One of the most important strategies to have for any business is leveraging content to fuel interest, engagement, site traffic, leads, and sales. Companies that put a heavy emphasis on developing legit content that their target audience actually cares about have higher likelihood of yielding results that will positively impact their business.
There are a lot of different ways you can go about approaching content. The obvious places would be to start a blog. However, if you were to take it a step further, you have to look at how you can take advantage of all of the avenues in which your content can live.
More specifically, there are a ton of different ways you can share out your content and repurpose it to gain more exposure and expand your reach. However, know that the spray and pray approach with content sometimes isn’t always the best. In fact, it’s best that you stay focused on ‘where’ you can truly add value and actually connect with potential customers.
This isn’t to say that you should limit yourself but that you should absolutely have a more focused strategy. In other words, you’ll align content efforts with business objectives to ensure that your efforts aren’t being burned on executions that don’t have a purpose.
In today’s blog post, I’ll highlight the following:
- How to set up a solid content output that keeps running.
- Top KPIs to measure your content success.
- How to overcome common content challenges.
- How to repurpose the content you already have and more.
Let’s dive in…
Get organized with your content efforts
As you plan out your content, the next step is to make sure that you have organized processes for ideation, creation, editing, publishing, and distributing. It doesn’t matter if you have a team of two people doing this or a team of twenty. You need to get everything organized so that you can keep track of every piece of content that’s being pushed out so you can understand which of those content pieces are performing the best.
Know how you’ll measure success
The word “success” can be defined in a lot of different ways, so when it comes to your content you should definitely look at how you can narrow your criteria in a digestible way. For example, let’s say your wanting to measure specific content pieces by how well they nurture leads down your marketing funnel. You’ll need to make sure the content pieces within each lifecycle stage feel personal enough to the buyer journey itself. From there, you’ll then measure which content assets are helping move the needle, i.e. getting leads to become customers.
To get even more specific, start at a higher level like this by simply looking at different ways you’ll look at the success of your content efforts:
- Generate brand awareness
- Increase quality leads
- Boost sales enablement by shortening the sales cycle
Once you have the basics laid out, then dive into each a bit deeper and know the type and content topics you’ll need to develop.
Awareness
Per Wordstream: For this goal, the KPIs to track include:
- Article views: You can simply use tools like Google Analytics to check the number of views your article receives. You can also gain insights about traffic sources, average session duration, and bounce rate for each article.
- Social shares and engagement: You should track and measure social shares and engagement to see how well your content is performing. The more social shares you get, the large your audience base will be. Tools like BuzzSumo rank the top-performing content on any topic based on their social shares and engagement.
- Audience engagement: genuine audience engagement such as comments and interactions on your content can help you understand how consumers feel about your brand. Tracking audience engagement can help you analyze which types of content your target audience engages with the most.
Increase Leads
When it comes to increasing quality leads, developing content that can easily be downloaded will be a big win for you. This means you’re tracking activities such as content downloads, forms being filled out, new subscribers, etc. Then you’ll get down to specifics such as tracking the cost-per-lead (CPL).
From there, you’ll then need to develop a specific plan for nurturing leads so that you keep them engaged throughout their journey before they get to sales. Further, know that this is the middle-funnel stage where people have completed more specific research about whether or not your product or service is right for them, which is why it’s known as the evaluation or consideration stage.
This is where you need to convince them that your solutions are the best fit. You can do this with content that helps establish trust and nurture the growing relationship — this is the time to show that you are the best in your industry. Content such as product webinars, expert guides, product comparisons, case studies, FAQ, data sheets, and testimonials work well here.
Boost Sales
At this stage, you’ll be looking at specifics around SQLs, opportunities, and closed-won deals. Some of the content you produce and push out should definitely be there to enable sales and further shorten the sales cycle. This means that you can attribute the revenue contribution back to marketing’s efforts too.
Take Your Content Distribution Strategy Seriously
Once you’ve created and published your content, making sure it is distributed in the right places is going to be instrumental in increasing quality leads, as well as sales.
Here are some key channels to consider distributing your content:
- LinkedIn Groups
- LinkedIn Articles
- Medium
- Subreddits
- Quora
- FB + FB stories
- Insta + Insta stories
- Ask your audience to reshare because you can increase your social distribution by 40%
- Slideshare
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Digg
Of course, the list could go on and on, but what’s more important is that you are very intentional with being present where your target audience is. Participate in relevant conversations. Share your content, but do so with an authentic voice. Use the right hashtags and tag relevant accounts. These are all things you can do to ensure that you are pushing to create a dialogue rather than just get your content out there for leads.
Wrapping it up
As you dedicate the needed resources and efforts to producing as well as publishing content to get more leads, know that you’ll need to also be patient with the process. Results will definitely come as you continue pumping out valuable content that truly serves the needs of your target audience.
Keep in mind that you’ll also want to test as much as possible. You can’t go wrong with growth hacking your way to content success that then generates quality leads for your business.
