Website Content Marketing Strategy and Development

Content marketing is a way to promote your brand, it is also a way to help your customers keep up to date with updates and changes within your business forte. Through the correct use of content marketing, you can improve website retention, build a following, and create advocates for your brand.

The key to successful online content is quality, and relevance to the topic. Gone are the days where an SEO would write a short 400 – 500 word article and stuff it with keywords for an almost automatic high position in the SERPS. If you write low quality content, the search engines will devalue your website, and lower its rankings as a whole.

Research has shown that content marketing is utilised by various large global brands such as Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and P&G. It is also used by many smaller companies worldwide, and this is because it works. As long as the content is useful to its readers, and is of good quality.

Content marketing is not written to only provide content for a website, it is a strategy that will attract high quality, on topic traffic. Also, quality content publication will improve websites SERP and page authority, so it is good practice to produce good quality content on a regular basis.

Processes of content marketing

Audit the websites existing content

A content audit can help a website stand out from the competition. Today the Internet is bloated with low quality content, there are around 1.6 billion websites and more than 71 million blog posts created each month. Thus creating poorly researched content is a waste of time and resources.

Collate your existing content, and evaluate who it is targeting. Research the content competition by utilising keyword software, then edit the content to align with realistic high traffic keywords. This will improve the web pages traffic, here you can decide how to help the visitors of your website, via, data capture forms, or point them in the correct way.

End goals

Effective content writing needs to have an end goal, so the writer can decide what the content is aimed at. The content could be created to simply provide the reader with good quality advice, generate leads, boost brand awareness, attract past customers, or maybe it will be written to improve search engine positioning.

Research the audience you are targeting

Effective research of the audience you are targetting is very important in creating good quality content, here you need to understand what your target audience’s problems, needs, and lifestyles are.

The best content marketing strategy is to attract your potential customers before they enter into the buyer’s journey. Once you have captured the interest of the audience, you can start to follow up, with content that will explain how your brand can help in providing solutions to solving problems they may have, or showing them what your product range has to offer that the competition does not. Once they have all the information, they can then take the next step in the buyer’s journey when they are ready to progress.

Focus on your product or service

Considering the Internet is bloated with millions of pages of content that may be relevant to the products or services you are providing, it is important to detail information as to why the new or existing customer should start a buyer’s journey with your company. At this stage of researching the content that is going to be written, it is important to provide detailed information on the product or service you provide. The search engines will evaluate your web page when it is indexed, if the search engines deem the content to be of generic content, and not content that will add any extra value to the existing pages it already has indexed. They will not allocate the web page a high authoritative position in the SERPS.

To stop your newly created content falling low in the SERPS, the content written has to be planned and, designed to provide authoritative information to its readers. If the content is of high value, it will be shared by its readers, via online services such as social media, and email. The more signals a piece of content has on the Internet the more value will be added, hence higher positions in the SERPS.

The more the content focuses on its niche, the more targeted it will be, thus leading your brand to be more authoritative in the industry.

Analysing the content data

The evaluation of the content marketing campaign, from creation to circulation, is a critical step in its success. Here you need to recrew the correct tools, to allow you to perform the analyses. Once the data has been collated, you can work out what success the campaign had, and also learn what areas need improvement.

During the evaluation stage, Google analytics can be used to identify problems and opportunities in the content campaign. The majority of online marketers do not follow this process, with only around 8% of considering themselves successful at analysing the ROI of content marketing campaigns they have created. Sometimes digital marketing professionals find it difficult to evaluate the data comprehensively to provide reliable statistics.

Basic metrics

Consumption is a basic metric, meaning, how many visitors have visited the page that has been created. Basic metrics will answer most of the questions that will determine how the content marketing campaign has been performing.

Key metrics:

Google Analytics

• Users: provides unique visitor totals per page
• Pageviews: Total number of times a page is viewed
• Unique Pageviews: pageviews by the same user during the same session

It is best practice to also analyse these other metrics:

• Location: This metric defines the location of the viewers of your web pages. So, if most of the views are coming from the U.K, you could target U.K influencers to write on your blog
• Source/Medium: This metric provides information on what signals promoted the content, so content can be created to complement those signals
• Mobile: This metric provides data on how many of the readers of your content are using mobile devices to access your content, this will give you an insight as to whether you should tailor your future content to be more focused on mobile viewing

Social media metrics

Social media followers

Many marketers suffer from follower vanity, it really isn’t about how many followers you have on social media platforms, it is about how engaged your followers are.

If your social media profiles are quite new, you may not have a large following. But if you have spent a lot of time over the last few months building a strong engaged following, the creation of quality content will hopefully drive conversion rate.

Follower growth

If increasing your social media followers metric that you are concentrating on, it is a good idea to implement this data into a targeted forecast and add the data to your database.

Reach – Audience Growth Rate

One metric you should monitor is Audience Growth Rate. This metric measures the growth of the audience rate expressed in percent-change over certain time periods, the growth rate data of your social media following depicts your social media popularity.

Audience growth rate data allows you to assess what marketing incentives were popular with your new and existing customer base. You can compare past marketing efforts against new campaigns and decide how to implement your next related campaign.

Engagement – Average Engagement Rate

As your social media following enjoys a positive trend in growth, from effective content marketing. You also need to make sure that your audience is engaging with your content, and the current audience is the correct audience.

Average engagement rate is a metric which supplies data on how effective your social media efforts are, with the current audience base.

Acquisition – Visitor Frequency Rate

The Google Analytics tool is a great resource for tracking website referral traffic from social media websites. Here you can track the data related to what percentage of website traffic is coming from social media. It also lets you know what frequency this traffic is visiting your site.

The visitor frequency rate is another metric that separates new visitors from return visitors, this data is quite valuable, to analyse and target. Return visitors depict that your existing audience value the content you post, and new visitors depicts the meaningful growth of your social media following.

Conversion – Assisted Social Conversions

It is a brilliant feat if you have a good solid audience visiting your website multiple times, however, you should also be converting those visitors to sales or other actions.

Assisted social conversion is the best way to track your social media engagement on your website, and find out what their conversation statistics are over a period of time. You can track that funny tweet you made, and see the visitor conversion journey.

Listen to what your customers say

Data from metrics is great, but statistics are not human thoughts. It is also important to ask your customers for advice, and feedback. This can be done by online surveys, email surveys, or face to face interactions. Customers need to know they are valued and will jump at the chance of getting involved with their favorite brands.

Another great asset in helping your customers with their overall experience of your business, is by asking your employees for a better understanding of the customer’s needs. This data can prove invaluable, and it shows them that they are important, and their opinion matters.

Amplify your content

Another good strategy is amplifying the content you are creating by visiting the places online that your potential customers visit, and placing content on those channels to reach out to them. This content should be relative to the audience, and of good quality.

Conclusion

As you can see creating quality content marketing is not that difficult, but is very time consuming. Content marketing is quite tricky to get the correct formula, but once the winning strategy is found it is a case of repeating it.

If you require any more information, please contact Plosion Web Design via our contact page.