Menu
Close
free strategy session
Menu
Close
free strategy session

Your brand’s reputation and credibility is an important part of how you are received by key audiences. A brand that is credible will have better relationships with consumers and a strong loyal customer base. 

Credibility can also help you overcome a crisis faster and gain important word-of-mouth recommendations. Overall, brands that are considered credible have an easier time growing the business and gaining new customers. But building that crucial credibility requires a strong, strategic approach to owned media.

An owned media strategy takes advantage of the content you have control over. That could include blogs, newsletters, personal publications, emails, websites, and even social media. 

Taking advantage of those channels and creating an owned media strategy allows you to build your brand’s credibility. But which types of content are the best options when creating your owned media strategy? Let’s examine the right kind of content to promote while boosting brand credibility.

1. Influencer Content

In today’s world, readers trust influencers more than they trust brands. That impacts buying behaviors, which in turn means that brands need to adapt their owned media strategies. 

Influencers have very loyal fan bases who listen and respond based on what the influencer suggests. Influencer content can be shared on your owned media channels, helping to combine both the power of owned media and influencer impact.

Influencer content can include unboxing videos, product reviews, shout-outs, and even advertisements. When the content on your owned channels includes a recommendation from an influencer, audiences are more likely to listen. 

It also boosts your brand’s credibility. If an influencer promotes your brand, your brand is tied to their credibility and reputation among audiences. The audience of the influencer becomes your own audience, and your content channels gain more viewers as a result.

2. Authoritative Content

Authoritative content is a content marketing strategy that proves to readers that you understand your industry and can provide them with answers. When you demonstrate authority, you become an industry expert. Both search engines and readers look to you as a source of information. 

It can help you grow your content readership and gain more followers across social media. And, most importantly, authoritative content puts you ahead of your competitors and lets you lead the industry.

Examples of authoritative content might include detailed blog posts, educational ebooks, how-to articles, or product and service buyer guides. By giving clear details and insider information to readers, you build up a content platform of authority. When readers want a credible brand, they look for content from industry experts and thought leaders.

3. Shareable Content

Another type of content that is important to boost brand credibility is shareable content. Shareable content refers to content pieces that inspire readers to want to spread that information among their own networks. 

Readers trust their networks and will look to friends for brand recommendations. The more your content is shared, the wider your reach and credibility are among new audiences.

Shareable content is often thought of as social media content. Social media posts have the ability to be shared with the click of a button and can quickly gain traction. 

Optimizing your social content can help improve your shareability. You can try having infographics, images, and videos that garner mass appeal. You could also try posting quick, memorable copy snippets that are more appealing to share than article links or dense paragraphs.

4. Linkable Content

Linkable content is content specifically created to attract high domain authority publications to link to your information. This type of content is more likely to be viewed as authoritative and, in turn, can boost your domain authority. When readers see your content being used externally, they are more likely to trust your brand and its insights. 

In order to be viewed as a credible source, you need to provide trustworthy content. That can include independent research, unique information, and claims backed up with data. Creating well-crafted, well-informed linkable content will increase your chances of being shared and gaining new audiences.

5. Interactive Content

Another example of content you want to boost is interactive content. In today’s world, readers have a relatively short attention span. In order to capture their attention and spread the credibility of your brand, the content you create needs to be engaging. Interactive content doesn’t mean it needs to be loud and bright, but it does need to be interesting.

Interactive content like quizzes and calculators on your website has high engagement rates with users. You can also use videos, GIFs, and graphics to gain the attention of readers and increase engagement. 

This content is also more likely to be viewed, commented on, and shared on social media platforms. That increases the reach of your audience and allows you to control the message you send to viewers. When you have control over the content, you can use that to improve your brand’s credibility.

Own Your Industry with Strategic Content

When you have the right owned media strategy, you own your industry. By taking advantage of the owned media channels you have, you can build your brand’s credibility. 

Rather than letting another source tell your story, you can have control over the content. And, when you have control, you can ensure that the content you share is authoritative, shareable, linkable, and engaging.

You can’t go out and spend your marketing budget on ordering a box of credibility or a carton of trust. It would be great and incredibly easy if you could, but unfortunately both of those things have to be earned. 

Equally, you can’t just tell people that you’re a great, trustworthy company, with an excellent product, and amazing customer service. Well, you can, but it’s far more effective when it comes from someone who has nothing to do with your company. And that’s where linkable content and earned media come in.

What is Earned Media?

Earned media is content written about your business by other people and published on platforms that you don’t own. For example, a well-respected review site in your niche might write a great review of your new product or service. Or a site could quote your CEO in one of their articles and link back to a case study or some research you did.

This isn’t achieved by buying an ad or paying someone to post your guest blog on their site. It’s, as the name suggests, earned by being good enough to deserve a mention or a backlink.

While you could send a press release for something that’s genuinely newsworthy, you could get mentioned simply for having valuable content to share. If you have industry insights, in-depth research, or information on what’s trending, you have something that could appeal to a wide audience. And that means that a site may mention you organically as a source for an article.

Publications are always looking for good content that’s valuable to their members. If you want to appear in Forbes or the latest issue of your trade magazine, think about what you need to put on your website that will be something they want to link to and source.

How Linkable Content Helps Earn Media Mentions

Getting publications to mention you and link back to your site is no easy task. There are a couple of different ways to do it. You can spend hours doing personalized outreach to every online publication you can find. That’s thousands of emails to editors, contributors, or whatever other email you can grab from a site. 

However, the other way to build your digital PR strategy and get those earned media placements is to have them come to you. And that’s through that linkable content.

