By now, we all know and love the mantra that “content is king”, but to what extent does your own marketing strategy honor it? With Google’s updates, algorithm changes, and our online habits continuously altering, creating appealing content has become vital for brands to survive, let alone be considered industry leaders.
To put it in perspective, over 70% of businesses that use content marketing have the metrics to prove how their strategy boosted their customer engagement rates as well as their leads. Simply, everything you post online, from your social media tidbits, all the way to your lengthy articles, and stunning imagery all shape the decision-making process of your audience. Ultimately, your content will be the first and final part of your brand presentation to tip the scales in your favor when the time comes to click “buy” on your website.
Know your audience
Being everywhere for all the wrong reasons is as detrimental as being nowhere on the digital map. Every brand needs a purpose-driven strategy that seeks out the right audience, analyzes their behavior, and adapts their marketing efforts accordingly.
If your audience is mostly on Twitter, then what are the benefits of focusing on LinkedIn? Maybe they like videos, not blogs, or memes, and not regular images. The content creation process comes with a steep learning curve, and the sooner you embrace it, the easier it will be for you to find your own “edge”. Because defining your tone of voice, posting at the right time, and keeping your audience on their toes are all as important as finding the right media.
Educate, don’t just sell
We’ve had a love-hate relationship with ads ever since they came to be, but utilizing such marketing gimmicks requires expertise many young companies lack. It’s not just the millennials who dislike this ancient method, it’s pretty much everyone who uses the digital world to do shopping or research. They like a clean, uninterrupted experience with no intrusions. Sure, nowadays, we mostly get exposed to selected ads due to smart search engines, so the type of ads we’re exposed to is at least moderated to an extent.
That is why there should be a strong emphasis on educating with your content. Whether it’s your blogs, videos, infographics, or images, your customers have problems they’d like you to solve. After all, isn’t that why you’re here? Find their weak links and offer them practical solutions, and they’ll love you for it.
Aim to engage
Experienced marketers know that it’s all connected – the website’s loading speed, the navigational simplicity, the content distribution. They all play into a single impression that will either inspire your visitors to stay, or urge them to leave. With that in mind, focusing on ecommerce website development is as crucial as perfecting your tone of voice, or choosing the right visual material. Precisely because you want your visitors to make a purchase, you’ll need to give them all the right reasons to do so.
This is where your unique storytelling comes to shine paired with a seamless experience, because they cannot have a single second to wonder why the page is so slow, or get annoyed by an auto-play video on the home page.
Inspire user-generated content
Getting more traction often means relinquishing some of your control. Since your brand is an entity in the making, your customers are the secret ingredient to a memorable experience. They are the ones who shape your reputation with how they perceive, rate, and utilize your brand. So, why not make the most of this natural process, and let them lead the way?
By encouraging reviews, rewarding their own creativity, inspiring comments, and sparking conversations, you bring your brand to life through interaction. Your content should never aim to talk at the customer, but rather talk with them. If they are happy to share their thoughts, review your service or product, and make it public, you’ll turn them into influencers who spontaneously bring you more traffic. Plus, you’ve earned it.
Diversify
People no longer go online merely to get an address or learn something useful, even though these still matter. They want to laugh, be mesmerized, inspired, surprised, or motivated, because the digital world has become deeply intertwined with our offline lives. It has become a part of our identity, and a place where we live and breathe just like we do offline.
In order for your content to be able to evoke such a vivid palette of emotions, you’ll need equally vivid content. Diversity with purpose is the answer to your content conundrum: find the types of content your audience responds to, and start brainstorming. Play with videos, background music, photography, quotes, memes, blogs, share content from other relevant people in the industry, ask questions, start contests, organize online charity campaigns, write to your heart’s content – as long as it’s what they want to see.
Emma is a digital marketer and blogger from Sydney. After getting a marketing degree she started working with Australian startups on business and marketing development. Emma writes for many relevant, industry related online publications and does a job of an Executive Editor at Bizzmark blog and a guest lecturer at Melbourne University. Interested in marketing, startups and latest business trends.
The post Doubling Down on Digital Media: How to Create Content That Increases Your Website Conversions appeared first on Digital Media News & Training.
No comments:
Post a Comment