By Gaurav Kumar
You must have heard that “content is king.” However, merely putting high-quality content on the Web is not enough to draw traffic. With over 900 million websites, nearly 200 million blogs and 144 billion emails sent every day, a proper content marketing strategy and worthwhile content are crucial to stand out from the crowd, according to Jeff Bullas.
Food for thought: What’s the point of posting content such as blog posts, photos, videos, status updates and tweets regularly if they don’t engage your target audience and drive traffic to your site? Remember, your aim must be to create content marketing strategies that produce irresistible content that target audiences eagerly await.
Let’s look at a few content marketing strategies that expert marketers use to their advantage.
Repurposing Evergreen Content
Improving a website’s search engine ranking, requires developing fresh content. However, constantly creating large amounts of new content can be challenging and time consuming even for the most experienced and professional writers. A dependable solution to this problem is repurposing already-created content.
Repurposing is an art of breathing new life into your old content and presenting it in a different format that may attract new viewers. It adds value to your old piece of content by turning them into infographics, slides or converting them into a visual story. When you’re repurposing content, it’s essential to work with your highest quality content. It’s usually best to repurpose content that’s evergreen — content that continues to be relevant for months and even years. These statistics may convince you about the value of repurposing:
- Infographic search volumes have increased by over 800% in just over 2 years. (Source: Jeffbullas.com)
- Slide Share is one of the top 150 most highly trafficked sites on the Web, receiving 60 million visitors and generating 3 billion views every month. (Source: Huffington Post)
- 95% of marketers say visuals are more effective than text-only, and 9% say visuals are up to 10 times more effective. (Source: Brafton.com)
Enhance Presence on Social media
Take advantage of the power of content marketing on social media. A report from Social Media Examiner predicts that eCommerce revenue from social channels will escalate to $30 billion this year — a huge increase. A significant presence on social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and others will help place and keep your brand in front of your audiences.
Make sure your social media page design looks professional and is customized to your business and your customers’ needs. The new generation is always connected and logged in, so an active presence on social media platforms can help you drive traffic back to your website or blog. Also, social media can help you locate user-generated content such as feedback and reviews that will eventually benefit your business.
To optimize staff productivity, focus on those social media platforms where your audience gathers. For consumer products and services, that’s Facebook, Pinterest and Google+. For B2B products, that’s often LinkedIn. Twitter cuts across both B2C and B2B. Younger audiences now congregate on Instagram.
Some statistics:
- 71% shoppers believe they will get a better deal online than in stores. (Source: Selz.com)
- There are 1.65 billion active mobile social accounts globally. (Source: Jeffbullas.com)
- There are nearly 1.4 billion Facebook users. (Source: Mashable.com)
- There are 500 million tweets per day.( Source: Twitter.com)
- 80% of the online population has purchased something using the Internet; 50% have completed more than one purchase online. (Source: Vivipins)
Offer Personalized Experiences
Another effective digital marketing strategy is to develop relationships with potential customers. Today’s audiences have grown blasé about the overload of the usual, static content. They seek — and essentially demand — more creative and personalized experiences from businesses. According to Tweak Your Biz, personalization is the best way to reach customers and make a lasting impact on them. In order to offer a personalized experience, your website should enable customers to establish their own preferences. The preferences can be type of content, categories of products, and many other choices. Then, every time they visit your website, they see their taste, preferences and voice.
If you favor email marketing, it’s essential to ensure a personalized email experience for your recipients. Try addressing your customers by their names in your emails and modify the content to meet their needs. Personalization definitely provides a positive impact on your overall content marketing performance. Don’t take my word for it. Consider these statistics that prove the value of personalization:
- Businesses that personalize web experiences see an average 19% increase in sales. (Source: Pardot.com)
- Personalized marketing emails receive 29% higher open rates and 41% higher click-through rates. (Source: Experianplc.com)
- Personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. (Source: Salesforce.com)
- 33% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. (Source: Exceleads.com)
- Personalized promotional emails lift transaction rates and revenue per email 6 times higher than non-personalized emails. (Source: Marketingland.com)
Keep it Short & Pack a Social Punch
Some social networking platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram, do not allow lengthy content. Twitter permits only 140-character limit per post and Instagram allows a single photo per post. So it’s important to be succinct. Each post must contain accurate keywords that convey your business message effectively.
Make your posts memorable with some humor. Or create a challenge for your potential customers. The content must be interesting and engaging. In creating content for the short-form social media networks, include links to more detailed information on your website.
Take advantage of the promotional tools that social channels provide. Consider these Twitter statistics:
• Tweets with image links get 2x the engagement rate of those without. (Source: Bufferapp.com)
• Tweets with less than 100 characters get 17% more engagement. (Source: Hubspot.com)
• 66% of user-generated tweets that mention brands come from mobile users. (Source: Socialbakers.com)
Take photographs of your products and post them on your social media channels. However, make sure the images are appealing and impressive enough to make them sharable. Emotional photos are the most shared. No matter what photos you post, always play by the rules. This means post only images that meet the guidelines of social media networks and do not violate copyright ownership. .
Explore User-Generated Content
Let your viewers and users do the talking for your business. Let customers convey their opinions about your products and services right on your website and by responding on your social media accounts – and encourage posts by customers on their own social media accounts. Consumers want convincing and dependable information so they can make wiser decisions. Supporting your posts with concrete evidence from customers helps increase your company’s credibility.
You can promote greater customer participation by asking your fans to share pictures of themselves with your products. Encourage them to share their stories and experiences related to your products or services. Even if 1% of customers share their views or create content for your social channels or website that will translate into a huge number of people engaging with your business.
Don’t believe me? Check out these stats: UGC fan videos get 10X more views than branded videos on YouTube. (Source: Olapic.com)
- 47% of adult Internet users repost photos or videos they found online on sites designed for sharing images. (Source: Engagegravina.com)
- 65% of consumers seek user-generated content before making a purchase. (Source: Business2community.com)
- 70% of consumers trust peer recommendations and reviews more than professionally written content. (Source: Ecoconsultancy.com)
Experts have used these content marketing strategies repeatedly to garner a solid base of loyal customers. Now that you also know these secrets, work intently on each. Pay attention to the demands of marketing content and continually review new marketing techniques.
A well-developed content marketing plan goes a long way in establishing your company as market leader in your niche. However, don’t expect the results too quickly. Content marketing yields quantifiable results over the long term.
Although content marketing may attract customers to start visiting your business right away, it’ll take some time to show measurable results. Over the longer term, you’ll find that content marketing yields quantifiable results in terms of increased sales and improved brand reputation.
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