Do you have an effective content strategy for your website? Customized marketing content continues to exponentially grow in its ability to influence targeted visitors. The strategy used to develop that content has become critical. Here are five solid tips for you to start developing your own effective content strategy:
- It’s About Value
How much value does your content actually provide? Effective content today must provide two specific types of value to the targeted visitor to be effective: It must have perceived value, or communicate what it can do for that targeted visitor, and it must have real value, or be something that the targeted visitor can use in some way right now, at this very moment.
Your product or service must be able to deliver on the perceived value you’ve communicated. To develop this value and then deliver it, you’re must understand what your targeted visitors are needing. How can you find that out? A good way to start is to ask questions or research similar products or services so that you can gather the data you need to create effective, valuable content. Why take these efforts? Because 90% of targeted visitors find a customized content experience to be useful.
- It’s About Relationships
Why do people shop at the same hardware store for 20 years, even though they could save money by going to a big box retailer and get the exact same product? Because they’ve formed a relationship with that store and that has created a brand loyalty. The content that you publish holds the same quality as a potential customer walking into a store for the first time. It must work to: Relate to the customers wants or needs, be friendly and engaging, and be clear and concise.
Using your content to expect a sale will make a targeted visitor bounce quickly and permanently. By changing the expectation of your content towards a relationship-building outcome instead of a sales outcome, you’ll find that more repeat business may just come your way.
- It’s About Choosing the Right Platform
What exactly do you want your content to achieve? Who exactly is your target audience going to be? For many domains today, the right medium is the blog. Blogs have the ability to effectively reach over 80% of the world’s population that is currently on the internet. Just throwing out some text onto a blog isn’t good enough, however – blog posts that have graphics incorporated with them get nearly double the amount of hits as their non-graphic counterparts.
Why is blogging so critical? It is because of the organic nature of a targeted visitor finding your blog, reading the information, and finding value in it. Outbound marketing leads close at about a 2% rate. Organic leads close at nearly a 15% rate. That’s why having the right platform for your content is a critical component to any effective strategy. Blogs help a website index 4 times the amount of pages than sites without blogs and give a site double the amount of indexed links.
- It’s About Being Interesting
Social media is an easy way to help create those relationships that can lead to business opportunities, but you can’t develop a social media presence without interesting content. Any effective content strategy must incorporate how posts are utilized on social media. One of the top three reasons why people choose to follow or like companies on social sites is because they have information that is interesting to them. Asking people to share or like this information helps spread the content to more people, build a customer base, and further brand awareness.
- It’s About Feedback
Having content that sounds awesome and a website that looks cool just doesn’t cut it any more. You’ve got to continually adapt and grow your content based on how visitors are interacting with it. A good place to start is by using analytics to examine traffic patterns on the site. This way you can begin to understand what is working with your content… and what is not. Polls and surveys about your content can also give you a picture of how your targeted visitors are perceiving your content. With feedback, you can evolve your content strategy to continually meet changing needs, and that will make you effective.
What Does Your Content Say About You?
Your content will make or break you. It can either communicate to your targeted visitors that you have a tremendous value to offer them… or it can communicate that what you have is worthless. Using these tips, you can develop an effective content strategy that will help to grow your brand, engage your visitors, and develop new lines of revenue that can help you thrive. Just remember – what works today may not work tomorrow.
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