Any business looking to drive more organic traffic to their website to increase their online sales should take their content marketing strategy seriously.
Good content marketing campaigns can reap rewards in terms of more new visitors to your website, an increase in the number of customers, better brand loyalty and greater brand awareness.
A good content marketing strategy doesn’t happen overnight but the following seven tips will help put you on the right track:
Create Killer Headlines
Killer headlines are great for increasing your click-through rate as well as getting your content shared socially.
Headlines which start with a number or have a killer adjective close to the start of the article are usually among the most popular. ‘How to’ and ‘research’ also go down well.
Likewise, if you can create content that resonates with your audience it increases the likelihood that they will share. If you can take any of these suggestions and transform your headline you should expect a greater audience than before.
Optimise Your Landing Pages
Your homepage isn’t the only page that should be drawing traffic to your website. In fact, it’s often ideal to drive traffic to your product pages or your blog when trying to get new users to convert.
After you’ve done your keyword research, you may find you need to create new pages for your target audience. Whether the pages are new or existing, make sure to optimise them fully in order to get the best out of them and to increase their chances of ranking highly in Google’s search results. You don’t want to hold yourself back with poorly optimised pages that hurt your rankings.
A/B Testing
You should always be running A/B tests on your website to improve its performance and ultimately, the conversion rate.
Whether you’re a small or large business, a slight increase in your conversion rate could make a massive difference on your bottom line come the end of the year.
A/B tests can also be useful for testing out headlines and content types to determine which works best on your blog. Any kind of information like this is extremely useful input for your long-term content marketing strategy.
Create An Editorial Calendar
Taking the time to create an editorial calendar before you start any content marketing campaign will help you plan towards your ultimate goal: keep your blog organised and ensure you’re not scrabbling around for ideas at the last minute.
It helps if you know your audience and the type of content they would like to read. Tracking the effectiveness of each piece of content (conversions, bounce rate, time on page, social shares, etc.) helps you further develop your content marketing strategy for the future.
Noting down information such as deadlines, publishing dates, the article title, author etc. will help prevent you or your writers from missing deadlines so that blog posts can go live as scheduled. A schedule also allows you to excite your readers by teasing them with content that is going to be published in the coming days or weeks, so they come back to your blog.
Give Your Audience What They Want
It helps in any business to know what your audience wants. Keyword research is one method but you should also check the demographics data in Google Analytics to give you a more precise idea of your audience. Any information you have about your customers is a bonus.
Google Trends is another free tool to help you find which topics in your industry are currently in demand and which are in decline.
Competitor Analysis
Spy on your competitors to see what they’re up to and what’s working for them. There are several tools out there to help you find out what they’re doing online. A couple of them are:
SEMRush – Find out which keywords they are ranking for
Majestic – Find out who is linking to them and what their most popular content is
BuzzSumo – Find out what content is working for your competitors on social media
Competitor analysis is an important part of any online marketing success. Once you have researched what your competitors are doing successfully you can use this to generate ideas for your own content marketing campaigns or even try to do a better job than them.
Making The Most Of Your Content
The more traffic you get to each piece of content, generally the better. We’re always craving more readers, more social shares and more comments.
As with teasing your readers with what content you have coming up in future, you can also let influencers and friends in your industry know about it at the same time so that they can share your content when it does go live.
This can help increase social shares of your content and even get it listed on industry roundups – opening you up to a wider audience. Contacting influencers helps you expand your network also which could lead to beneficial partnerships such as sharing each other’s content, creating interviews and doing business together.
If your content can be placed in more places than just your blog then again you are reaching a wider audience. Perhaps it includes a Powerpoint demo that can be uploaded on Slideshare, or images that are worthy of Pinterest or Flickr, or answers to questions on Reddit or Quora. These different social media channels are vital in getting your content in front of as many people as possible.
Conclusion
Your business or your client is going to want to see results so it’s worth taking into consideration all seven of these tips to improve your content marketing.
If you get it right you should see an increase in your audience to help you increase the number of customers, in turn this should lead to increased sales volume and essentially improve your bottom line and generate awareness of your brand.
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