Is Your Content Investment Paying Off?
Getting People to Your Posts
Creating original content is vitally important in digital marketing. But to make it a great business asset, there’s a second step. You have to tell people about it.
Targeted Ads, Search Engine Optimization, Analytics might seem overwhelming and out-of-reach for entrepreneurs and small businesses. This article is a how-to guide on promoting your original content. This important but low-intensity and low/no-cost task will make sure your money stays where it belongs- in your pocket.
To attract people to your content and grow your audience, offer them content that helps them. Creating longer, thoughtful content your customers appreciate, in forms like how-to videos, blog content, and online tools, is a great beginning. This kind of content is a powerful asset for your business.
But there is more you can do to get better business results from your content. Use short-form communications to alert your audience that you’ve made something they should find helpful.
Hip pocket marketing helps you turn your primary content into sales. Use social media and short e-mails to inform your audience that you’ve posted something new. Be sure to respond to likes, shares, and comments.
This critical part of content marketing can be done in minutes but needs to be done in a way that reinforces your branding and customer experience expectations.
Marketing of your startup or small business can be helped enormously in ways that require no cash outlay. Creating original digital content that your audience appreciates is important for attracting and retaining your customers. Your business needs to get results from this work. Your customers likely want to know about it. If they know about it they will want to read, view or listen to it. This is because it should have information helpful to them. To get results from the creation of central content work, you need to let people know about it.
Set yourself up
Central to marketing success is the experience your customers have when they interact with your company. A proven strategy to enhance this experience is to become a resource for information your customers can really use. If it’s you regularly providing them helpful information, they will be more likely to contact you when it’s time to buy. They will already feel you can help them run their business more effectively. They will already have experiences with your business that are positive.
This strategy calls for the creation of original digital content that your customers just love. But creating great content isn’t enough. You need to promote it.
Make time to not only create helpful material but also promote it. Understand the resources available to you right now. For no cash outlay. You’ll see that with only a few minutes, as part of a regular process, you can improve your website traffic and ultimately, sales. You’ll see better dividends from the work that you put into creating solid content. These are meaningful goals for any business.
Once you get into a regular routine of creating great content and promoting it, this part of your content strategy will become really easy. The tasks associated with this aspect of modern marketing are usually completed in just a couple of minutes. But remember it is still important you incorporate your organization’s brand pillars, keywords, and personas.
Find Them
Depending on who you want to reach and where they go for info in your industry, you could see particular platforms that are a perfect niche for your business. But certainly look at Facebook, Twitter, email, and Subscribers.com, at minimum, for ways to reach your audience. With these, you can keep your content promotion effort to a low level. Look at marketing automation tools that enable you to write something once and post to multiple social media accounts, such as Sharp Spring, HootSuite, and others.
How do you know you’ve created great content?
There are endless choices for the kinds of content you can create. Like most things in life, the more you do it, the easier it will become. But what makes content great? It becomes great not because a large audience viewed it- unless that is your goal. It becomes great because the right people see it and like it. A lot.
How do you know who has seen it and if they liked it? There are most likely tools available on your website and marketing automation platforms. Social/video/content platforms can tell you. Your website blog no doubt allows for reader comments. Be sure to allow visitors to post comments. Social media wouldn’t be social without several ways to let your audience interact with your content. They comment, like and/or share, and the social media platform will keep count for you. Medium is a great content platform that also provides for two-way conversations around an article you may post.
While these resources and platforms will tell you numbers of views, likes and shares, comments and questions are the mother lode. These let you know if your topic and content hit a nerve. Read them for insights. Look for clues that the post missed something, or generates reader comments that give you ideas for the next piece. Read comments for insights into potential ideas that could tell you about market opportunities.
As for who has seen it, external platforms will at least show which user left comments. Your marketing automation platform can usually tell you who has opened an email and clicked on a link.
If you’ve created a solid central piece of content or on-line tool, you’ll know soon who saw it and how it was received.
I’m busy
Sounds great, right? But creating that great content took some time, and you’ve got 87 other things that demand your attention today. And why aren’t you seeing results from that great content?
Getting your business in front of your customers on-line demands you also promote the content you create. I’m all about marketing basics for small and start-up businesses. I can tell you that with a few minutes a couple of times each week, you can execute the other part of content marketing: getting people to click on it.
There are unlimited numbers of reasons your customers want to hear from you. With minimum effort, you can keep them coming back. This improves your search engine results and snowballs into increased web traffic for your business.
Nuts and bolts
So you’ve created a terrific blog post, video or podcast. You’ve kept your audience’s interests in mind, your brand pillars, and edited. You formatted it well for easy consumption by your audience and search engine results. Now you’ve got to tell people about it.
Hip-pocket marketing is centered on small messages that can go out over multiple channels to call attention to longer-form content. Social media and email are perfect platforms for this.
Be especially sure you promote any original research, reference material, videos, and blog posts. Also, be sure the material meets the criteria I mentioned above. Appropriate humor is perfectly fine. As long as it engages your audience in a positive way and reinforces a brand pillar, experiment with different messaging. But keep the goal of becoming a resource to your audience top of mind. You’ll learn over time what they find engaging in terms of types of content in social media posts. Keep an eye on your Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram results, etc. Generally, those posts that get the most shares, likes and comments give you the most insight into what your audience wants more of.
Google Analytics and other web-tracking tools will tell you the source of clicks that come to your website, so pay attention to the categories that are driving the most clicks. Examples could be news sites (press coverage), social media with more text, social media with more images, more links, fewer links, or any other insights. Now take this info and refer to it for your next post. See how the next post does with some tweaks in style and presentation.
What to say in the short messages
One source to promote the long-form content you’ve created in social media posts and email is from the content itself. Try using the key sentences and headings from a section of the blog post or audio transcription as the social media post and/or email subject. Include a link to the longer content.
You may find that certain sentences you re-use get more clicks than others from that same piece of content. This can be a clue to what your audience wants more of. The goal is to re-use what you’ve already done. This saves time and more importantly gives your audience the content they are promised in the social media post or email.
Try it
To summarize, you can set yourself up for content marketing success by establishing a routine that includes
- Understanding your audience. This can be captured in personas and knowing where they look for info on your industry and what media they like best
- Creating some longer-form content that should help your customers learn something about improving their operations
- Promoting the longer-form content with social media and email
- Observing metrics and analyzing differences in posts for several characteristics
- Using the information from step four to start a new piece in step one, and potentially updating older pieces based on this information.
Hip pocket marketing is something you can do easily to promote longer-form posts and sharing of your content customers find helpful. It can be something in the moment, but should also be planned to appeal to specific personas in your audience.
This is the same guidance for your longer posts. The purpose is to promote your brand, your customers’ success, and your employees’ success by promoting longer content on your website. In a short time, you’ll find it is easy to do and calls for no additional cash outlay. You’ll see what works by experimenting and tracking results on various platforms. Once you get proficient, it should take only a minute or two for an individual message in email or social media. Over time, you will have a very high rate of return through increased visibility of your business. Let me know how you do?
