Imagine paying a lot of money for advertising to get clicks to your brand or website. You see clicks coming in and your money being spent (depending on who you’re advertising with), but you’re not seeing a lot of conversions to your brand or product. That’s difficult for many because all the money invested in advertising is not making your brand or product profitable
What Is Setting Yourself Apart From Your Competitors?
Put yourself in the shoes of a user looking for a specific product. What’s the first thing you want to see when you’re browsing through different websites. You want that one piece of content or a combination of different content that gives you the feeling that you’re ready to buy. Your content needs to set itself apart from other competitors because if you don’t, then they’re going to move on to a competitor that gives them what they’re looking for.
Even if you’re selling the same exact product at the same exact price than a competitor, if their content is even slightly better than yours, then you’re going to lose that potential lead. Let’s take a look at some ways you can improve your content so that your business or brand can explode and generate the revenue you had hoped when you started your venture.
For example, the content you create is arguably the most important part of your digital marketing efforts. Content not only helps you build trust and connect with your target audience, but also acts as fuel for your other marketing techniques. It’s the base upon which you promote your business online, so it’s essential to give it the attention it deserves.
Be The Source Of Knowledge About Your Business Or Product
You should have a blog or educational materials on your website so they can learn about business or products directly from you. You can help influence their decision to buy simply by being the one who educations them. Having a blog, especially if you’re using SEO, on Google can help users find the information that they’re looking for. Blogs are a natural form of traffic for your website. They’re great if you have a very limited advertising budget and want to be found strictly through social media and SEO.
The best part about blogging is your content will always be there. As long as your business or brand doesn’t shut down, then your content will be there for a long time. It’s a decent long-term investment. Imagine searching through Google content and seeing a blog that’s a couple of years old that still provides relevant content. You can use the natural traffic driven by your blog to have links to your product or call-to-actions to take a deeper look into your product or brand.
Having a call-to-action after educating users on your product or brand is great if you have a newsletter where you can also retain customers by pushing add-on, older, or newer products or services that they didn’t know they needed. Once you’ve driven traffic through your blog, then it’s time for users to see what other content you have to offer.
Quantifiable Content That Works For Every Business
1. Content Educates Your Audience
Education is the first step a potential customer takes when deciding whether a product or service is right for them. Before they can make a choice, they need to fully understand the options available to them. This means you need to have content that properly educates audience members on what you can provide.
Educational content typically takes the form of blog posts, product pages, your home page, and your company’s ‘about’ pages. However, it may also include tutorials, reviews, and other content that provides your customers with the resources they need to make educated purchasing decisions. Educational content should focus on teaching your target audience more about your business and offerings.
To educate your audience through the content you create, you want to focus on the questions or concerns they may have. When addressing your target audience, consider what problems they might be trying to solve and how your products or services relieve those issues. Your educational content should focus on the solutions you provide, and how you can make their lives easier.
2. Content Fuels SEO
Search engines are a go-to resource just about any time someone has a question or concern. This means that optimizing your content to appear in relevant searches can help you attract new leads to your website. However, in order to fuel your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, you need to have strong content.
SEO marketing revolves around keyword placement, backlinks, and website visitors, and your content enables you to create web pages that fuel each of these components. Without content, you’d have nowhere to place your keywords, no page for your visitors to read, and no information for other websites to link to. However, if you’re creating awesome pieces of content that your target audience is excited to engage with, you’ll find it’s not hard to reach the top of the search engine results lists.
Content creation and SEO should always go hand-in-hand. When you consider your readers first and foremost, you will be able to create content that provides clear value to your audience. If your target audience is engaging heavily with the content you create, your SEO strategy will be that much more successful.
3. Content Drives Social Media Strategies
Your social media platforms are one of the best ways to connect with your target audience. As a powerful tool for establishing genuine relationships with your customer base, social media gives you a direct pathway to have conversations, get feedback, and push new leads to your website. However, this is all fueled by strong content creation.
Your content enables you to take your social media conversations deeper. While there is only so much you can say in a Tweet or Facebook post, great content encourages your audience to follow through to learn more. This helps you establish a better connection with your target audience. Plus, you can also gain more visitors to your website, where you can collect their information and bring them into your sales funnel.
Your social media strategy should leverage content that provides a high amount of value to your target audience. While content is crucial for developing strong connections, you also need to remember that your audience wants information they can participate in. If you’re simply posting links to your content, you can’t expect to see high amounts of engagement.
4. Content Builds Backlinks
Backlinks, or links from an external website back to your content, are an important part of bringing new traffic to your site. A backlink back to your site can encourage a visitor of another article or website to click through and learn more about you.
Of course, you’ll only see backlinks when your content contains ideas, opinions, or information that is worth sharing. If you’re creating mediocre content or simply relaying information that your audience can find elsewhere on the web, you’re going to struggle to get other websites to link to you. This means that you’ll have a more difficult time attracting new attention and establishing authority online.
Backlinks also contribute to your SEO strategy. They show Google and other search engines that you create content worth recommending. The more backlinks you have, the more authority a search engine will assume your page holds
What Other Content Is There To Offer?
Blogs are great to educate and possibly convert users, but what about people who don’t like to read? What if people want interactive content, one they don’t have to pay much attention to, or one that doesn’t require a lot of words? Data, charts, and studies are nice, but people online nowadays don’t have the kind of attention span for reading content online as they used to. In fact, Microsoft themselves did a study that shows people only have a short attention span of under ten seconds. That’s not good if you have a longer blog post. You want to make sure you keep your content simple and effective.
A video is an effective form of content marketing as the first couple of seconds in your video will make people decide whether or not they want to continue watching, so don’t waste it with long introductions. Video are a form of media like television, and just like television, you want to ensure you have that hook that gives them a reason to continue. Believe it or not, memes are also a great way to bring in traffic as well. They’re short, humorous, relatable, and effective. Having a watermark on your memes will help people come to your brand or product wondering if there’s any more you have to offer. These short bits of relatable humor have been around for years and have helped content marketers with a cheap and effective way to drive traffic to their product.
Don’t Fall Behind
Lots of websites do content marketing. Many businesses use them to drive engagement, build their brand, and eventually convert a user into a buyer. Don’t fall behind and get with the times by using these effective tips to drive traffic.
Key Takeaways
Content can help educate your audience, ensuring that they’re making smart purchasing decisions.
Strong pieces of content can help you become more visible online, both on search engines and in social media.
Quality content can be linked to all over the web, increasing traffic to your website and building authority with search engines.