Category Archives: Content Strategy

Content matters at every layer of your marketing funnel

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Most of the people think that content matters only till people have reached your website. Once they are there, they are simply going to stay or go away if they don’t want to buy from you. This is like telling people to visit your brick and mortar store and then not attending to them once they have entered your store. How much care and attention you give to people who have come to your shop or office? You show them everything you have got. You employ best people (according to your capacity) who guide your prospective customers and clients through your various offerings and make sure people don’t miss out on anything important.

The same sort of attention is needed once people are on your website. Whether they are on your homepage, your landing page or one of the in-between pages in your sales and marketing funnel (by the way, do you have a logically arranged funnel on your website?) It’s very crucial that they stay focused and don’t lose track, because it is very easy to lose track on the Internet. People may suddenly move away without even realising. There are so many distractions on an average computer or mobile device that even in the midst of making a purchase people can get distracted and end up going through an endless stream of Facebook updates, realising after a couple of hours that they were trying to purchase something from a website they can no longer recall.

What exactly is marketing funnel and how your content keeps it closely focused

Or even sales funnel?

This is how a marketing funnel looks:

Quality content at every layer of your marketing funnel

In terms of content marketing, it means making people aware of your presence, or the presence of your product or service, through continuously writing, publishing and broadcasting highly relevant and quality content. The more content people get from you the more aware they become of you, your product, or your service. In the context of my own business, the more you read my content, the easier it will be for you to decide whether you want to do business with me or not in case your business needs quality content.

Provided that they are aware of your existence they may consider doing business with you and while they are considering it, they may visit your website multiple times to explore various options and read more about your offer. This is the place where you need to keep them hooked. It’s no use creating great content trying to create awareness and then losing your customers and clients once they start exploring your website.

In the “intent” stage they intend to purchase from you and now it depends on your flow. What is the purchase experience? Is it straightforward or is it replete with distractions? Is your copy engaging or totally indifferent (you have already assumed that they are going to buy). Does your content keep talking to them till the checkout form?

Eventually they purchase. Remember that even before filling up their credit card details they can get distracted or develop a doubt. Hold their hand through your content. Be with them. Keep them hooked.

Is your job done after someone has done business with you? For most of the businesses, around 40% is repeat business, that is, those who have already done business with you and have had a good experience, preferably do business with you rather than with someone else. This also holds true for my own content writing business: unless I truly screw things up, people for whom I have already written content keep on hiring me even if they contact me once or twice a year.

After they have purchased your product or service you need to keep the channels of communication running. Customer loyalty depends on 2 factors: the sort of experience they have with your product or service, and the way you keep on communicating with them and providing them all the information they need, promptly. Actually, after they have already bought from you it’s more important to pay close attention to the sort of content you’re providing them through blogging, helpful tutorials, social networking updates and more importantly, email newsletter.

Provided they are totally happy with your product and they are thrilled with your content, they become your advocates. The more advocates you have, the easier it becomes for your marketing funnel to attract new customers and leads. That’s why it’s very important to take your content seriously at every layer of your marketing funnel.

What’s better, owned content or sponsored content?

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First let’s understand the difference between owned content and sponsored content. Owned content is the content that you produce, write or get written on your own and then publish it on your website or blog (or on a third-party website or blog with complete attribution to you or your brand). Publishing a series of blog posts, articles and informative webpages under your own website or blog is a good example of owned content. Sponsored content is content that talks about you or your brand as a reference and then that content is published on a third-party website or blog. Your name or the name of your brand appearing in a New York Times articles is a good example of sponsored content. Which should be an integral part of your content marketing strategy?

I think both have their own place. When you have just started creating content you don’t have any audience. It takes time to build that audience and unless you have built the audience, you cannot leverage owned content. So what do you do? You go for sponsored content. Sponsored content helps you build audience while you’re creating your own content.

Besides, sometimes you want to reach an audience that doesn’t directly come to your blog or website no matter how much owned content you have. Sponsored content helps you achieve that.

Do you stop investing in sponsored content when you have created a considerable inventory of owned content? Depends on your marketing strategy. Do you want to reach out to a diversified audience? Or are you simply happy with the sort of people coming to your website or blog at the moment?

Benefits of investing in owned content

  • Gives your brand its own unique content
  • Strengthens brand identity
  • Prospective customers and clients don’t have to scour the web in order to find content relevant to your product or service
  • Your website or blog becomes a resource hub – you give people a reason to come to your website or blog repeatedly, or refer your links to the family and friends, or share your links on social media and social networking websites
  • You generate more targeted traffic that can give you more leads, sales and even repeat sales
  • As a personal brand you become an authority figure

Benefits of investing in sponsored content

  • You can target bigger audience from the word go (although it’s not recommended to go for sponsored content from the word go because the exposure will go waste if you have got nothing substantial to offer on your own website or blog)
  • You can build an audience for your brand much faster
  • You increase respect among your own audience by appearing on reputed publications (the New York Times example, for instance)
  • You can leverage the reach of well-established blogs and websites

Why 86% of B2B marketers use content marketing?

