Content is gaining a lot of importance in marketing strategies. Marketers are looking for ways to turn brands into top-quality producers of content and are developing required skills in that direction.
Content marketing begins at the top of any funnel by providing crucial and required information to searchers that may not be quite ready to make any purchase. Marketers now need to research and create in-depth customer personas. If you are one such marketer then you need to begin writing content, based upon those personas. A good idea is to write all that you can and then begin editing.
In case you are not confident about your writing skills then you can always outsource this exercise to experts. A few well-known names in the outsourcing market are Zerys, Writers Access, Textbroker, and Skyword. Two quick tips to anyway get a head start in content promotion are to ensure optimization of your title tag and to link your content through Google Authorship.
Promoting your content through blogs and on social media is now mandatory. However, you need a specific strategy to ensure perfect implementation that saves time, money, and energy. You must set guidelines to develop and publish content, monitor the entire campaign, and most importantly, collect audience feedback to continually deliver as per their needs.
You can use several tools to implement and track the above strategy such as the Approval Workflow plugin in case you use WordPress, Kapost.com or even Google Docs if you want a free tool. You will need a content team made up of bloggers that are creative and professional, and possess expertise in presenting any topic in a natural manner.
You must also understand that you cannot squeeze out high-quality content from writers that are paid lowly rates for their efforts. You may end up paying more for experienced and talented writers, but will definitely achieve your campaign aim only by sticking with such professional writers. In addition, you need to guide your content team by providing them precise information of your needs as well as tools required to complete the job within the pre-determined time limit.
Finally, you need to calculate the return on your content marketing efforts. Even though the bottom of the funnel will be always more profitable than the top, you can still calculate ROI based on a few factors. You can measure conversions received through referral traffic from your blogs. In addition, you can calculate the percentage of that traffic as compared to the overall traffic as well as multiply the total conversions with blog percentage.
You may not have an accurate figure, but you will at least learn about the direction of your ROI. Using the above proven tips to create and market your content will definitely provide direct and indirect results. Direct results include bringing in additional web-traffic and conversions, while indirect benefits include transforming your business, its products and/or services, and your website/websites into a highly trusted brand over time.