Content marketing still remains one of the most cost effective
marketing techniques that is widely adopted by most of the businesses
worldwide.
Nearly all -- 93 percent -- of B2B companies rely
upon content marketing for demand generation and brand building. Startups
already know the potential that content marketing holds for them. However, that
power factor still remains missing that can bring in more customers and retain
the existing ones.
Here
are nine effective ways to boost your existing content marketing strategy.
1. Create content based on user
persona
Persona
is a fictional representation of your ideal audience. You need to answer the
basic question of who you are writing for. That’s before you start preparing
content. If you have an idea of your target audience then it becomes easier for
you to prepare content.
Document your persona using elements like:
--
Age group.
--
Gender.
--
Likes/Dislikes.
--The
pain points and how your content can solve the problem.
--
Is the target a decision maker?
--
Which device do they use to access information?
--
When do they prefer to read?
--
Are they active on social media?
--
Which social channels do they prefer and at what time?
--
Do they enjoy watching videos?
--
Which brands do they follow and why do they follow them?
--
What influences them to share content?
2. Identify the crucial micro
moments.
As
a business, you should remain aware of the micro moments that are bringing in
and converting the people.
Catch your audience’s attention follow the
below-given suggestions:
-- Identify
the Micro-Moments that Matter the Most to Your Business: Whether
that is to draw customers’ attention to your website or to buy your product
online, what are the micro-moments you have to prevail upon?
-- Convey
on needs at the time: Streamline your content to fit these moments
and also make sure that information is bite-sized, simple to consume and
visually inspiring.
-- Measure Results: The key to any marketing
activity is to evaluate the outcomes and choose whether the outcome was worth
the time and cash.
3. Prepare a solid layout for the content using
Gestalt principles
The
use of Gestalt principles helps to create great designs. Designs need to be
coherent, associated and bound together.
Here are prominent Gestalt principles that
you should use for your content layout:
-- Proximity: Proximity
can make your images stronger by gathering your subjects together with a goal.
You should make use of proper spaces in order to hold the attention of the
visitors and properly arrange the text into one group, appropriately spacing it
from the CTA on your site page.
-- Similarity: Similarity
occurs when shapes, colors, sizes or objects look enough similar to be
perceived as a group or pattern in the viewer’s mind.
When
you use all these components in your images it gives your viewers a feeling
of rhythm and will mean harmony.
-- Continuation: You
should make use of text and images to manipulate the direction in which the
visitor will look.
This
could be awesome for your landing pages. Having flow can grab your audience’s
attention right to the call to action.
-- Closure: One of
the approaches to keep the viewer associated with the images is to have them
finish a picture, shape, or an idea.
By
having the viewer work at filling in the missing pieces in an image, will turn
them into an active applicant, and they will also stick for a long time taking
a look at your site images.
-- Simplicity: This is
also an important concept that you can follow in your design, as it's important
to keep your website pages clutter free with a specific goal to streamline the
procedures leading to transformation
-- Figure/ground: It
basically refers to the relationship between an object and its environments.
It's important that you should make a clear difference between the figure and
the ground.
You
need to take this principle into consideration in order to create beautiful
graphics and if you want to come up with exclusive logos.
4. Don’t ignore aesthetics
Aesthetics
simple means having visually appealing content. The attention span of readers
comprises of a few seconds and you need to make an instant impact that
persuades the reader to take an action.
An
aesthetic design helps to attract more attention, improve design usability,
enhance perceive credibility and influence the brand choice.
Here is how you can make your content
visually more appealing:
--
Make your content easy to scan and use bullet points and numbering wherever
needed.
--
Use responsive design and avoid grammatical mistakes.
--
Add relevant images and videos that explain your content well.
--
Use proper contextual links and similar posts feature in order to make it
easier for the readers to click on the links. This will help to reduce the
bounce rate and improve the overall time on page.
