The key to successful growth for pretty much any modern business lies in creating a high-performing website and developing a prominent online presence. There are various types of content that businesses need to focus on and several platforms to distribute it on to achieve these goals.
A solid marketing strategy needs to be broad and encompass several factors apart from SEO rankings and traffic. As you use online content to drive business growth, you should constantly be questioning whether it’s working effectively and how you can help it evolve to make it even more effective.
One of the first steps to driving online traffic to your site is developing content primarily to improve your SEO. While this process includes looking at rankings and traffic by monitoring keyword visibility reports, opportunity workspaces, and traffic dashboards, that’s only one part of the larger picture.
By keeping a critical eye on various aspects of your content, you can strengthen its success. It’s essential to consistently analyze how it engages customers, whether it covers the entire customer journey, and how it achieves brand goals specific to each stage in the customer journey.
Engage Prospective Customers Beyond Rankings
These days, content marketing success isn’t measured only by how many people see your content but also how it impacts them. The purpose of creating content for your business isn’t only to optimize rankings and traffic but to build brand loyalty and add value to your audience’s experience. Here are the various ways in which you can achieve these goals.
Overall Website Engagement
Any solid SEO strategy can lead people to your website, but it doesn’t really matter how good your keywords are regarding actual engagement. It’s up to you to learn everything you can about your average customer and tailor high-quality content that communicates with them and keeps them engaged.
Click-Through Rates
When you create content for your brand, it’s your responsibility to pique the interest of potential customers and keep their attention. The best way to attain high click-through rates is to ensure that the metadata for your content is designed to effectively pitch it to targeted web searchers and social media users. In addition to using strong keywords that get your content high visibility, you need a compelling perspective that will resonate with your target audience.
Remarketing
When done effectively, remarketing can help you increase your brand awareness and remind potential customers to purchase your product or service. You can position your remarketing efforts effectively by using cookies on visitors who land on your content. Analyze the click activity of your advertisements and promotional posts to get a better understanding of the topics that your audience is interested in, and let that information help guide your content marketing strategy.
Social Media Performance – Engagement and Followers
A brand’s social media following can be compared to a modern-day version of an email list, in that the people who follow you on social media have voluntarily opted in to receive your updates and content. You should constantly analyze and evaluate your social media performance to see whether or not your accounts are gaining followers and that the content you share on each platform is receiving a healthy number of comments, likes, and shares. If your social media performance is looking good, then you know your content is engaging. If the numbers are lacking or you aren’t gaining new followers, you need to look at things you could be doing differently.
Consider Content for the Entire Customer Journey
Customers go through five phases from the moment they realize they need to seek out and purchase a new product or service throughout finding exactly what they need and following through with buying it. These phases are referred to as the customer journey, and if you want to attract and convert a large number of serious customers, you need to create content that supports them throughout the journey.
One thing that even the best SEO strategy can’t do alone is guide a potential customer through each phase of the buyer’s journey so that they’ll be introduced to and choose your product or service. The perspective of a customer in the awareness stage is entirely different from that of a customer in the decision stage, which is why the content in each stage should be specifically tailored to engage the customer’s point of view in each.
Tailor Content to Each Stage in the Customer Journey
Each stage of the customer journey should begin with effective leading indicators. Prospective buyers must come across your brand and engage with it before deciding to hand you money for a product or service. Using the appropriate leading indicator metrics offers an effective way to evaluate the content and see which pieces are performing well and what needs work.
Awareness Stage Content
The purpose of awareness stage content is to introduce your brand and position it for new users. This can be done by choosing the right point to share a compelling perspective or answer with customers. The goal is to connect to their needs. You can use reach and engagement metrics and first-touch assisted conversions to monitor your content’s progress at this stage.
Consideration Stage Content
Prospective buyers in the consideration stage of the customer journey are closer to the point of deciding to purchase your product or service. Your awareness stage content has piqued their interest, and they want to hear more. At this point, each new subscriber or follower presents an opportunity to sell.
Decision Stage Content
In the decision stage of the customer journey, each prospect should be ready to make the leap with your brand – you just need to hook them in with content like customer reviews, comparison charts, and pricing tables.
Content marketing has come a long way since the early days of standard SEO practice. With so much information about consumer personalities and habits being tracked and made readily available, it’s essential to create a broad content marketing strategy that’s focused on building engaging relationships with prospective buyers and nurturing relationships with existing customers.