Content marketing is a tricky world to navigate. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, content is no longer king, it’s the entire universe. You must be clever in your content marketing strategy as it has the power to attract or seriously deter potential customers from your business. Prior to considering the following content marketing tactics to acquire new customers, you first need to make sure that you’re in control of your library of digital assets. Without an organized library of digital assets, you can’t effectively create content. Since 1988, we’ve been building digital asset management software to ensure that when you’re launching new campaigns, and implementing new lead generation strategies, finding the right content for the cause is not holding you back. Once you’ve got your creative content workflows in order, it’s time to start with a content marketing strategy to attract the right people.
Here are seven content marketing tactics designed to help you acquire new customers; turning content into revenue.
1. Implement Evergreen Content to Convert Leads into Sales
Yes, we live in a fast-paced, content-saturated digital world where the shelf-life of content is growing shorter and shorter. Because of this, it’s more important than ever to create content that is evergreen. This is content that works all year round and is interesting and relatable to the entirety of your target market. Timely content or content that speaks to a particular season or festivity is great and holds a role in the overall content marketing strategy. However, be sure to place an emphasis on content that prospects and customers can keep coming back to. This content can be a mix of downloadables, white papers, infographics, eBooks, video content, and templates. Let your customers know that you know what you’re talking about and position your brand as a thought leader within your industry. This will help to build a dependable and trustworthy reputation for your brand which is hugely influential when attracting the right people.
Distributing your content across multiple marketing channels is also another large piece of this puzzle. Often, digital marketers believe social media to be the end all be all of content distribution, but this is not always the case. Social media should be utilized as a distribution channel for short-form and fun content that really cultivates the personal side of your brand. For example, people log on to Instagram to see other people, not advertisements but that doesn’t mean it can’t be leveraged as a marketing platform. In the case of Instagram, brands are able to humanize themselves with the curation of an Instagram feed, as well as organically integrate advertisements through the use of influencer marketing and retargeted advertisements. Social media is just one of the pieces of the puzzle and there’s so many other channels to explore! By making your content easily accessible to both prospects and customers, you are encouraging them to come back and reference your pieces. Consider housing all of your content under one tab on your website, and include a search function so that visitors can easily navigate to the pieces of content that are of most interest to them. Through your content and the strategic use of CTA’s and forms, you can give your site visitors more opportunities to convert into leads or customers online.
2. Optimize your Content to Acquire Customers Using Digital Asset Management
Firstly, equip yourself with the tools you need for your team to act with a data-driven mindset. Your content is meant to attract and engage potential and current consumers and equip them with information about your business’s offerings. For example, a DAM system is a valuable tool which not only houses digital assets but also allows users to track the performance of different pieces of content, and even different versions of one piece of content. Secondly, learn to read that data. What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for a successful piece of content? Is it views? Clicks? Engagement? Shares? Once you’ve identified these KPI’s you’re in a better position to understand what pieces of your content are performing well. Your DAM system can also help you articulate the data with custom reporting and performance metrics for your content. It’s important to identify what success looks like for your business, and then optimize your content to facilitate that success. Making your content work for you as an extension of your brand and another point of connection with your target market is highly valuable. Once you’ve done that, you’re more likely to acquire new customers with content they are proven to value, rather than shooting in the dark.
3. Introduce Conversational Marketing to Relate to Your Customers
Conversational marketing is vital when it comes to creating content and converting customers. But, what is conversational marketing? Any form of written content is an opportunity to speak using your brand voice, personalizing your brand and ultimately relating to the potential consumer. However, what conversational marketing truly is, is an exchange between a brand and a potential customer: a conversation. This can happen via social media, it can happen on site, through your blog comments, via chatbots, any written touch points you have with a potential customer. Customers want to interact with the brands where they spend their money. There are many ways to convey this conversational attitude through your marketing efforts. One of the easiest ways is through writing content pieces in a more casual, familiar, and friendly tone. Tone of voice and linguistics are hugely important in written content. Keeping a consistent brand voice is vital to building a successful brand, but be sure that this voice is friendly and invites the reader to interact and start a conversation. Leveraging conversational marketing tactics will also build trust between your brand and the consumer. If the consumer feels like they are a part of the conversation, and are a priority to the brand, they are much more likely to convert.
4. Implement an SEO Strategy to Attract Potential Customers
For all of the content that you create, it’s going nowhere if you don’t leverage with SEO tactics at the top of mind; especially when it comes to onsite content and your blog. You want to be ranking for search terms that your customers are commonly searching for, you want to be found via a mixture of branded and non-branded searches. You want to get your content in front of the right people and having a clear SEO strategy will increase your brand visibility. Here are a few SEO best practices to weave into the next blog post you write:
- Pick a keyword or phrase and make sure to use that (where appropriate) throughout
- Place your keywords in your headings and subheadings
- Link internally to other relevant pages on your website, especially in the first half of the content piece
- DON’T stuff your keywords. For example, don’t get to the end of your blog and panic by stuffing a keyword in numerous times in one paragraph, this will actually be a detriment to your blog.
- Make sure your metadata and Image Data is optimized to involve keywords or synonyms of them.