--
Adopt an easy navigation that is mobile friendly and use effective CTAs that match
the main theme.
5. Leverage the power of content curation
Content
curation will help you to save time and produce lots of content in order to
generate indirect traffic and conversions.
Major benefits of content curation include:
--
Allows you to attract a huge amount of traffic.
--
You can create content really fast so this allows you to produce more content
for increased social sharing.
--
Enhances your brand identity by strengthening and broadcasting your brand
values.
--
Helps you compete effectively and efficiently, and also offer you with unique
benefits critical in today’s market.
You
can use tools like Scoop.it to
curate content and reach the masses. It is easy to use and its premium
subscription which starts at $11 a year comes with more features such as the
ability to customize Scoop.it, make use of analytics as well as to distribute
an email newsletter.
6. Adopt a storytelling approach
It
is one of the most powerful ways of attracting audience’s attention. It has the
power to form a personal relationship with your audience and also helps you in
building an attractive and friendly platform for you and your brand.
Follow the below given points to improve storytelling while
building your brand:
--
Know about your audience is the first step you need to consider when creating a
story. You have five minutes to grab your audience’s attention while telling
your story in the right place, time as well as in the right context.
--
Make use of various platforms and channels in telling stories to your readers,
which will help you in making your brand messages more appropriate.
--
Be specific in telling a story and also support your videos with micro moments,
as it will help your brand to connect at a much higher level with your
audience.
--
Be authentic, as original is better. Don’t try to polish things in the hope
that it will look pleasant to your audience, doing this can sometimes have the
adverse result.
--
Make it more actionable as it will help your audience to take immediate action.
7. Use the right tools to save time and resources
Hard
working content marketers do all the work themselves while smart ones make use
of tools!
If
your content is facing publishing and distribution related problems then you
can use this tool. It will help you in achieving the awareness for your content
and also your brand on authoritative sites as well.
This
tool provides you with great customer support and it has many tools that you
can use for monitoring and generating an effective blog posts and landing
pages.
HubSpot
has social media analytics and message-scheduling capabilities by which your
content can flawlessly publish to social media platforms after you finish
creating your content.
This
tool will help you in telling the performance of your content and breaks down
that performance by numerous metrics through domains, keywords etc. You can use
it free for the first five searches and can find out how much it is helpful for
your content marketing strategy.
By using this tool you can also find out which
content is being shared the most.
8. Run PPC ads on selected platforms
PPC
still remains one of the most popular and highly effective choices when it
comes to lead generation. Especially for startups where it is necessary to
raise up the revenue, you need immediate results. PPC is an ideal way to grab
more clicks in no time and improve your ROI.
Writing
attractive and persuasive PPC ad copy will also help you in grabbing the
attention of your audience to click on your content.
Use
platforms like Reddit, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn or any other platform whose
demographics matches the demographics of your target audience.
Make
use of orient’s model when designing image ads. If your ad contains images of
people, place them toward your CTA and avoid positioning your models towards
the viewer as those front-facing images will attract attention toward the
model, rather than the essential parts of your ad.
9. Take the help of micro influencers
Micro
influencers are an ideal target community for startups because they can be
reached easily. Micro influencers can be anyone from a blogger to a niche
expert who have a loyal following of people. If you can convince such micro
influencers to promote your brand then you have hit the jackpot!
Micro-influencers can help you in:
-- Increase engagement: Micro-influencer
can bring your brands and products in front of the audience.
-- Attract higher quality leads: Working
with micro-influencers also fosters higher-quality leads since they apply their
impact in particular niches. Because of this specificity, the leads you produce
from these micro-influencers will be more focused on. The outcome is a higher
number of leads who are already interested in what you offer.
Follow the above given ways in order to drive high-quality
traffic, increase conversions and to retain customers coming back for more.
Also,
it’s important that you should calculate the ROI on a regular basis in order to
identify whether your money and efforts are yielding the proper results or not.
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