Content marketing is largely successful at generating new leads and attracting new customers for your business. Full 70% of companies say they invest in content marketing strategies, and
60% say that content marketing is very or extremely important to your overall business strategy.
However, successful content marketing requires more than just starting a blog and posting on social media. You need an effective strategy that ties all of your content marketing efforts together, and that is far more difficult. A lot of marketers are still not using it efficiently. One study reports that only 23% of marketers agreed that they manage to manage content across the company.
If you are part of the remaining 77%, do not panic. We have some important tips for improving your content marketing strategy.
You have set up your blog and you post regularly, but you do just don't see the results they were hoping for. It's not necessarily because your content is weak. You may forget to optimize for SEO.
Only 30% of small businesses have an SEO optimization strategy, which means that more than two thirds neglect this important marketing tool. SEO is critical to getting your blog to rank high in search engine results for certain queries and terms and to helping more people discover your content.
In a guide to starting a blog Neil Patel explains many of his tips on how to increase your blog traffic and generate significant income including the need to optimize for SEO. Neil recommends using the Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress, setting up permalinks, and other useful tips.
Your content is amazing, people love to read your blogs and watch videos, but you don't see any impact on that Sales. If this sounds familiar, it's probably because you need a content marketing funnel .
It is very rare for someone to read a blog, social media post, or watch a video and then immediately make a purchase. In general, people want to learn more, follow your brand on social media, or read a few more blogs while they make up their minds. 65% of consumers are more likely to shop for more than a month from brands they follow on social media and in the B2B world the average shopper visits 5.1 Sources of Information before you buy.
Using a funnel, you can customize your content so that these leads move from one piece of content to another until they are ready for purchase are. It's called a funnel because you can attract a lot of traffic to begin with. However, then the number of leads will decrease as they move down the funnel. That's not a bad thing. While it would be nice if all the throngs of people who visit your blog became paying customers, it isn't realistic. Not everyone who hits your blog is looking for your products or ready to buy.
While it's important to post on social media regularly, it's your relationship with customers that leads you to want to Return to your company. You can't have a relationship with only one side talking. So you have to listen to what your target market is saying instead of yelling into a void. Customers want you to reply to their posts . 61% of consumers agree that getting a response from a brand after providing feedback on social media is very or extremely important.
Social media listening tools help you track public opinion, spot emerging trends in your industry, and understand your customers so you can generate the content they really want to consume. 54% of people will stop following you if they think your content is not relevant and 34% will leave if it's boring. Social media listening means that you can come up with more relevant and engaging topics that will pique your followers' interest.
Content marketers say their main secret to success is their ability to understand and connect with their audience's interests, needs, and values. Social listening helps immensely.
Many marketers are nervous about marketing data, especially if their primary strength is content creation. 20% say they are unsure how to measure the impact of their social media and 59% are fighting to track the leadership of executives. But that's not a reason to give up.
If you don't measure it, you can't improve it. It's important to track the success of your content marketing funnel, social media posts, and more to learn what types of content are most popular, what topics are best for each stage of the funnel, and for how long the headline should take time to draw readers, etc. With the right marketing tools like Google Analytics, Hubspot or BuzzSumo, you can capture, track how consumers are reacting to your content and analyze them for useful insights.
Video is the leading type of content. 68% of marketers say that video and other visual content is very important or critical to their marketing strategy. Video consistently outperforms other content types. Hence, it's not surprising that marketers produce more video than any other content. The rise of TikTok, a pure video platform alone, underscores the demand. Only 14.5% of companies do not publish video content and it is hard to believe that the number could be that high.
It is clear that you need to include video in your content marketing strategy. There are many different formats like Instagram and Facebook Stories that use short video snippets to tell a story. Live video on social media; and YouTube videos. Video content can be in behind-the-scenes style or as guides for information and more.
Content marketing can attract, convert, loyal customers and in power holding your business for more sales and higher profits. If you create a content marketing funnel that includes social listening, video content, and SEO optimization for your blog, use and data to optimize your strategy, you will soon get results for your small business see business.
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