- Find other relevant domains to link through to your blog using “anchor text” that describes what your blog is about.
- Be sure that your font sizes are uniform (H1, H2, etc.)
SEO is certainly a marathon, not a sprint and it goes hand in hand with our first tactic of producing evergreen content. You want to create content that is searchable and ranks in Google over a period of time. These top tips are in no way the end all be all of any blog but they’ll certainly get you on your way to optimizing your content if you’re new to the world of SEO, and will ultimately help you to acquire relevant site visitors and begin converting them. Additionally, optimizing your website for mobile devices is something that will undoubtedly increase your SEO ranking, and website traffic. Mobile devices account for approximately 50% of web traffic worldwide, so if your site isn’t already responsive to mobile devices, now is the time to optimize.
5. Give a Chance for Your Site Visitors to Convert into Customers
Attracting site visitors and providing them with content that’s relevant and informative is a huge piece of the puzzle, however if you don’t offer them a chance to convert, they’ll never progress through your sales funnel. These conversion opportunities don’t have to be giant red buttons that exclaim: BUY NOW! Rather they should be strategically placed opportunities for a potential consumer to connect with your brand in some way. Whether that be to get in contact with a sales representative, schedule a demo of a product, or download a piece of content. For example, if you’re a SaaS company that wants to offer your product as a solution to a problem that you’ve recently written about on your blog, then you’d be missing out on a vital opportunity to sell your product if you didn’t include a CTA within that post. Providing consumers with opportunities to connect further with your brand is a fool-proof way to increase brand loyalty. The more conversations you can have with your target buyers, the more you will understand them and what touchpoints to engage them at. However, trust in your content and that it’s written well enough to be read through to the end. If it’s definitely aimed at converting, then you just need that one opportunity at the end of the article to convert. However, if your blog post is aimed at nurturing then you must provide ample opportunities throughout the article to click-through to other blogs or further interact with your site. In turn, you’ll create a nurturing journey that should lead to a conversion. Interlinking to other relevant blog posts from your own site will further educate your reader while also increasing the time they spend connecting with your brand. Keeping people on your page longer (organically of course) will further develop their idea of your brand while advancing your nurture efforts.
6. Create Buyer Personas to Understand Your Customers
Number six on our list of Content Marketing tips and tricks for acquiring new customers is buyer personas. Buyer personas are an essential part of a brand strategy that’s main purpose is to personalize your target market and help you further cater to the right audience. Spend some time analyzing your data, identifying your target marketing down to granular demographics, and then build visually strong buyer personas around your findings. Each buyer persona should be specific, aiming to target one segment of your target market. This process of identifying who you are targeting will help your content teams create tailored and interesting campaigns meant to catch that specific type of buyer’s attention. There is never too much detail when it comes to buyer personas. Granular demographic information such as job title, age, gender, location, education level, and even personal interests outside of work all culminate to create specific imaginary identities. Buyer personas are an extremely effective tool when they have been researched and developed correctly. They are meant to give greater insight into what a consumer wants, what their buying habits and behaviors look like, and what ways are most effective to nurture and target them. Whether a content writer, content creator, or visual designer, every member of your creative team will be able to create better targeted content through the use of buyer personas. Ideally, this carefully curated and intentional content will convert leads into new customers.
7. Get Personal—Connect on a Deeper Level
The backbone of inbound marketing is the initial opt-in. Nurturing an inactive prospect to finally opt-in can be a long and tedious process, but it’s important to balance your content offerings and cater to leads at all stages of the buyer’s journey. Offering content that’s free and easily accessible allows potential consumers to get a taste of your brand. The more they read, the more they learn, but they will eventually want to go deeper if they see a use for your product or service in their life. This is where barriers of entry come in, and ultimately where the first tangible opt-in should occur.
Barriers of entry sounds like a negative tactic but let’s explore it a little. Barriers of entry are a major tipping point for a potential customer to deem how worthy they think your content is. If you place a required form on a landing page that the potential consumer must fill out before they can access a piece of content they’re interested in, they’re then forced to decide whether or not that content is important enough for them to take time and fill it out. Forms are a great way to make a deeper connection to a potential consumer, and a form is a great thing to use for an initial opt-in. Once they have provided their email and some general information about themselves, you can then begin to nurture them personally through whatever marketing channels and tactics you prefer. This allows for a new level of interaction between the consumer and your brand, and presents an opportunity for a passive engager (someone who only reads or engages with your content when you email them or appear in their newsfeed) to an active consumer (someone who actively seeks out your content and uses you as a resource point). By providing the reader with a decision point, you’re able to refine your marketing efforts to only those readers who have raised their (online) hand. This method allows readers to self-vet themselves on a very preliminary basis, yes, but it gives you a better understanding of who’s interested in what you have to offer. This tactic also reduces the chances that your brand will be perceived as spam because the prospect has already opted-in by providing their contact information.
If you’re looking to make the most of your content then The Content Lifecycle E-book is for you. Learn how to make the most of your DAM software at all stages of the customer lifecycle and essentially create or recreate content that converts into new customers.