Linkable content has been specifically crafted to attract attention and entice high domain authority sites and publications to link to it. Again, it has to be good enough; data-driven, and full of unique insights and quotes. 

While you might wish that the top publication in your niche would link to your sales page, that’s highly unlikely. However, if you write an article that’s impactful and full of value, you will gain domain authority. Your content is also more likely to be used and shared.

Types of Linkable Content

Getting those earned media mentions is invaluable for your company. However, you can’t get that third-party validation without having the right type of content. As we mentioned above, linkable content can come in many forms: 

The types of linkable content doesn’t end there. Make sure you’re exploring all the different ways you can provide great content that online publications will want to source to and link to in their own articles. 

And creating linkable content isn’t a one-and-done situation. It should be an ongoing effort so your company is providing fresh, valuable insights on the regular.

Why You Need Earned Media for your Digital PR Strategy

Earned media can be an important part of your overall content strategy and your digital PR.

What makes it so important?

From Nielsen's Trust in Advertising study, “88% of global respondents trust recommendations from people they know more than any other channel. What’s more, 50% more people trust recommendations than lesser-ranked channels like online banner ads, mobile ads, SMS messages, and SEO ads.”

Consumers are increasingly internet savvy. They know that what you say about yourself is designed to promote your products or services. Of course, you still need your own promotional content, but it does mean that consumers may take it with a pinch of salt.

When another site picks up your content, however, consumers know that they don’t have to do that. Other sites don’t have any reason to mention your content or your business unless they think what you have is valuable enough. Consumers will see this content as unbiased, third-party validation and take it more seriously than anything you post yourself.

When other sites and publications publish your content or link to it, of course, you get all-important backlinks to boost your rankings. You also get a whole host of other benefits, including brand credibility and awareness, and increased trust in your products and services. You can reach wider audiences with this strategy and build your authority and credibility.

And being mentioned in online publications is only one part of beginning to truly own your industry. If you want to eventually be the name that people think of when they think about your particular industry, you’ll need a strong mixture of digital PR, SEO, and onsite content. 

Dive Into High-Quality Content

All you can control is what you do and how much effort you put into it. Create high-quality, linkable content that’s targeted and full of value and it's more likely that your content will be shared. 

With a consistent approach, you can build a strategy that brings you the earned media you deserve.

Content promotion and distribution have been hot topics in growth marketing, and for good reason. Brands that have struggled to find success through content marketing initiatives are beginning to understand why they need more than a favorite social media channel. A struggling content distribution strategy is usually less of a quality content or platform issue and more of an audience issue. (more…)

It's oftentimes a freelance writer or professional marketer's biggest question about generating effective content: "What should I write?"

Do you struggle with content production? As you engage in content planning, do you find it difficult to identify topics to write about? Does your team toil over what type of website content or which content type will have the greatest impact on your target audience? Do you agonize over which content piece will attract your target audience? Do your marketing activities ever grind to a halt at this point?

You're certainly not alone.

Content writing can be challenging. Highly visual content and building a strong content calendar present their own unique challenges, too. This is true whether you're engaged in influencer marketing or building a B2B content marketing strategy. Producing engaging, effective content is the top challenge for most content marketers. More than one digital marketing strategy has stalled out at this critical juncture of the customer journey.

Regardless of the content format you select, this roadmap will help you navigate the path to achieve both engaging and effective content — and more importantly, a marketing roadmap will help you answer the question: "What should I write?"

An effective content marketing plan can help your company create consistently good content and write its own success story. Because we all know it doesn't feel good to spend a lot of time and effort writing effective content that nobody reads, or worse, that they do read and think was a waste of time.

Roadmap for Creating Engaging and Effective Content

Step 1: Start with business strategy and audience needs.

Cascade business strategy and context.

Without a set of defined business goals to achieve, your growth marketing strategy is flying blind. A marketing roadmap brings both vision and clarity to your content plan.

A successful content marketing strategy starts with the set of business goals you're out to accomplish — brand awareness, lead generation, sales, etc. These goals must cascade down from your overall business and department objectives to your written content and ultimately to your potential customers. OKRs — used by Google's search engine and Intel — can give you a simple framework to think about how your marketing roadmap strategy can cascade if your organization doesn't already have a formal process.

Even if you've been doing content marketing for years, go back to this step and really understand what your business goals are for your content marketing strategy. You may find that those goals and your current execution are not in alignment with a successful content marketing effort.

Don't gloss over this step.

Before any talk of content creation occurs, write out your business goals and make sure your entire content team is in alignment with them. Everyone needs to know what the finish line looks like for providing valuable content. Your marketing roadmap must make this clear.

Understand your audience's needs and preferences.

While you are developing your foundational understanding of a successful inbound marketing business strategy and context, you should also be doing some parallel research to identify your audience's needs and preferences, right down to the social media channels they tend to prefer.

Don't let the organization's product launch objectives interfere with how you approach this step. This can influence the results, creating an understanding of your company's ideal customers, instead of your real customers. Aim to understand your real audience and develop content that addresses their current need, not your company's "want."

There are many ways to do this research prior to developing your marketing campaign. Start your information-gathering initiative with the development of buyer personas. An effective content marketing strategy for your campaign should answer questions such as:

Get your hands on website analytics for recent posts and competitive intelligence. These will help you better understand what is engaging your audience on your website, the websites of your competitors, and on social media. Your marketing strategy roadmap should answer questions such as:

Step 2: Identify key metrics.

