Content marketing is an amazingly powerful tool when used correctly. You can use content marketing for various reasons, including generating leads, driving traffic to your website or blog, and boosting sales. This article will explore how you can use content marketing to beat your competition by discussing five different ways that it can be used for successful lead generation and sales boost. It’s time to beat your competition with content marketing.
1. Think about your content marketing through the funnel view.
Pick whatever funnel. We’re funnelling agnostic here. But you need to align your content marketing to whichever stage of the funnel. In this case, we will just stick to.
Awareness, consideration, decision.
Simply put your content simply needs to align to each stage of the funnel
Awareness – Content that explains what you do and why you do it. Builds a level of awareness and interest for your products/services. Awareness is at the top of the funnel.
Consideration – Content that focuses on telling your unique story and why they should pick you instead of your competitors. Here’s where they begin to understand your value add to their lives, careers, business or community Read More.. Decision – Content that explains how to act upon this newfound knowledge.
Decision – Content that explains how to act upon this newfound knowledge.
2. Use content marketing to boost sales.
Ensure that you have a targeted audience in mind for each piece of content you create. Build your audience by researching keywords relevant to your product/service, and finding related articles on the Internet, compiling them into an informative post and embedding links throughout it, that directs readers directly to pages or products where they want to make a purchase
3. Use content marketing to generate leads.
Most businesses want to generate more leads, to fuel their sales funnel, but most don’t know how they should do it. Here’s how: Write about things that your audience cares about. For instance, if you sell a type of car, write about the best places to drive on the weekends
Share helpful information relevant to your product or service with your audience. Offer tips and advice on how they can use your product or service more effectively. Share case studies or testimonials from customers who got real results from using your product/service.
4. Use content marketing to get social media shares & likes.
Your content is not complete till it gets social media attention. Don’t just share your content on networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest but get other people to share it by offering them incentives to do so. One of the best ways to cash in on this social media phenomenon is by hosting online contests and sweepstakes. Host online contests and giveaways are an effective way to attract new visitors to your website.
- Use content marketing to get shared on industry blogs.
If you want to grow your business and reputation in your industry, all you have to do is build a relationship with an influential influencer in the industry. Have them share your content with their audience – and that’s exactly what you’re doing by engaging them with content that has value for their readers and listeners. Also, make sure to make it easy for them by offering them an incentive to do so!
Bonus Tip
Use content marketing to improve SEO.
Content marketing when you at least consider SEO can be very impactful. What we mean by that is that there is some semblance of thought put to find out if people are even interested in what you writing.
If you do that at the bare minimum you’re already probably doing more than a majority of people who produce content.
Make sure you are writing good content to attract people to your website. Keyword density is not as important as writing something that people want to read and take action.
You could put all the keywords in the world into a block of text but if no one wants to read it chances are it’s not going to rank well.
Conclusion
It is important that you are able to measure the impact of your content marketing; after all, you are trying to reach your target audience and improve your search engine ranking in order to convert more of them into customers. The following method can help you identify the effectiveness of each piece of content used on your site.
If you do the above you’re sure to be beating out most of your clients online as a majority do not place the emphasis required on. So what are you waiting for? Grab a piece of paper and create your own content marketing strategy.
To get an in-depth guide to developing a content strategy – we have a guide here
