Content marketers often follow a rule of “Give, give, give, ask” (GGGA). Quantity over quality, to begin with. This often leads to poorly written blog posts that serve purely as click-bait, intended to grow a fan base. But it wouldn’t be so popular if it didn’t work; eventually companies get to the “ask” bit, and can successfully convert their audience to buyers, new clients, or raising brand awareness by sharing and spreading content, making it viral.
It can take years to build a real fan base, and it’s important to regularly create content. It doesn’t all have to have a strategy or fill a purpose. It’s ok to have content-fillers whose only purpose it is to grow your audience. But as you’re growing, make a gradual shift to creating more and more high-quality content, even if it means losing followers.
Here we take you through some easy-to-follow steps to get you started with a content marketing strategy, especially if you don’t have the budget for a whole marketing team.
1. Do your user research
The first step towards a successful content marketing strategy is understanding your user base.
- Define the purpose of your content. Have a workshop with your team on what they think the purpose of your content is/should be
- Audience definition. Define who you want to attract, and why
- Favourite customer. Define your ideal customer for your business
- Reach out. Get in touch with some of these ideal customers and understand their current pain points by asking questions, like these:
“What problems did your company face before you started working with us?”, “Were those problems solved or addressed when working with us?”, “If yes – How?, “If no – why not?”
Other key data to gather from your existing user base and clients are answers to:
- What other challenges does this company face outside of the problem you are solving for them?
- What publications do they read?
- Who would they define as an influencer and expert in their industry?
2. Have a process for content ideation, SEO, and decide on content formats and production
More often than not, the topic of your content is more important when it comes to generating leads and impact, than the traffic. But how do you generate original content ideas and how to produce and promote them?
- Source ideas. Implement a process for how people can log content ideas. Not sure where to start? We can help.
- Pain-point SEO strategy. Understand the pain points in your industry and with your customers. Build content ideas around them.
- Customer questions. Get a list of questions your sales team or other staff normally get from leads. Answer them in blog posts.
- Newsletters. Always send a welcoming email to new subscribers, with a few links that explain your business more. Include a link to a survey with a clear CTA (call to action).
- Keyword research. Use Google’s Keyword planner or download and install a free keyword search tool or pay to analyze them more in-depth to understand related keywords and long-tail keywords.
- Join communities. Research which Facebook, Reddit subreddits and LinkedIn groups have lots of members discussing the issues of your industry. They might inspire you. Be active in these communities and regularly contribute with comments and posts. Once you’ve become an active and contributing community member, you can start posting links to your content here, to drive traffic. DON’T just drop links in communities without being active in them first. Be honest and say that it’s your content.
- Analytics set up. Set up conversion goals in Google Analytics.
- Write compelling headlines. A headline should make a potential reader curious and list the benefit. Example: “Fighting an older person’s loneliness is easier than you thought, and you can help” . Be emotional. Be specific, list the biggest reveal/shocking fact/data point. Juxtapositions do well. Test your headline’s strength in a free tool.
- Source good images and graphs. Here’s a free photo database, via Unsplash.
- Content formats. Decide which content formats best suit you, depending on your needs and resources. Stick to them. There’s a lot to be gained for building familiarity with your users. If you constantly change your formats you might confuse them.
3. Promote your content
A good SEO strategy can take a long time to kick in and boost you in search rankings. And without actively promoting the content you produce for any other channel outside of social media, should be promoted on social media. Otherwise you will have spent all that time crafting the perfect product description or white paper, but no one reads it.
- Set up social media accounts if you don’t have them already.
- Download and install a social media scheduling tool, like Buffer or Hootsuite (they both have free versions, that are limited, but offer enough to manage a schedule)
- Set up a social promotion schedule. Decide how often you will post, ideally several times a week, and stick to your schedule.
- Repromote older content, tweak headlines. Look back to see how well your previous posts performed and consider re-running those posts that did well with a different headline or social copy.
- Always include an image, a graph or a video with your social posts
- Promote in online communities. Just make sure you don’t spam the group.
- Consider paying for targeted audience ads on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook, for short-term results.
- Influencer marketing: encourage your influencers and people in your network to share your content as soon as it’s published
- Social engagement: try to reply and react when people like your content on social media. This increases trust from your audience and builds a regular user base. Low-level: “Like” comments and tweet replies. High-level: Respond individually in the comments section
4. Content conversions
Now, after you have set up your processes, tools and created a backlog of original content, it’s time to learn how content can actually convert to more readers/customers/users.
Learn the three different sales/marketing funnels, and create content around them:
- Top funnel: people who are only starting their research. Example: “How can content help my business”
- Middle funnel: people who know what they want, but need comparison analysis, or more detailed information “Invest in longer-form content or social media content?”
- Low funnel: people who have found your services and want to read more about it. Example: “Content marketing looks at your specific needs and delivers tailored content to your new and existing users”
Other things that help convert your content to potential new customers:
- CTAs. Place your CTAs (call to actions) strategically on your website: generate conversions of website visitors to signing up to your newsletter by placing a link to signing up in the sidebar of articles, in your footer, a link in the header, and embedded in the blog post
- Welcome Gate: one of the biggest converters is the so-called “Welcome Gate”: a window on top of your website, not a pop-up, that has one CTA with a link, and that every user has to either click on or click away. Annoying, but good for conversions.
- Free downloads. Offer your audience something for free, like an e-book, a guide or a white paper, that they can download in return for leaving their email address in a form. This way, you have a list of people who have actively engaged with your content, and you can now turn them into qualified leads.