After you've defined your business goals and have an understanding of your audience, you must determine how your marketing roadmap will measure the progress of your strategy.

It is vital that you establish these metrics before launching the strategy. All too often, measurement is an afterthought, and marketers simply measure whatever is easily available — which usually takes the form of soft metrics like social media shares and page views — things that don't report well to the C-Suite.

Without establishing metrics that align with the overall goals of the strategy, marketers will have no idea if their marketing roadmap is succeeding or failing. The point of measurement is to determine the true trajectory of your marketing roadmap. You manifest what you measure.

Effective reporting begins with the basics.

Identify to whom you will be reporting these metrics. Just the product manager? Or do they report up to the C-Suite? The Board of Directors?

If you're not sure, you might check with human resources to make sure you're following established company protocol. Understanding to whom you're accountable will help target the metrics that will most effectively measure and communicate your content marketing success.

For example, a COO may value sales and revenue metrics over online marketing consumption metrics. Email marketing figures matter more to content creators than business administration types. Social media numbers matter to your brand awareness types. Adjust your metrics accordingly.

In order to have a true understanding of whether your content program is working, Jay Baer suggests that you "create an array of metrics that are selected from four primary buckets: consumption metrics, social media sharing metrics, lead generation metrics, sales metrics."

Which goals will show the success or failure of your strategy and give you insights into whether to adjust it? What metrics will give you the best pulse on your strategy?

Also, understand how you will get to these metrics. Google Analytics, social media statistics, and your company's CRM are great places to start.

New content intelligence tools are utilizing big data and predictive marketing to give you more insight into individual metrics by diving deep into your existing content and understanding what's resonating with your current audience. These insights not only help you create great content moving forward. They also help you optimize existing content you've already created.

With a solid foundation of business goals, audience understanding, and metrics, we can now begin the task of diving into the creative guts of your content marketing strategy.

Step 3: Develop content marketing editorial mission statement.

At the beginning of any marketing initiative, Joe Pulizzi suggests content marketers get clear on this key part of editorial planning, which can then serve as a guidepost for all content creation and social media campaigns. The mission statement answers the question, "Why do you exist?"

Pulizzi recommends answering three basic questions to create your initial mission statement:

  1. Who is your core target audience?
  2. What will be delivered to the audience?
  3. What is the desired outcome for the audience?

Because you have your business goals and understanding of your audience already in place, this section should come together rather quickly.

When creating your editorial mission statement, keep in mind your own differentiators you discovered from your competitive intelligence gathering. What unique attributes does your company bring to the market when solving your audience's problems?

Step 4: Create an editorial calendar.

Go back to your audience preferences and identify the content types/forms that will work best to address their needs. As you develop your marketing road map, ask yourself:

Do a gut check. Check that the types/forms of content you selected lend themselves to the metrics you identified in Step Two.

If not, you may need to establish better metrics to show success. This may be an evolution of an existing metric. For example, if you have video content, and one of your goals is sales instead of just "views," you can use links within the video descriptions to get people back to your site where they can buy your product.

Within your editorial calendar, you will also identify the appropriate promotion channels. Once content types/forms are selected, you'll have a better idea of what channels will work best to promote them.

Step 5: Adopt a data collection and reporting schedule.

It's important to discuss and agree on when and how you will report the progress of your marketing plan and content marketing efforts — not only to your team but to the relevant organizational leadership.

With the right metrics and marketing analytics, you should be able to quickly shift your roadmap strategies depending on their initial effectiveness. Keep an eye on the end goal, and if the strategy is veering off, correct it.

This is why constant monitoring and reporting is your best friend. It may help to have more frequent meetings with your content marketing team to have these discussions — the most effective teams meet daily or weekly, as reported by CMI .

Step 6: Write, edit, publish, and listen.

At this point, you should have amazing clarity around how to answer the question, "What should I write?" Not only that, but you should also be able to answer the question, "Why did you write that?"

So, do what you do best — write, edit, and publish effective content that will engage your audiences and deliver the business results your organization needs to be successful. To help make the creative process even smoother, the Content Marketing Institute offers 10 ways you can write like a pro.

Then, be sure to listen. (This is one place social media can become one of your best friends.)

Listen to how your audiences are responding to your marketing effort. Nurture the product roadmap connection you've established with them. Feedback what you hear into the understanding of your audience in Step One, and see how that new information trickles down the rest of the marketing roadmap. This will all help later on as you seek to build a marketing roadmap template with a proven track record.

Step 7: Establish a continuous feedback loop and make adjustments to your approach.

Anything in your digital content marketing strategy can change. Your marketing roadmap template is just that, a template that will require adjustment and course correction.

Executive leadership might launch a new strategy or invest in a different market, which would completely alter your content strategy. Your audience's needs and preferences might evolve over time or drastically shift overnight after a major event. Competitors could enter the marketplace or change their own content marketing strategy.

Commit to constantly monitoring Google Analytics, collecting your digital marketing metrics, and keeping a pulse on your audience via social media. That way, you'll be able to pivot as changes occur. You can then feed the new information back into the top of the content strategy. Revising your marketing roadmap template is a sign of progress, not failure.

This is a strong win-win tactic. By doing this quickly and effectively, you'll be able to create the content your new audiences need before your competition and gain a competitive edge. That competitive edge will make you a content strategy hero in your organization. Don't you want to be a hero?

Conclusion

Without the solid foundations of a digital content marketing strategy, any small business will struggle to come up with a great content idea and deliver engaging, quality content to its target audience.

Your content marketing strategy must open your sales funnel to increased traffic in a way that both helps audiences solve a problem and helps you achieve your business goals.

