I bet like any other business owner you want more clients and ideally, you would like them to knock on your door. After all, what’s better than a lead who has found you by themselves and reaches out for a quote?
Enter content marketing.
Content offers opportunity. It can expose your business to a multitude of new prospects. With content you can target potential clients at different stages of the buying cycle, not to mention with different buyer intents. You can nurture your leads until they are ready to buy or fix a problem for them.
But here is the catch, all of this doesn’t happen by itself. Creating great content isn’t enough. To get the most out of your content marketing efforts, you need to actively promote it to reach your target audience. As someone once said, a successful content strategy is 20% creation and 80% promotion.
But most of the time, your content strategy falls short by missing some crucial elements.
7 Missing Elements of Your Content Strategy
1. No Paid Promotion
Your content should end up in front of your target audience, fast. To get it out there, use paid advertising. But, of course, not every piece of content deserves paid promotion.
When it comes to heavy magnitude pieces, however (content that’s designed to attract large numbers of qualified leads to your site – ebooks, white papers, reports etc.), paid advertising is by far – a must.
2. Not Using Landing Pages with Your Content
Even the best content might fail if the other pieces of lead generation strategy aren’t working. One of which are landing pages – Web pages dedicated to a specific aspect of your business.
Unlike your website, which has to cater to all of your prospects, landing pages allow you to pitch to a very specific lead, someone with a particular problem you hold a solution to. Thanks to landing pages, if a particular piece of content attracts your target audience, they will have a business reference point to find out more about how your business could help them.
3. Lack of Integration With Other Marketing Strategies
Content marketing is an integral part of the entire marketing communications. Most of the time however, it is created separately from other marketing activities.
Blog posts, videos, graphics, comic strips and other content types, however, can complement your overall marketing and branding efforts and not work outside of it.
4. No Diversity of Content Types
It is unfortunate that content marketing is often considered synonymous with blogging. Blog posts are one of the most common content types created, true. There are, however, many other types you could use, not only to educate, but also entertain your audience.
Comic strips, quizzes, memes, videos, games, apps, white papers, PDF reports and ebooks all form a content mix you should be availing of.
Naturally, not all content types will work in your industry. But you should at least try to go beyond blogging when planning your content strategy.
5. Lack of Content Personas
A challenge when creating your content strategy is speaking to a specific audience. Since you can’t see the person that’s going to read your words, it’s hard to relate to them and write with them in mind. To overcome this, you should develop content personas to help you better target your content.
6. Not Involving Influencers
Industry influencers are great to leverage your content. Since they already have an audience, anything they share or get involved with immediately gets attention. Involve them in your content strategy and marketing, especially at the early stages to quickly put your website in front of your audience.
Some of the best ways to do so include interviews or expert roundups.
7. Not Measuring Your Content’s Performance
Lastly, it’s hard to know if your content strategy is successful without measuring its performance. There are a number of ways to do it, from creating a simple excel spreadsheet to track KPIs to using sophisticated testing platforms outputting all the data you need to know. The key is to always measure, analyse and repeat what’s working in your content strategy.
Puzzle Pieces Photo via Shutterstock
The post 7 Missing Elements of Your Content Strategy appeared first on Small Business Trends.
Source: Small Business Trends
7 Missing Elements of Your Content Strategy
No comments:
Post a Comment