In January 1996, Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, came up with the phrase “Content is King”, and it has remained to be one of the most relevant phrases in the digital marketing world. Having dominated the marketing industry for a very long time, content still remains to be the heart of today’s marketing strategies. However, considering that only 9 percent of all B2B marketers consider their content marketing to be productive, it becomes vital to know how to execute a perfect content marketing strategy. Once you have come up with a solid content marketing strategy, you need careful planning and then devote your time and effort to ensure that you have a successful outcome. If you are wondering how to do this, here are 10 tips to utilise content marketing effectively to make your business profitable.
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Identify and understand your targeted audience
The most important tip on how to utilise your content marketing strategy effectively is first knowing and understanding who your audience is. You should be able to list down the different groups of people that your business is primarily targeting and try as much as possible to understand their behaviour. You can achieve this by coming up with surveys on your website which will assist you in identifying the needs of your customers. You can then use this feedback to improve the way you create your content.
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View Your Content as Data
A content marketing strategy is not only about the number of blogs that you can write in a day. As a great content marketing strategist, you need to ensure that your content is also working. This means assessing your website traffic patterns through monitoring, watching, tracking, and reporting on real numbers. Doing this will enable you to keep refining and re-adjusting your strategy for better conversions.
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Understand the Content Marketing/sales Funnel
The sales funnel describes a buyer’s decision-making journey which is usually in three key phases: awareness, evaluation, and purchase. Since you are involved in sales and marketing, you need to understand this funnel to better understand what makes buyers move through the funnel. This will make you understand how to provide engaging content throughout each and every stage of the funnel and also keep your customers and visitors cycling through the funnel.
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Prioritize SEO
Search engine optimisation or SEO can either make or break your content marketing strategy. SEO is what helps your content to gain visibility to the right audience. Therefore, it is definitely the best way to grow your audience organically when it comes to content marketing. For an effective SEO implementation, ensure that you use very strong and relevant keywords, include ALT text, add outbound links, and also provide links to your internal pages. Doing this will make your content more visible and also keep visitors on your site for longer.
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See What Competitor Brands Are Doing
Monitoring your competitors is one of the best ways to stay up to date with your industries latest trends. In fact, most brands creep around their competitors to see what they are doing to become successfully. You should always keep track of all your competitor’s strategies and try to learn from them. However, this does not mean that you go about stealing their content marketing ideas. Just try as much as you can to see what they are doing to be successful and use these methods to adjust your content and improve your strategy.
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Be Active on Social Media
Considering that 92 percent of marketers feel that social media is very critical to business operations, we can see why social media engagement is extremely important in content marketing. Nowadays, people turn to social websites for fresh content. To make the most out of social media, keep track of your audience’s feedback on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram e.t.c to get an idea on how to further engage them and boost your brands visibility.
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Listen to Your Customers
For you to create content that is relevant to your customers, you also need to listen to their feedback. Whether it is in form of questions or complaints, it will give you new ideas and concepts on how you should start tweaking your content marketing strategy. Since it can be quite difficult to manage each and every of your social media profiles at once, you can use apps like Sprout Social. These apps makes it easier to see all the questions and complaints that your audience has raised using lust a single-stream platform.
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Keep Formatting Visual
According to a report by a Social Media Examiner, 19 percent of businesses regard original visual assets as the most vital form of content. Visual formatting adds a certain form of attractiveness to your content. Attractive content in turn makes your website visitors stay on your website for longer which results to more clicks. Some of the elements of visual formatting that you can apply in your strategy include pictures, quotes, surveys, and many other additional elements.
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Revisit Your Old Content
Revisiting your old content is a great way to boost your search engine ranking. As your content strategy develops, you will need to re-purpose your old content to make it resonate with your new strategy. For example, if you come across an article that is doing well but is not in line the current voice of your company, you can re-purpose the content to make it be in the same voice. You can use apps like BuzzSumo which will allow you to identify well performing content on social media so that you can repurpose them.
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Keep Your Content Consistent
Regardless of whether you are a marketer or just a mere writer, it is very important to make sure that you are consistent with your content marketing strategy. This means using a steady brand voice across all your channels. Keeping your content consistent helps your readers flow smoothly from one post to the next one resulting to longer stays and more clicks.
Conclusion:
Content has the power to increase your brands visibility and build trust with your audience as they consider whether to buy from you When used effectively, it can give you the opportunity to engage with your audience, start a conversation, and develop lasting relationships. You just need to be consistent in your efforts towards providing good results to your audience. By using these tips, we are confident that you will be able to keep your audience engaged, increase your lead conversion, and in turn achieve more sales for your business.
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Author Bio:
Venkatesh C.R, CEO of Dot Com Infoway, handling the entire team of professionals with experience on small as well as the large integrated projects. Dot Com Infoway, 360° App & Web solutions company that turns your ideas into world-class products and helps you reach your target customer.
