Why do you need a content marketing specialist?
Far back in 1996, a then fast-rising tech entrepreneur called Bill Gates voiced what would later become one of the most fundamental pillars of marketing: content is king! It has been 24 years since then, and content has not yet lost its kingship in the marketing world.
Today, content marketing is ever so important. Businesses and marketers alike are leveraging the incredible power of content in consolidating their reputation as industry experts and generating tons of lucrative sales in the process.
Well, content marketing involves creating value-adding, relevant, and sharable content – be it blogs, pdfs, videos, case studies, and whitepapers – to a designated audience, preferably related to your targeted customer market.
So explosive has this marketing channel been that according to Zazzle Media, that 96% of decision-makers in the marketing industry are leveraging content marketing to drive their success. Compared to 2017, only 70% were using this inbound marketing strategy.
What more, with content marketing fast growing into an exclusive marketing department for many companies, 78% of businesses today, according to SEMrush have a dedicated team of 1-3 content marketing specialists. Can you now see how powerful content is today?
Fine, let us keep the figures aside. How can content practically boost your business? Today, Lyndsay Phillips – an enterprising content marketing specialist – shows us how to use content marketing to achieve smooth sailing business growth.
How content marketing can help grow your business
Content marketing can do your business a whole lot of good. Here are some reasons why getting a content marketing specialist (or integrating this inbound strategy into your overall marketing architecture) could prove to be the best marketing decision you would ever make.
It boosts your brand reputation
One of the most powerful ways to establish yourself as an industry expert is by consistently dishing out high-value content. When your audience comes to recognize you as the ultimate destination for authoritative information in a particular niche, you have firmly consolidated your place as a force to reckon with in that space.
With a significantly enhanced reputation, your reach expands. More people refer your website to others as the go-to destination for quality information on a specific subject.
This means more publicity for your brand. With a strengthening brand reputation comes increased customer trust.
When your content perpetually adds value to your audience via sufficiently answering their questions, they will certainly trust you. This trust can be lucrative if you have a product or service to sell.
With the fundamental customer objection withered down by the trust your content has generated, it is far easier to get your audience taking action. This brings us to the next benefit of content marketing.
It increases your conversions
Wondering how to boost online conversions? Produce powerful content back to back!
Yes, aside from offering value to your audience, here is one powerful thing content marketing does for you: BUILDING VITAL RELATIONSHIPS.
When you build trust and provide genuine value, you are already building a robust relationship with your audience. With every piece of content you publish that your audience savors, you strengthen your influence on them. This is you getting closer to their heart.
This audience can be nurtured down the line to buying customers. In this podcast, Lyndsay Phillips expands further on this when she points out the need to build relationships along the way.
With a solidified relationship, you have stronger emotional leverage on your audience, and it becomes astonishingly easier to get them acting on your prompts and clicking the call to action.
This is because with consistently insightful content, you have established yourself as a reliable commander, and your audience is fanatically ready to follow your orders.
Will you be reluctant to click the subscribe button for a newsletter at the end of an incredibly powerful blog? Likely not! You are not alone, either. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 61% of American online consumers buy after reading a convincing blog that recommends products for them.
It is unsurprising that businesses now covet content marketing specialists as this marketing channel (content) produces six times the average conversion rate of any other digital marketing channel.
Keyword-optimized content increases search engine visibility
Believe it or not, thousands of potential customers are typing queries into search engines like Google related to your industry. The bigger question is: is your website showing up in these queries?
When you optimize your content with specifically targeted keywords, your SEO rankings increase, and your website starts to show higher in search engine results.
Content marketing is the pillar of SEO, and SEO today is a game-changer you should be maximizing. Do you know that 93% of online experiences start from a search engine query?
So lucrative is ranking higher on search engines with optimized content that American businesses are expected to spend up to $79.27 billion on SEO in 2020.
How to maximize your digital content marketing strategy
Having seen how much you can get with content, it is unfortunate that not everyone succeeds in content marketing? What could be the difference between the winners and losers?
The winners are consistent
According to Lyndsay Phillips, winners of content marketing are fundamentally consistent and structured with their content production and promotion. Top content marketers always advocate religiously adhering to a structured content editorial calendar, optimized to your content strategy and audience persona.
You can’t be sporadically spraying just any type of content on your blog and social media, and just HOPE it does well. First, you must produce only content that aligns with the demographics and interests of your targeted audience.
This involves deciphering the befitting content marketing ideas, writing editing (in terms of brand voice), and keywords to optimize your content to.
Next, you will have a firm schedule for producing this content. Is your content going to be published every Tuesday?
Would you be assuredly publishing two blogs or five social media content every week? Keep a consistent schedule so that your audience can know when and what to expect every time.
Now, what marketing channels would you consistently promote this content? Would you be promoting them via Facebook ads, Facebook groups, email newsletters, guest posts, or using influencers?
According to Lyndsay Phillips, it is crucial to have a template or system in place that enables you to predictably generate results from your content.
The winners build robust relationships
According to Lyndsay Phillips, the best content marketing specialists focus enormously in building powerful relationships via their content.