No matter where you are in your company's content marketing strategy, revisit your goals and understanding of your audience to see if they are still in alignment with where you are currently spending your time and resources. If they're not, it may be a sign that your digital marketing program needs to change — for the better. Much of what we call marketing management is merely tweaking an underperforming marketing tactic to deliver more consistent results.

What will you do to be a better content marketer today? How will you incorporate social media monitoring into your marketing plan? Do you need help building or modifying a content marketing roadmap to meet your company's marketing goal? If so, consider contacting a Relevance strategist today to help you build out your digital marketing roadmap.

Being visible online is now crucial for every business. No matter if you only work locally or sell goods worldwide, you need to stand out in the crowd of competitors. You need to reap the beneficial results of content marketing. For this reason, many companies invest in effective SEO services performed by experienced and skillful professionals for their marketing efforts.

A skilled marketer or PR agency uses many techniques when building a marketing strategy. Some strategies are applied to the website itself. These typically involve combing through Google Analytics, conducting a content audit, overhauling blog posts, and optimizing all existing content for crawling by a search engine.

Others are performed off-site to achieve the impressive results of content marketing in the digital age. Among the off-site methods, there are two that are usually considered to be the most significant: digital PR and content marketing. Thanks to them, you can improve brand awareness, reach a wider audience through enhanced content distribution, and appeal to a potential customer by providing more engaging content that addresses the felt needs of your target audience.

Most companies profit considerably from a combination of social media marketing, PR efforts, media placements, publishing a white paper, media placements, journalist relationships, and more.

Additionally, those strategies can have both short-term and long-term effects on your business. Read on if you'd like to find out more about creating B2B content, how B2C marketers leverage relevant content as part of a comprehensive content marketing campaign, and why inbound marketing is beginning to eclipse more traditional marketing practices.

Digital PR

As the Digital Marketing Institute explains, "Digital PR includes a wide variety of marketing possibilities such as being interviewed by online publications, increasing your online presence, and using the interactive power of social media for further growth and recognition."

Digital PR is similar to traditional PR, focused on networking with journalists. The big idea in the content marketing world is to encourage them to feature a particular brand in magazines, newspapers, radio, and television. Consequently, digital public relations specialists search for coverage with articles on online news sources and websites or on social media and blog posts.

Digital PR Tactics

Nowadays, many digital PR tactics are used to improve a company's visibility on the internet. These include:

Short-Term and Long-Term Benefits of Digital PR

Digital PR provides a business with many short-term and long-term benefits. However, to track its performance, an expert content marketer or full-fledged PR firm will recommend you set the goals for your campaign before you start it.

Some results that can help inform your goals and content marketing efforts might be as follows.

Improving Website Traffic

If many people read about your company as you share your branded content on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media, you are likely to get more visitors to your website. As a result, every point of contact with valuable content represents a chance to enhance your company's brand awareness (and profits) through content promotion.

Enhancing SEO and Rankings

As your business engages in content creation and gets mentioned on high-authority websites and in other B2B content marketing, it allows you to receive valuable links that work excellently for SEO. Consequently, when Google rates your site higher, it can rank higher for keywords associated with your industry. As a result, the savvy B2B marketer knows that you will get more traffic in this way as well.

Boosting Sales

One of the most significant benefits of any public relations practice is increasing sales. Therefore, when a company sees ROI from their online marketing investment, they know it is a crucial sign. It shows that all the marketing efforts were worth it and eventually paid off. Keep this in mind as you establish your marketing budget!

Generating Leads

Thanks to an excellent digital PR strategy, your great content will reach a relevant audience that's interested in your services or products. As a result, the more people that read about your offer and click through to your website, the more potentially valuable leads you will get.

Building a Trustworthy Brand

Similar to traditional PR, this digital counterpart aims at gaining your client's trust. Thanks to a lot of positive references online, your brand will definitely grow its reputation. Additionally, if your content creation efforts consistently yield an excellent blog post adapted to SEO standards, search engines perceive your website as a reliable source of information.

Content Marketing

You may think that content marketing is an on-page SEO tactic, focused on creating and publishing content on your company's website. However, in fact, this term is much broader. Instead, it involves both on-page and off-page methods. The successful marketing team typically uses a combination of email marketing, blog content, Google Ads, video content, and more to help boost their content marketing ROI.

Obviously, these days content creation means a lot more than firing off a random blog post every now and then. Yes, it's vital to create quality content on your site to increase your brand awareness. However, you should also remember to provide excellent, engaging assets to maximize the results of content marketing. (Seek to publish these authoritative resources elsewhere, too.)

Content Marketing Strategies

The most common practices used by content marketers are as follows:

Experienced B2C marketers closely associate any content marketing effort with PR, link-building, and social media. As a result, these all become part of a successful content strategy and contribute powerfully to the process of building a reliable brand. Consequently, content creation and a healthy marketing budget represent twin necessities for taking your business to the next level.

Short-Term and Long-Term Benefits of Content Marketing

Social media is quite ubiquitous nowadays. Consumers are starting to expect unique and interesting content on various channels from every company. Consequently, any PR pro will tell you that it's worth following this trend as part of your overall content strategy and marketing efforts.

Whether you work with an agency or have your own in-house PR person, great content marketing can provide you with many short-term and long-term benefits.

Increased Reach

With content marketing, you can be wherever your customers are likely to appear. Your PR content can answer comments on social media, point them to a blog post or press release, or respond to questions on forums. You do not have to limit yourself to creating content for your website only.

