If prospects don’t find your content relevant and engaging, they will quickly leave your site and find the information elsewhere. So a regular content heath check gets us “on point”, keeps things fresh, aligned with customer needs and our products and services. This article brings us back to basics with tips to ensure you are focused on your customer journey.
Planning your content strategy
When devising a new campaign strategy, planning is the key – the development of a content marketing plan sets out markers to drive meaningful messaging, relevant information and most importantly customer engagement. Establish trust and confidence with prospects by creating appealing content that speaks their language, reassuring them that you have their best interest in mind.
A content plan should deliver:
- Relevant content focused on the customer journey
- Compelling content to capture attention - Content that demonstrates how a prospect will benefit from doing business with you.
- Targeted content relevant to the segments of your business
- Maximum impact, content that encourages your prospects’ decision-making process
- Inspire prospects, creating content that offers information about other facets of your business that may be of interest
A vital part of your planning process should include insights and data that you have gathered from previous campaigns or interactions to support and inform your plan. By understanding your audience, it makes it easier to anticipate behaviours and prepare a content plan for automation.
Be credible; customers want to know they’re investing in the best solution so showcase how you stand apart from competitors.
Timing is key
Content will only work if you send it at the right time, be sure to articulate messaging at the relevant stage when automating content, craft content according to:
- Awareness – mostly not buyer ready, new to you, yet to subscribe and identify – a prospect to target as part of an automated nurture led content campaign –harvested through gated content on your www, links, advertising etc. Content should educate through success stories, blogs and reports
- Consideration – A lead that is engaged but needing confidence in your brand – to offer content that is authoritative and relevant to their needs, e white papers, expert guidelines and video content.
- Decision time – Conversion content can be led through vendor or product comparison, case studies, pricing and live demos.
- Retention -Always remember to keep a client interested, upsell with relevant products, training materials and webinars.
Output
Aside from all your generic campaigns, expand output to maintain a narrative with customers to ensure you stay connected. Follow through and best practice is essential to keep the pipeline flowing.
Keep tabs on interactions where you are using content for landing pages, you can easily see how campaigns are performing, A B test ((Link to article)) if you feel your pages are not driving enough interest then look at tweaks to keep things fresh and monitor performance.
Conversion rates will also be much more successful if you target specific customer groups with personalised messaging. Segmenting your audience, ((link to article)) targets groups that share a commonality that enables you to create a robust connection with the individuals who belong to them.
If personalised e-mails are not opened then ask yourself why, you need to question content but also look at the layout, image or design. Remember, there is value in creating content to go to customers who have provided information but abandoned a purchase or action, re-engagement can get you a conversion.
Measurement
Marketing Automation offers you a wide range of tools to monitor and react, if you have concerns about a campaign, you can easily switch it off and reboot with something that drives a variation of the theme, testing is worth it to find the best route to sales.
Monitoring all activity saves you a good deal of time (and money) it keeps you agile and focused.
Don’t forget..
Being able to see reviews from real people makes your prospect feel a lot more comfortable about your brands products or services if they haven’t engaged before. Call on customers you know are happy to endorse their experience and get these testimonials visible on your site and relevant pages. Happy customers provide the best type of content you could use, they do the selling for you.
Pull it all together – make a plan that works
Your content campaign should consist of content that is built to last, it needs to be something that your audience will find relevant and helpful for months or years to come, with updates to keep things accurate, the core content should remain pertinent and valuable.
Creating a viable long-lasting campaign, and optimising for search helps gain organic traffic, but remember you need to create content that will channel traffic once they have landed to drive conversions.
Calls to action are key - From email signups, demo requests, contact form requests, chatbot or live chat engagement to subscription signups you need to allocate relevant content to each area, follow best practice for landing pages and automated email campaigns that you build as part of the overall plan.
Social campaigns may need variations dependent on the channel, be it visual or text driven. Remember when planning that repeating content will vary from platform to platform.
Check in and check again
Any campaign needs to be monitored to see if it’s in keeping with your strategy or adjustments need to be made – make changes if things are not progressing.
- Daily checks on social platforms are important to be sure there is engagement where needed.
- Weekly checks on paid promotions mean that you can pull anything that isn’t working quickly.
- Monthly reviews ensure all is aligned with your general campaigns, and that social elements haven’t got out of line
- Quarterly reviews should see updates and accuracy maintained
- Annual reviews look to focus on what has worked best and how edits and relevance needs to be refreshed in the coming years activity.
If you are looking to grow your business, gain a better understanding of customer needs drive greater loyalty, client upsell and enhance referral business, contact us now for a no obligation demonstration and assessment to see if Marketing Automation would work for you.