In her words: “You need to foster relationships along the way and nurture them.”
You just can’t jump on your audience, screaming at them to buy from you on your first blog or maiden social media post. They will likely turn you down, and you can’t blame them either since they have not trusted you.
You have to patiently and systematically build that relationship laden with trust so that the audience can be convinced that you genuinely have their interests in mind.
This involves engaging your audience over time, building meaningful conversations with your blog readers, social media following, and newsletter subscribers. You can even start your marketing podcast.
Here is how you can build your audience into a vibrant base of diehard followers and then into leads into buyers and into returning buyers. For this, you would need an appropriately optimized sales funnel.
Building your sales funnel via content
Content marketing specialists agree on one thing: powerful sales funnel is a strategic combination of powerful content, each stage pushing the lead closer to conversion.
A sales funnel starts from the incidence when the prospective buyer learns about you down to when they buy from you. Some sales funnels extend past them into retaining this buyer and even cross-selling and upselling to them.
According to Lyndsay Phillips, the first step is deciding the entry point where the prospective customer is “onboarded” into the sales funnel. This is where they come to learn about the essential matter or offering you are giving them in the form of the lead magnet.
There are several viable ways to pull in leads into your sales funnel. You can go organically via the search engine traffic accruable from your SEO-friendly content.
Others would go with running social media ads or forums, pulling in the required audience to start processing through the funnel.
Here is what many marketers get wrong: there is no hard and fast rule definitively governing your sales funnel stages and which content should be appropriate for that stage.
For some content marketing specialists, their marketing funnel can span just two stages. Others may have funnels extensively spanning five stages.
The way Lyndsay Phillips sees it, “it is all about moving them to the next stage that you want them to go.” Your content should be aligned with the ideal action you want them to take next as they approach the ultimate stage of the sales funnel where they would be converted.
Personalization is the juice of a sales funnel. If you want to smoothly transit your leads from one stage of the funnel to the upper one, you have to ensure that the funnel is specifically streamlined to their persona.
Your objectives for that funnel must align with their demographics, your content must appeal to their interests and personality, and your offering must suit their income levels.
You definitively can’t run one Facebook ad targeted at mid-level earners and put a call to action at the end to buy a $30k product.
Not many people have that money to spend on impulsive buying as the generality of people in this category don’t spend more than $7 at a first-time incidence of coming across a product.
This is why your funnel has to be patiently procedural and naturally progressive to build trust and acquaintance along the funnel. In the words of Lyndsay Phillips, “you have to go deep before you ask someone to marry you”.
Typically, people are more open to buying higher value products or offerings from you when they have enjoyed reasonable value from you for free. This is why you see lead magnets are compelling components of a winning sales funnel.
Of course, the lead magnet must not be a free Lamborghini. The lead magnet can be as easy as a free ebook, free webinar, or a free case study.
The overall idea is to pull them in and consolidate your reputation as an authority in what you do. This is because you want these leads to trust you enough to open their purses and buy from you.
Advice from a content marketing consultant to maximize revenue
How can you get your content to sell?
Focusing on the measurable metrics
From a content marketing specialist’s perspective, Lyndsay Phillips –aside from building relationships – advocates focus on your analytics. Content is not some scattergun escapade where you randomly get results.
No, you need structured and iterable systems that can generate your desired objectives consistently. To access these systems’ efficacy, you need to work on your analytics, identifying crucial KPIs to track.
Besides the conversions, you should focus on other important metrics like the bounce rate in terms of how many leads are falling off your funnel.
It would help if you also analyzed what stage most leads dropping off the funnel, the stay time leads spend on each stage, and what content they interact with most across the funnel.
When you bring all these analytics together, you have a more accurate idea of the customer journey across your funnel and how you can optimize it with these insights to amplify conversion.
Delegate More Tasks In Your Business
Being an entrepreneur means being the sole custodian of that enterprise. Sometimes, we cherish a business so much that we don’t trust other people to handle aspects of the business as well as we could.
Therefore, you see the entrepreneur wearing several hats and juggling several tasks simultaneously. Such overwhelming multitasking will not only damage your work-life balance but also diminish your capacity across the board.
It is better to delegate and focus on the more delicate part of your business. You could get a content marketing specialist to handle your content strategy, an HR team to handle your recruiting and onboarding, or even hire a consultancy firm to map out your industry and identify game-changing opportunities (which you wouldn’t see on your own) to scale.
According to Lyndsay Phillips, “you need other members on your team to meet your goals faster.”
The beauty is that you don’t need to spend massively on hiring full-time employees in the contemporary corporate space. There is an incredible pool of freelancers that can get tasks perfectly done for you on a when-the-need-arises basis.
Interestingly, one of the best ways to build valuable and lucrative relationships as a business is via launching a podcast. Do you know that 32% of Americans listen to a podcast at least once monthly?
That is an enormous audience eagerly waiting to hear you out and get you crazily rich if you launch your podcast. Will you keep them waiting any longer? Start and grow your podcast today.