Higher Authority and Credibility

Creating a lot of reliable content shows your company's expertise in the industry. In this way, you can appear as a credible provider who really knows a lot in their field. You can do it through publishing, for example, case studies, webinars, downloadable resources, or blog posts. This is what many PR professionals mean when they use the term inbound marketing.

Boosted Website Traffic

Similar to digital PR, content marketing sources can significantly improve your website traffic. This is because relevant and useful content (among other PR activities) will encourage your audience to come back to your website for compelling content and more.

Retargeted Audience

When you analyze your content's performance, you will gain the data necessary to retarget your audience. Content marketing success means providing them with the information they need. After taking a look at the users who viewed your content, you will know which display ads to retain in your content strategy to maximize the chances of making a profit.

Wrapping Up

Both digital PR and content marketing can provide your business with a lot of benefits. The obvious results of PR and content marketing are both obvious and quantifiable. Consequently, it's well worth combining them as part of your content marketing strategy. And yet, according to the Content Marketing Institute, more than half of businesses reported that their company had yet to put together an integrated digital marketing strategy.

Don't let your business become a content marketing statistic! Taking care of public relations and building a positive brand image has never been more crucial. As a result, numerous companies are fighting for the same audience, employing content marketers to help grab eyeballs online. You should do your utmost to stand out and attract them to your product or service. If you haven't done so already, start putting together a marketing budget and a content marketing strategy.

Thanks to content marketing and digital PR, your website will rank higher in search results. As a result, you will get more website traffic as just one of many results of content marketing. Additionally, your business will appear more relevant and trustworthy.

A content marketing strategy is vital as many people nowadays are exceedingly wary of online fraud. Therefore, investing your resources in PR and content marketing and leveraging off-site SEO techniques can really pay off.

Just like a sales funnel, a content conversion funnel is meant to drive conversions. It starts off by creating awareness on a certain topic and ends with a conversion.

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your brand or products. In fact, 95% of B2B product buyers consider content trustworthy when they are evaluating a company.

This powerful statistic establishes the importance of content marketing. However, to make sure that content marketing helps you get conversions, you need to have a content conversion funnel in place. This can help you plan the journey of potential buyers better.

Before we get into the advantages of a content conversion funnel and how you can create one, let's take a close look at what it actually is.

Content Conversion Funnel

The content conversion funnel is the process through which you take your visitors that leads to converting them. You create the content flow to convert visitors into actual customers who will pay for your products.

When a website visitor arrives at your site, you'll want to grab those eyeballs with catchy headlines, useful information, and existing content that serves to support your legitimacy. According to the Content Marketing Institute, you'll also want to make your content source format accessible to all.

There are four stages to the content conversion funnel:

Most people don't move through this process along the defined path. That is why you need to have a content conversion funnel in place. The funnel will not only help you drive the visitors to make a purchase but will also help you plan and create content.



Before we dive in any further, let's take a close look at each stage of the funnel.

Awareness Stage

The awareness stage is the first stage of the funnel and is meant to attract and educate your audience.

This content should add value. It should answer questions or solve the problems of your audience. It should essentially help generate brand awareness in the long run.

One way of figuring out if your digital content is working is to check the number of views and shares it gets. At the same time, you should also see if the people viewing and sharing it are a part of your target audience.

Evaluation Stage

This is the stage at which the leads that you've attracted during the awareness stage will start evaluating your brand.

They will look for content to determine the legitimacy of your brand and develop trust. Based on this stage, visitors will decide if they want to purchase your product or services.

This type of content should generate leads and also influence them. If visitors are converting from this content, then it is successful.

Nestle, for instance, released their Toll House Chocolate Chip recipes. These recipes included chocolate chips as the main ingredients. This helped build the brand's image in the minds of consumers. It validated the brand.

Purchase Stage

This stage involves convincing your leads to make a purchase from you.

The content should result in a conversion. It should influence the purchase decisions of your leads. It should also influence the content pipeline.

To analyze if this content is successful, you can conduct reviews or surveys. The survey responses and self-assessments can give you a fair idea of your success.

Delight Stage

Many companies overlook this stage. However, it is especially important for companies with a subscription model.

The delight stage will help you build a loyal audience that will help you grow your business going forward.

Customers abandoned as soon as they make a purchase will likely be only one-time customers. However, if you can delight them with your response and special offers, they may become repeat customers.

Why Should You Create a Content Conversion Funnel?

According to Kapost, content marketing produces three times more leads than paid search for every dollar spent. It also offers six times higher conversion rates than other methods.

The primary reason for this is that content marketing helps you improve your website's search engine optimization (SEO).

It can help you get more pages indexed and even get more backlinks. This can not only help improve your website's authority but can also help you create brand awareness.

Content marketing not only reduces your costs but also helps increase your conversion rates.

But if you don't plan your strategy well, your content marketing campaign can fail. Which is one of the main reasons you should have a content conversion funnel.

How to Create a Content Conversion Funnel

The first step in creating a content conversion funnel is to figure out who your target customer is.

You create a funnel for the purpose of selling your products. For this reason, it is important to know who your target audience is because you must tailor content to the requirements of your target audience.

You will need to figure out the challenges that they face so that you can solve them through your content. Is your product able to solve their problems? At that point, you will have sparked their interest in making a purchase. Then you tailor content according to each section of the funnel.

1. Awareness Stage

At this step, focus the content on expanding your reach to spread brand awareness. The goal is to get the attention of people who have an interest in your products. It's on you to create great content that would be of interest to a potential customer. You may need to create a buyer persona and conduct AB testing as you develop your digital marketing campaign.

