- Segment Your Audience To Truly Know And Reach Them
In order to know what type of content you should produce to drive traffic, it’s helpful to learn about your current and potential audiences. Audience segmentation provides a way to understand various customer personas and characteristics — who they are, how they’re different and how best to reach them. Segmenting your current audience will also better equip you to find and reach out to new target audiences.
Analyzing demographics is a great place to start. Group your audience members by age, gender, geographical location, income, family size and other factors. You’ll need to dig deeper, of course, with insights and data that indicate behaviours and preferences. These indicators can help you create data-driven personas, which will then help you create and serve up relevant content.
- Diversify Your Reach
A diversified approach to content distribution is the best approach, from my experience. According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, on average, business-to-business (B2B) marketers use 13 different content marketing tactics. If you are only creating one kind of content (like a weekly blog) and only promoting it through one channel (say, Facebook), you’re severely diminishing the potential impact of your content.
Utilizing the right channels will help your diversified content generate targeted, qualified leads. Facebook is the most well-known social media channel, and YouTube is great for video-driven content like tutorials, reviews and inspirational shorts. In my experience, LinkedIn and Twitter are more appropriate channels for B2B interactions, and newer platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat, can be great for reaching millennials. Understanding what social media platforms best fit your particular needs will help you reach a wider audience with your content.
- Be Consistent
Consistent content engages customers. Being consistent with your content doesn’t just mean you’re publishing regularly — it means you are also maintaining a consistent voice, tone and quality.
A style sheet can be helpful in curating a consistent voice and tone, and a content calendar can be a big help with planning consistent distribution. These items can hold your team accountable to a clearly defined schedule, prompt the sharing of content ideas, notate special events (that may require a content boost) and fine-tune distribution. Having a consistent content plan will likely give you a leg up on your competition.
- Utilize SEO
Incorporating accurate SEO into your content marketing strategy can do wonders for organic site traffic. SEO can help your website rank higher in search, and highly ranked pages consistently have higher click-through rates (CTR). A good SEO strategy — complete with long-tail keywords, effective meta-descriptions, quality images and descriptive URLs — can help increase CTR and website traffic.
- Analyze And Optimize
You’ll never know if you’re driving traffic if you don’t measure the performance of your content. Split A/B testing is a particularly useful tool for finding out what kinds of content drive the most traffic. And, as an added benefit, A/B testing also helps you understand your target audience more deeply, which will only serve to help you create more effective content.
What do you want to test? Almost anything on your website or in your shared content that can affect user behaviour can be tested, but you’ll want to focus on the elements most important to driving traffic. These elements include your headline, call to action, content length, images, site speed, landing pages and so on. Once you’ve determined what kinds of content work best for your purposes (namely, driving traffic) your work becomes that much more effective and your overall content marketing strategy clearer.
At the end of the day, it’s critical to provide a clear path to how content will help foster the overall strategy and what will be tracked to ensure success. Doing so will help streamline both content production and marketing efforts.
CC: www.forbes.com
I trust these hacks to help harness your content marketing ability… Should you have any other hack, kindly share in the comments!
Recent Comments