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In an annual study by the Content Marketing Institute titled “2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends” 86% B2B marketers are using content marketing to promote their businesses. The online survey was conducted on 1800 North American B2B marketers, as explained in this Ad Age blog post. Although in this previous blog post of mine you must have read that 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing one way or another. The differences of percentages doesn’t really matter, what matters is, why it is important for this segment of the market to rely on content rather than conventional advertising models. The explanation depends on from where you look at it.

I write content for a living but without hesitation I can say content marketing no longer means creating informative articles and blog posts, although a major chunk of content is written. Content these days can exist in multiple formats including video, audio and graphic, aside from textual. People are consuming content all the time in one form or another. Take for instance social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. All the time people are posting new updates. They are posting images, videos, sounds and of course text updates. This is content. Without this content these social networking websites have no reason to exist.

Content like this has turned into a medium. Even the search results on Google are examples of content, although it is curated content rather than generated content. But it is content. Since people are constantly consuming this content, rather than existing as a random entity, it has turned into a medium and whenever there is a medium, businesses find out a way to use it for advertising, marketing and promotion. But that’s not the point, the point of this blog post is, why more and more B2B marketers prefer content marketing over conventional marketing?

Is content easier to create and promote? Once it used to be easier to create and promote content but with millions of blog posts and articles being churned out on a weekly basis, this no longer remains the case. It’s not that suddenly there is lots of good content; simply, there is lots of content and it becomes difficult for people to reach what may be useful to them. Nonetheless, whether one likes it or not, without content you don’t exist on the Internet. This is one reason why B2B marketers cannot help using content for marketing.

Another reason is, B2B transactions involve higher stakes in terms of monetary transactions and effort required compared to B2C. Is it easier for you to purchase a single mobile phone from an online retailer or purchase 2000 mobile phones from a manufacturer for your own retail store? Before purchasing those 2000 mobile phones you will need to research and for this research you’re going to have to go through lots of content not just on the manufacturer’s website but also other places. Obviously the manufacturer needs to convince you that there is a market for his product and how your bottom line can be improved by selling the phone from your own retail store.

My content writing services can also be termed as B2B because it’s mostly business owners who approach me to get content written for their websites so that they can make more sales. Although they may not be spending thousands of dollars for my services, my services are critical for their business. So they need to do some research. They carefully need to read through various sections on my website to make sure that they are hiring the right content writer for their business. It’s not just the cost but also the future of the business that depends on a B2B transaction and that is why more and more B2B marketers are using content to strengthen their brand and expand their presence on the Internet.

Does keyword-rich content help you improve your SEO?

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“SEO content” is still a buzzword among content writers and content creators. What does it exactly mean? Ideally it means your content should help you improve your search engine rankings so you should write it in a manner that the search engines like Google find it easier to index and rank for your chosen keywords. Nothing wrong in that, but some people take it way too seriously. But it’s not their fault, many of the tactics being considered obsolete these days definitely worked a year or so ago. For instance, using your target keywords in your content was a definite yes-yes while writing webpages, blog posts and articles. Plugins and add-ons like Scribe SEO still recommend placing a certain number of your relevant keywords at strategic places. For instance, if I’m writing about my professional content writing services then this expression plus its various combinations must appear on the link and this is logical. Otherwise how would you tell the search engine to even consider your webpage for these terms?

Google still uses keywords these days but more than focusing on the exact keywords its algorithm uses something called Latent Semantic Indexing. The expression sounds ominous, but what it means is, if I write something on the topic of business content writing services and if it ranks well, it should also automatically rank well for professional content writing services because the algorithm may find identical patterns between the two words: professional and business. It is the way we use language in the normal world. There are many words who may be similar or identical and more or less convey the same meaning. The method is used to extract the meaning of the text you have written rather than simply analysing the words you have used.

So what about using keywords in your title, headlines, bulleted lists and other places? There is no reason why you shouldn’t use them, especially in titles and headlines, but there should be no compulsion also. Don’t use them unnecessarily. Create your title in such a manner that it conveys the core message of your content and prompts people to come to your website but you don’t need to stuff it with your keywords.

SEO content in the new context is more about creating meaningful, useful content. In fact I have written this multiple times on my website as well as my blog that when you are creating good, useful content you are actually creating SEO content. Focus on the quality, stick to a routine, use the language your target audience uses and make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content and most of your SEO job is done.