When it comes to content marketing the possibilities are almost endless. From SEO-lead landing pages and social ads to PPC text and guest blogs, there’s almost too much choice to go at.
Despite being a marketing medium customers are crying out for though (61% of B2B buyers said they seek content during their decision-making process), many organisations leave their content strategy on the backburner. But here’s why you shouldn’t.
Proper content marketing:
- Increases brand visibility,
- Creates lasting relationships,
- Builds credibility and trust,
- Helps establish authority,
- Generates traffic and leads,
- Adds value,
- Answers questions, and
- Can increase conversions.
What’s not to like?
If you’re not sure where to start here are 18 tactics you could use to start luring in new customers today.
SEO
Your SEO efforts are all about improving your website’s visibility for organic search queries. Although your results aren’t solely determined by your content (there are a lot of technical aspects too), there’s a lot you can do with your words to help.
1. Regularly upload new, quality content to your site to satisfy Google’s ‘freshness’ ranking factor. Adding a blog and creating and sticking to an editorial calendar will help with this - but remember, don’t just start churning articles out for the sake of it, quality is critical.
Tip: to stop your content from going stale keep it varied with a mix of blogs, infographics, whitepapers, videos, and presentations, etc.
P.s. Remember to let your sales teams know when something new goes live too, they might be able to use it as a sales hook.
2. Make sure your website’s core pages are accurate, engaging, and include relevant keywords. If they don’t include the terms people are searching for they’re unlikely to feature highly.
Try not to look at your site’s content as a one-off job either. Write your pages, analyse their results, and then continually tweak and refine them with an SEO and user-friendly mindset.
3. Engineer your content around user questions and intent. In doing this, you’ll naturally pick up keywords as well as provide visitors with genuinely useful information - and Google likes that, a lot.
PPC
5. Make sure every word has an impact and drives action. If you’re not confident in your abilities consider outsourcing this bit to an individual freelancer or an agency.
6. Make sure the landing pages you send paid visitors to are well-optimised, and that means making sure they:
- Include keywords,
- Explain your product and its benefits,
- Have a clear call to action (CTA), and
- Allow you to capture leads.
Social media
7. Spread new content across your social media platforms to make it work harder. Remember to personalise each post to the platform though; what works on Twitter might not necessarily perform on LinkedIn.
8. Using in-platform and/or any other type of analytics available to you, dive into what social users find most interesting and create content specifically for each platform’s audience. And remember, this doesn’t have to mean writing umpteen articles from scratch, it could just be a case of tweaking something you’ve already got.
9. Create a private group and turn user-generated content into an idea for your next campaign - after all, if one person’s thinking or asking it others probably are too.
10. Consider placing content behind a form to gather new leads to target with other channels.
Guest blogging
11. Place content on relevant and authoritative websites to benefit from their reach, widen your pool of prospects, and boost your brand’s exposure. Before you invest time into this one though:
- Make sure the website has a solid reputation,
- Enquire about their daily, weekly or monthly visitor data,
- Look at how many social followers they have,
- Ask if they’ll be sharing your article on their social profiles,
- See if you can include a company link and bio, and
- Check if a fee is involved.
12. Get people to guest blog on your site. Whether it’s undergraduates trying to build their portfolio or industry experts wanting to share their knowledge, open up your website to outside contributors (providing they’re not competing with you).
You’ll benefit from more content without the time and money of creating it yourself, they’ll benefit from the experience and exposure, and they’ll probably share it with their network too giving your profile another boost - win, win, win.
Email marketing
12. Create a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly newsletter to showcase your best pieces of content. By doing this, you’ll continue adding value for existing customers, illustrate your expertise to prospects, and stay at the front of everyone’s minds.
13. Develop nurture campaigns tailored towards specific segments and take them through a journey that encourages conversions along the way. Don’t go in too hard too soon though, the flow should go something a bit like this:
Gently introduce your company and product > offer a piece of unique content > highlight your benefits and expertise > show off some happy customers > finish with a conversion-lead message.
Partnerships
14. Hand-craft relevant content for partners, affiliates and advocates to distribute to their audience.
PR
15. Produce a piece of content so consuming the press want to talk about it too. Don’t get too distracted by the whole ‘going rival’ thing though, remember, quality is better than quantity.
16. Come up with something newsworthy for journalists to get their teeth stuck into, like:
- Commissioning research,
- Telling them about a new and significant hire, or
- Raving about how revolutionary and/or environmentally-friendly your new product is (but only if it actually is).
Offline collateral
17. If you’ve got a team of salespeople who meet prospects face-to-face, create an exceptional brochure or flyer for them to leave behind. It’ll add value to the buyer journey, give you another opportunity to sell, and keep your brand in their eyeline if it’s left lying around.
18. If you or any partnering businesses present at trade shows create a bespoke piece of content and include it in attendees’ gift bags.
