9 Ways Startups Can Increase ROI From Their Content Marketing Strategy

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?

I will also recommend you to read the buying process map before you prepare the content calendar.

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.

Recognizing the most critical micro moments for your brand is an art. It implies making sense of why individuals turn to mobile and when your brand can be generally useful.

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!

Outbrain

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.

HubSpot

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.

BuzzSumo

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.

In order to rank high in search and grab your customer's attention, ensure that your content should be of high quality,relevant as well as SEO-ready.

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.

-- Cultivates trust: Micro-influencers can help your customers in developing a high level of trusts for your brand. You can find a list of top influencer marketing platforms here.

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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Broadband Can Help Achieve Sustainable Development Goals

DURBAN - A report released by the United Nations (UN) Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development says that broadband will play an important role in development.

According to the report broadband technologies today are a driving significant transformation in lots of sectors that are related to development such as health, food security, financial inclusion and education.

Therefore broadband will play a key role in achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are:
No Poverty
Zero Hunger
Good Health and Well Being
Quality Education
Gender Equality
Clean Water and Sanitation
Affordable and Clean Energy
Decent Work and Economic Growth
Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
Reduced Inequalities
Sustainable Cities and Communities
Responsible Consumption and Production
Climate Action
Life Below Water
Life on Land
Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Partnerships for the Goals
Digital technology and ICTs (information communication technology) offer big opportunities to help enhance the lives of people and improve development results. They also help achieve three of the goals mentioned above.

The report details the many ways that technology and ICTs are improving food security and putting an end to hunger; helping to improve health and well being and securing quality education that is inclusive for everyone.

Technology related to broadband are effective tools to promote nutrition including improving agriculture systems, bettering flexibility of food systems that could be affected by the economy or the climate and helping to improve knowledge of food choices.

Health in relation to technology have been important to improve the health of people in the past two decades. Now there has been a shift from making eHealth a small part of healthcare to making it central to strategic health planning. Broadband can serve as the support for future health systems by providing national eHealth strategies.

Broadband and ICT’s can be used in health sector to train health professionals through e-learning, connect distant communities with clinics and introduce electronic medical records.

Education in association with broadband can be used to boost education systems, increase access to information and drive learning.

The report states that ICT’s must be implemented into planning, curriculum, teacher training and schools.

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Foundation Harps on Digital Information Literacy

THE Gani Adams Foundations (GAF) has joined the world to celebrate the World Literacy Day.

Fifty-one years ago, United Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)  proclaimed September 8 as International Literacy Day to mobilise the international community to promote literacy as an instrument for empowerment.

The Osun Hall of the Lagos Airport Hotel, Ikeja venue of the event, was filled with intellectuals, cultural enthusiasts, media practitioners, teachers and pupils who lent their voices to the importance of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in the 20th century.

GAF’s Chairman/Managing Director, Otunba Gani Adams, who was excited with this year’s theme: ‘Literacy in the digital world’, underscored the need for Africans to shift from ‘analogue operation’.
In her lecture titled: ‘Literacy in a digital world’, Dr Kemi Ojemoghaat of the Department of Adult Education, University of Lagos (UNILAG), described digital literacy as a sine qua non to living, adding that technology dictates communication and interaction within mankind.

She called on the government to make digital literacy affordable, and create a link between the teaching of ICT in schools and industries.

She said: “A survey conducted by Research ICT Africa in 2011, disclosed that 70 per cent of non- internet users in Nigeria say affordability is the main reason for not using the internet. The majority of internet users in Nigeria access it exclusively using mobile devices. Smart phones and tablets have become very popular in Nigeria.

“Nevertheless, a mobile broadband cost is high for most people in a country like Nigeria where low per capita incomes subsists.’’

She continued: “The ICT curriculum does not provide the skills that industry value. Despite support from the government, many ICT teachers still do not have the qualifications or knowledge to teach the computing curriculum. Given the pace of technological advances, it will always be a challenge for schools to keep up with the latest innovations.”

A retired professor of African Philosophy at UNILAG, Sophie Oluwole, lamented the loss of Yoruba oral tradition, which according to her, forms the bedrock of knowledge acquisition.
Ifa, Oluwole explained, is a warehouse of knowledge, which cuts across all disciplines including ICT, if acquired.

“If Ifa has over 256 odu and yet our fore fathers without the knowledge of reading and writing, were able to not only memorise, but also passed same to the next generation. Unfortunately, the influence of modern religions have made those practice look fetish or Satanic to an average Yoruba. But I can tell you that Ifa is the bedrock of intellectual knowledge which can be learned to derive new inspirations in engineering, science,and ICT, just name it.”

Oluwole said it was not too late for Nigeria to ape Asian countries, such as Japan, China, and Malaysia, which have attained technological advancement through adoption of their mother tongue as official languages.

Adams said he was praised the UN for the choice of the theme.

“I love this year’s theme,” he said.

“Truth is, the world is going digital and the United Nations through the theme, is challenging us to drastically reduce our analogue way of doing things.

“Some developed societies no longer conduct their activities manually. Even some corporate bodies and institutions are going digital. Some conduct paperless meetings. This reduces work load or hauling of papers and files from one office to another.

“For instance, the mobile phones we use have several applications beyond mere making and receiving calls; unfortunately, most of us only use it to make calls, and failing to utilise other apps for knowledge possession.”

Adams said GAF had identified with the UN through propagating, organising interactive sessions and giving educational materials to schools.

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