Inbound Marketing revolves around content. On our journey of inbound marketing, we’ve covered much about content. Although your business may serve the technology, manufacturing or electronics sector, content still plays an essential part of your Inbound Marketing campaigns.
Having said that, it can be elusive to measure the Return On Income (ROI) on content. A new manufacturing process or the latest investment to your company producing a particular range of products may be clear to see and track ROI. But content lacks this level of luxury. If you find yourself spending a lot on content but have nothing to show for it, we have seven reasons why this may be so.
What are you measuring?
A good place to start is to understand the type of value your content delivers. Do you check where users come from or how they interact with your content? If you are not doing this, there is a high chance that you are also overlooking key factors like how many times the content is shared. Or even how many new contacts have been generated by the content. Content will indeed produce varying data. Some content will get high traffic but generate fewer leads, whiles others might receive little traffic but are newsworthy. The figures will give clear indications if your content is significant to your audience or hits its target perfectly. Put in the effort to measure key performance indicators regularly and use this to steer your content strategy going forward.
Know your goals
At this point on your inbound marketing journey, you know what you want out of content. Being in tune with your goals not only gives you a benchmark to compare but also to know if you are achieving your ROI.
As a firm, prioritise the goals you wish to achieve. It may be daunting to decide, especially if your goal is multi-departmental. However, doing this will allow you to determine what actions will ultimately guide you to your objectives.
Are you just blogging?
One popular means of producing content is through blogs. From their infancy as a personal journal, blogs have advanced as an influential tool for business. However, it shouldn’t be the only arsenal in your content strategy. Basing your content strategy solely around blogging is naïve at best. Whiles blogging is a great content strategy, it’s not sufficient by itself to deliver significant ROI.
To reach the masses of your audience, you can make use of multi-media and multi-platforms. This need not be extra work on your part. It is the case of altering existing contents to different form. You can group similar blog post into an ebook and deliver it to your visitors.
Be a thought leader with your content
Your content online is an online representation of your brand. Hence it should be in alignment with your company’s ethos and value. When visitors have faith and value in your brand, chances are they will also have faith towards your contents. Therefore it’s imperative to tie your content offering to your business persona. Providing advice on how to lengthen the life span of a technical device or electronic equipment, for example could mean that you gain a reputation as a thought leader in your sector. With Inbound Marketing, the content you develop must have a purpose. Regardless of what form the content takes, it must have an aim, be it to turn visitors into customers, lead nurture, or simply to educate. To achieve this, one essential piece of the puzzle is to utilise the Call To Action (CTA) button.
With a CTA button, you encourage visitors to exchange their contact details for content you have, be it a white paper or an ebook. Many businesses overlook the importance of having a CTA button, meaning they miss out on capturing leads from their content. In it simplest form, CTA is a vital marketing tool to augment lead generation. Neglect it at your peril.
Consistency is key
The content you publish should be a coherent and regular activity of your marketing efforts. Without a plan that goes with updating contents, it can easily go off course and become sporadic, losing valuable momentum. This can cost you not just visitors but also money.
One technique to use to your advantage is an editorial calendar. This gives you an overview of what you post, when you post it and the platform you post it on. What’s more, you can also keep track of important events in your industry like, network events and expos.
Increase Traffic
Search Engine Optimisation is crucial for visibility across the web. Ranking well on a search engine ensures exposure, which in turn drives traffic to your site. Your content must contain the targeted keyword of your targeted audience. Contents that include targeted keywords and phrases don’t just increase visitors to your site, but it ensures that you are attracting the right traffic. You can build a list of keywords to use through research. The quality of your keyword list will ensure that you get the targeted visitors that translate to more quality leads. The more leads, the higher the percentage of making a sale.