The content marketing efforts of today's digital marketer will include some combination of Google Analytics, keyword research, email marketing, social media, and marketing automation. Social media channels, in particular, can help facilitate rapid distribution. Some of the best types of content that you can create for this stage fall into one of three categories.

Curated

This sort of content creation revolves around posts that are easily shared on social media. They are very easy to create and share easily. However, these sorts of posts can become spammy all too easily. You must also ensure that you add your own views to the content to give it a personal touch.

Infographics

Infographics are images with bundles of information. They show a variety of statistics and data that is very easy to interpret. Infographics can generate high engagement and views as well.

Blog Posts

A blog post is a great type of content when done correctly. Blog content can help improve your website's SEO and can also be highly informative to your audience. Your website traffic can increase dramatically if your blog posts are well-written. And when you can create and share blog posts, the overall reach will increase as well.

Other great types of content for this stage include videos and podcasts. These can dramatically increase your conversion rates and boost your lead generation as well.

2. Evaluation Stage

The content that works the best in the middle of the funnel should be educational in nature. Relevant content provides the key to the conversion process. Authentic interest and compelling content converts mere readers into customers. You'll want to make sure that your contact info is readily accessible at this stage of the average buyers journey.

The awareness stage concentrates on getting the attention of people. The evaluation stage should show them why they should purchase a product or service from you. The content should show why your products or services are useful for them. It is only then that they will continue through the funnel to make a purchase from you.

Ideally, you should get the contact information of consumers during this stage to convert them into leads. The main purpose of the content is to ensure that consumers who see this content will continue to the bottom of the funnel.

The most popular forms of content for this step include:

Case Studies

Data is the primary driver behind case studies. They showcase statistics and other data gathered during a test.

White Papers

White papers provide statistical data and academic style reports as well. They help convince your audience that the product or service you offer can solve their problems.

Ebooks and Free Guides

This form of content revolves around "How-to" get things done. Target these at providing solutions to the problems faced by your audience. This content should describe and show consumers how your product can solve their problems.

You can also include worksheets as a part of this stage. They can also help you with lead generation.

You should also take the time to build attractive landing pages and optimize them for conversions. Similarly, if you're an eCommerce business, a visually-appealing website is even more important for you.

You can leverage WordPress to build your eCommerce website or landing page. This platform provides the foundation for over 30% of the world's websites, many of which also sell goods.

3. Bottom of the Funnel (Purchase and Delight Stage)

These stages should be extremely personal. The content that you create for the bottom of the funnel should show your leads the added value that your paid product offers. This should be in contrast to the free value that you've already been offering them.

One of the best ways of distributing this content is through an email autoresponder sequence. These emails can be sent to people who have provided their email addresses to you. The sequences will build up gradually and bring the user to the point where you can ask for the sale. You can do this with a great call to action.

You can offer demos and trials of your products or services to your leads to give them a hands-on experience. Other popular forms of content for the purchase stage include discount codes, webinars, and testimonials.

For the delight stage, you need to ensure that your customers are happy with your products or services.

The best types of content for this stage include special offers, member-exclusive giveaways, and product guides. You then aim this content at making the customer experience better so that their renewal rates and product usage increase.

Final Thoughts

Having a well-charted content marketing strategy is essential for success. And that includes a well-planned content conversion funnel. You need to think up content ideas tailored to your target audience for maximum effect.

At each stage of the conversion funnel, your content marketing world should be based on the primary goal or target of that stage. This will ensure that you can succeed in your goals for that stage and, in turn, increase conversions. If your company does not have a content marketer on staff, you may find success reaching out to a sales conversion service or other digital PR agency.

If you would like to set up a time to speak to a Relevance strategist about content conversion, schedule an appointment.

One of the most important reasons any brand creates great content is to become visible. As Tony Robbins says, setting goals is the best way to make that happen. You know you need a content marketing strategy, but do you know why? What are your content strategy goals? Do you know what outcomes you want to get from creating content for your brand? How will your content marketing objective help you reach a potential customer?

Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible to the visible.
--Tony Robbins

By setting content marketing goals, you can tailor your content strategy to meet your business objective. By strategically setting your content marketing goal, you can focus on the type of content that will achieve these goals. This is far better than blindly creating content and hoping it gets read. No experienced content strategist takes this approach to digital marketing.

Creating Brand Awareness

Whether you're a small business startup or have been pounding the content production pavement for years, brand awareness is where your content marketing efforts all begin. It should represent the foundation for your content strategy framework and be the content goal that fuels your blog posts, social media, and other marketing efforts.

You won't make any sales if potential customers don't know who you are. Not only do you want them to know you, but you want them to think of your brand when they think of your industry or main product line. When you sneeze, do you reach for a tissue or a Kleenex? While your brand may never realize Kleenex-level recognition, setting brand awareness as one of your primary content marketing goals is crucial during your initial content strategy process.

Conversely, if you are a well-recognized brand, brand awareness will not be your primary business goal. However, it could still remain at the forefront of any content piece you create.

Creating brand awareness can be done through concerted efforts of outreach, which means focusing on good content, be it a blog post or social media content that can go viral and get you recognized, as well as build your presence and get you connected with your target audience.

Because more than 91% of retail brands use two or more social channels, you don't want to be part of that 9% who aren't participating in making a name for yourself. One of the best parts of social media marketing for new brands who undoubtedly have low marketing budgets? It is absolutely free, and the return on investment can be astronomical when executed strategically as part of your content marketing plan.

