In many instances, your business is only as good as its marketing. While some companies can rely on word of mouth, the vast majority of companies need excellent marketing. So if your marketing struggles so too will your business. You likely already put out content marketing, but you’re not sure if it’s doing what it should or if it could perform better. Chances are, there are ways for you to fine-tune and even troubleshoot your content marketing. To do this, you need to take advantage of these strategic tips and suggestions for cultivating, correcting and improving your company’s content marketing.
Do You Know Your Key Demographic
Creating content for your marketing approach is great. However, if it’s not tailored toward your key demographic it’s all for not. You need content designed specifically for those who are interested in your products and services. You can spend all the time in the world on exceptional marketing material, but if it’s for the wrong age range it doesn’t matter. So before you create additional material make sure you dig deeper into your key demographic.
Content marketing likely makes up a very big portion of your marketing approach. According to Omnicore (2018), in 2017 37 percent of all business-to-business companies said content marketing made up a major portion of their advertising. The next highest digital priority was brand building and viral marketing at 24 percent.
(Source)
With such a substantial amount of attention directed at the creation of your content marketing, you need to devote the time to knowing and understanding your target audience. This time and resources investment ensures your marketing approach is better suited for your demographic and is more likely to hit home.
Is Your Content Solving a Problem (or At Least Addressing it)?
Everything in business is designed to solve a consumer’s problem. Whether the solution is to help a customer look cool, feel comfortable, drop weight or save for retirement, it’s all about assisting both current and potential customers. The content marketing needs to do the same.
Content marketing needs to inform customers about how your company’s services can assist the consumer. If your content is not solving a problem, or at least addressing the issue, your content marketing needs retooling.
As Customer Journey Marketer points out, there is a very specific way content marketing can educate, solve and address the problems with a customer. It is a multi-tier approach, with each tier building off of the previous information the target audience received. This begins with initial marketing engagement and building brand awareness, moving through problem identification and showing how the product can assist with this problem, all the way to assisting in the purchasing of the service.
(Source)
It’s also important to stick with a customer and to follow through after a purchase. The follow through is just as critical, if not more critical, than the initial sale. This is because it helps establish a connection with the business and the customer, increasing the potential of converting the customer into a repeat buyer.
How Visually Engaging Is Your Content Marketing?
Your content needs to bring visual aids into the fold. Viewers are more likely to respond and remember visuals than anything else. According to Brandon Gaille, A reader will absorb about 10 percent of the text you include in a post. On the other hand, a viewer will retain 95 percent of a video.
Your target audience is more likely to remember and recall important information from a video because the brain is wired to respond to visualization. It will respond 60,000 times faster when seeing a visual than when reading the text. In fact, 90 percent of everything transmitted back to the brain is visual.
Now, this does not mean you should avoid text altogether. You still need to inform the viewing audience of your material and the services your company provides. However, content marketing should heavily depend on imagery and videos. In fact, it is better if you to take a visual first, text second approach. This way, you’ll capitalize on highlight the finer points of your business using visuals while filling in the gaps with text.
(Source)
There is a reason why when giving a presentation Apple uses predominately visual aids. It may include some basic text, such as resolution, device memory or units sold, but outside of this, it is all visual. Visual aids are easier to digest, easier to absorb and easier to remember, which is exactly why your content marketing needs to take advantage of it.
Is the Content Even Working?
It is important to know whether or not your content is even working. You don’t want to continually publish material that falls flat and isn’t generating the kind of traffic you’re interested in. If your business has just opened and your content marketing is in its infancy it will take time to generate enough analytical data to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Once you have established yourself though there are a number of specifics you need to consider. These specifics include traffic, conversion rate, sales, SEO ranking, customer feedback, subscribers, and time spent on the website.
Each one of these points is of critical importance to your content marketing and will help indicate what’s working and what isn’t. Make sure to go over all your publications, blog posts, and marketing material to look into what is performing and what isn’t. You’ll likely identify a pattern for what visitors are interested in. This should help you develop a new marketing approach that revolves around the well-performing material.
Rebecca Lieb, the Digital Advertising, Media and Content Analyst for Altimeter shares insights into what kind of content marketing metrics you need to utilize in order to determine what’s working and what isn’t.
(Source)
First, there is your Google analytics information, amount of Internet traffic and your email open rate. This is the large layer of a pyramid called the consumption metrics. Next, there is the sharing metric, which is made up of retweets, likes and forward. Third, there is the lead metrics, which is all about leads generated, and lastly, there is the sales metrics. By looking at these different data points you’ll have the necessary information to see which content marketing approaches and posts are working and what need to be retooled.
Is the Problem With Content or With Your Publishing Schedule?
Quality content is only as good as what follows it. If you don’t have anything following your last post for weeks at a time you’re doing yourself a disservice. Often times the problem with your content marketing isn’t the material itself, it’s with the publishing schedule. Whether publishing material on Facebook, your blog, Instagram or any other social media platform, the only way you’ll generate interest and build up leads is to continually publish new material.
The new material helps increase the exposure of previous content. In a way, it advertises the previous advertisement. These new posts also bring new links back to your homepage, which helps send more traffic to your website.
According to Quicksnip, there is a specific schedule you need to follow with all your content marketing. With services like Google+, Instagram and Pinterest you need to post three times a day. With Facebook, you need to post twice a day and with LinkedIn, you need to post once per day.
(Source)
You also need to focus on posting a new blog post every other day for optimal results. If you run a business that has multiple writers you can have each writer create a different post per week, which will help populate your page and help you continually post the fresh material (which you can also use as a post on the other social media sites). If you’re writing on your own and just don’t have the time to write a post at least every other day shoot for two to three posts per week.
What is the Content Marketing Goal?
It might sound like a simple question but it has an often complicated answer. What is the goal of your content marketing? It needs to be universal for your marketing material to hit home. You can create multiple marketing campaigns if you have varying goals, but each post or publication should have only one goal in mind. Whether it is to increase your social media following, to sell more products or to increase leads, you need to clearly identify your marketing goal before moving forward. This way, when you produce the new marketing material you know what the desired end game for your content is.
(Source)
There is only one way to measure success and that is to know what success looks like. According to the Content Marketing Institute, you need to focus on success metrics. This means on a boost in sales or an increase in subscribers. Boosting comments or likes are nice, but it isn’t a measure of success. This information is helpful as it shows how your target audience is relating to the published material, which can help you when determining future posts, but it doesn’t help you out in terms of measuring overall success. So before creating any further piece of marketing material, clearly establish what your marketing goal is ahead of time.
In Conclusion
Your business needs content marketing. Content marketing helps connect your company with a key demographic while growing its readership and exposure. However, there’s a good chance your content marketing could do better by developing more leads and converting these leads into sales. By taking advantage of these strategic ways to troubleshoot your content marketing you’ll find new ways to promote your business and improve the ever-important bottom line.