Consider Inviting Others to Speak Highly of Your Brand

Another great content outlet that helps you gain brand awareness is guest posting. Guest posting is the new "word-of-mouth," one of the most helpful content ideas, and this effective content strategy can pay off big time.

Up to 85% of small businesses get most of their business by word-of-mouth, so it is an avenue any brand trying to create awareness needs to go down. By getting your brand talked about in relevant publications, your target audience will take notice. Your digital PR should focus on creating a problem, solving the problem, and selling your brand as the best solution.

At this stage, it is all about building trust with your audience, and your content should be tailored accordingly.

Positioning Your Brand As a Thought Leader

Running a successful company is normally the primary goal of any business, but more important than that is being a leader in the industry.

Thought leadership shows your audience that you don't just sell your products, you live them. This is important because it builds trust in your brand and creates value for your customers, ensuring long-term customer relationships.

In setting your content goals, if being a thought leader is important to your brand, you'll need to address this in your strategy, and you can do that by putting out more long-form content. You can achieve this by creating guides, e-books, and blog posts that are 2,000+ words.

It's not only about length, but your content should also be super valuable and give your readers actionable advice that they can't get from anywhere else. Long-form content can also ranks higher in search engines. It gets more shares and views, making it a worthwhile endeavor on all fronts.

Driving Traffic

Quality content begets content in the case of driving traffic.

You want your customers and leads to reading the content you've skillfully created and curated on your website, but how do you get them there? With more content, of course!

If your primary content strategy goal is to drive traffic to your website, you'll need to focus on your outreach and your social media channels, as well as your SEO strategies. You can have a regularly-updated blog, with targeted keywords and value-driven content that you can link back to while doing guest posts and social posts.

To drive traffic to your website, your content strategy plan should be comprehensive and incorporate all aspects of content creation. This includes blogging, newsletters, social media, and guest posting. All of your content channels are important when you are trying to drive traffic.

Generating Leads

Traffic is great (unless you are stuck in it), but it is nothing if you aren't gaining valuable leads from the people who visit your site or your target audience isn't reading your content.

This is where your website, especially your landing page, comes in. Your content strategy should always incorporate your website, especially if you have valuable content and good traffic...but few leads.

Before you begin to create content, start by figuring out the purpose of your website and the primary goal of your homepage. Your content should reflect this and give your readers a great user experience for your targeted audience. Your home page should be quick, colorful, and appealing to those who you've already defined as qualified leads.

Take a good look at your current website and its existing content. Conduct a content audit. Look for content gaps that surface in your Google Analytics reporting. Optimize what you do have for search engine optimization (SEO). Ensure your content format suits your brand and gives that amazing user experience your customers are looking for. Provide a full report of your findings to your content team.

Commit Your Plan to Writing

After all this has been done, you're ready to build an effective content calendar. In addition to clear deadlines, every item should identify content type. It should name the marketer on your team who is primarily responsible for completion. Who will be writing your blog posts? Which content marketer gives the go-ahead for your email campaigns?

Email marketing is another avenue that is important for lead generation. In fact, email can be more important than social media marketing in terms of customer retention. It's a part of any good content strategy. A full 80% of retailers say that email marketing is their most important customer retention channel. Another 59% of marketers say email is the most effective marketing channel and an especially powerful tool in the B2B marketing space.

Converting Leads and/or Upselling

You may have a fairly large audience already but aren't getting the sales you want to see.

If your goal is to convert more leads and get more upsells, you'll want to tailor your content marketing strategy to hook your existing leads and customer base. Your focus should be on your emails and newsletters and your social media. This is where your customers have already opted in. They are most primed to see your content.

It's important to keep them hearing your name by sending out regular emails and social media updates. The information should be pertinent and valuable to your audience so that you can pull them back to your brand with everything they read or see. Specialized offers that are tailored to them as loyal customers will do the trick and turn your leads converted into long-term and dependable customers. (Make sure you take down or revise limited timeframe offers as part of your regular content audit!)

A recent study found that brands that post on social media regularly have more loyal customers. By keeping your social media presence up, performing your content audit regularly, and giving your current audience value, they'll go from lead to customer easily.

By focusing your content strategy on one or two specific goals, you better position your brand to realize those goals. You will see a better ROI from the content you take the time to produce.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, there are four goals that ought to remain front and center whether you are engaged in B2C or B2B content marketing. However, your goals may change over time. Consequently, it is always important to reassess what you've done and how it has worked.

If you are interested in a call to help with your content marketing strategy, please schedule a call with a Relevance strategist.

Content marketing is nothing without a content marketing strategy. Content marketing strategies are critical to have in hand before you commit to a social media platform, engage in email marketing, develop interactive content, hire marketers, or even just conduct a brainstorming session for content ideas.

You can have the most interesting, thought-provoking piece of interactive content out there. You might have the world's greatest content marketer on staff. However, it's all for naught if it can't be found by the right people. Likewise, professional marketers know that great content means nothing if it doesn't reach its target audience.

No matter what stage of your content creation process you're in, whether you're in pre-planning - deciding on content format, conducting a content audit, or finishing up and wondering how to present your blog post to the world through social media marketing - now is the time to start thinking about the best content marketing strategy for optimizing and distributing that content to your audience.

Seasoned marketers know that the world's greatest content production workflow and search engine optimization tactic means nothing in the absence of a documented strategy. Similarly, content marketing strategies help convert existing customers into unpaid brand loyalty cheerleaders.

Do I Really Need a Content Strategy?

Yes! The point of your content is to be seen, read, heard, and, most importantly, shared as part of the average customer journey.

But what good is your high quality content if it's never seen? Why develop any top-notch content asset if it doesn't gain any traction in the marketplace? Research by the Content Marketing Institute has shown that countless brands who succeed at digital marketing develop and follow a content marketing strategy. As a result, they consider their content marketing efforts to be more successful and found content marketing, in general, to be less challenging.

Significantly, these companies were later able to justify a higher content marketing budget that allowed them to invest in higher quality content.

What Does a Successful Content Marketing Strategy Look Like?

Your content marketing strategy should be a part of any content creation your company does.

While there are no defined "rules" for building a content marketing strategy, it's important to include these nine key components in any content marketing effort. Make sure you address all nine of them before you create content, sink considerable resources into video marketing, build a content calendar, or engage in any form of content promotion.

1. Understand your audience better with a buyer persona and research.

Every piece of content your brand develops should be created with someone in mind.

A potential customer is more likely to make a purchase from a brand they identify with. Consequently, relevant content begins and ends with that brand demonstrating a keen understanding of its audience. Valuable content gets shared via social media and starts moving up in search engine results.

Understanding your target audience includes very basic factors such as their age, gender, education level, and even income. However, it also goes deeper than that. What does your audience want? What problems are they facing? Which social media channels do they seem to prefer? How can your product or service create content to help solve those problems?

Don't just assume. You won't hit upon an effective content marketing strategy by spitballing. Research your target audience and see who's already engaged with your brand. What content type hits home consistently? Can you create content that answers felt needs?

Additionally, you can even set up simple online surveys to send via email marketing to your current audience. Build audience profiles and your content calendar based on the results. Begin to have your creative types sketch out some content marketing examples they think might be seen as in tune and responsive. However, your audience won't fit a single category. On the other hand, research can help you develop a primary "buyer persona" that fits the profiles of much of your audience, as well as several secondary personas.

2. Conduct some keyword research.

Now that you understand your main audience, place yourself in their shoes as you consider various content marketing strategies.

What are they searching for when they need your product or service? Make a list of basic keywords surrounding your brand, as well as any variations: "New York painters" and "New York painting," for example. You know your niche well, so draw from all possible terms used for what you have to offer.

Once you have these keywords, you're ready to do some digital marketing. Integrate them into your content. Here are a few reasons why.

Effective content marketing strategies keep your target audience engaged.

3. Identify effective content.

Next, you need to ask yourself, "What sort of content will my audience respond to? What content format are they looking for?" If your audience is more likely to read a blog post, would you waste time creating a video? Do they enjoy email marketing more than SMS texting? In the same vein, if they want how-to guides, will they spend hours looking at case studies that only tell them "Why?" Probably not.

Identifying the most effective content starts with identifying and listing to your audience. However, it will likely also include some trial and error as you experiment with different types of content to see what works for you and your content strategy. In short, the most common types of content include:

4. Decide on placement.

Another reason to develop an understanding of your audience is to determine where they're looking for online content.

Are they searching YouTube for the latest videos on your niche...or do they spend most of their free time browsing Instagram for great photos? Similarly, are they likely to respond to (often expensive) Facebook ads?

For content such as blogs, articles, and landing pages that lead to additional content, implementing an SEO strategy is a good place to start. However, it's also important to maintain active business pages for any relevant social media platforms. Likewise, influencer marketing can be another effective way to expand the reach of your content and build brand awareness.

5. Develop your brand's voice.

The most successful brands develop a "personality" that their audience can recognize and identify with. This is often overlooked in content strategy, but it's also one of the most important aspects of a brand.

As with every stage of your content marketing strategy, start with your buyer personas. What sort of personality will they most identify with? Is that voice friendly, formal, or silly? What sort of language and terms will they understand? Where does this crowd gather when on social media? Additionally, what do they not want to hear about?

6. This one's tough. Stay consistent.

The key to knowing whether your content strategy is effective is to stay consistent.

If you publish one post per month on Facebook, it shouldn't be surprising that your social media presence isn't growing very quickly. Develop a content schedule and stick to it.

7. Analyze the results.

Whether it's weekly, monthly, or quarterly, never leave your content without tracking the results.

This can include monitoring view and click rates, reading customer comments and responses, social media likes and shares, or even tracking eCommerce stats in relation to your content releases. Data tracking will allow you to analyze the results of your content marketing efforts and learn what's effective...and what isn't.

8. Revisit and revise.

Why track the data if you're not going to utilize the results? Collecting data by itself won't affect even one search engine. You need to leverage what you've learned.

It's a good idea to sit down with your content marketing team at least once per year, if not once per fiscal quarter, and go over your current strategy. Take note of what worked, what didn't, and where you'd like to improve. What do your website analytics reveal? Which social media campaigns received the best response? Adjust your existing content accordingly.

9. Try new things!

Research is great, but it never hurts to try something new if your content marketing timeline (and budget) allow for a little experimentation.

Jump on social media trends, try out new technology, or reach out to your audience and ask them what they'd like to see. This is where maintaining a content calendar will really pay off. Just make sure you're always tracking the results so you can revisit and potentially add something new as part of your successful content marketing strategy.

Now that you've developed and followed your content marketing strategy, it's time to go through the entire process again!

Content marketing strategy is a never-ending process that needs to be followed, analyzed, and revised on a regular basis if you want your strategy to be effective at capturing leads for your business. Engage, refine, and rework on a regular basis, and your content marketing efforts will show better results consistently.

Privacy PolicyCookie Policy
Privacy PolicyCookie Policy
linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram