An Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Does your content marketing strategy find it challenging to create and publish content that engages with your target customers?


As digital becomes the dominant marketing channel, in order to
increase brand exposure and have effective lead generation online then a
strong content marketing strategy is required. Most social media plans
are dependent on one factor, the creation and delivery of relevant,
engaging content that will be of interest to your target audience.


Content marketing is a continuous process, and it is vital for
professionals to monitor their efforts and adapt their strategy to the
ever changing preferences and insights of their market.


Below are some greatly beneficial tips, explaining how to best implement your content marketing strategy





Gain Audience Insights

Knowledge is key, you need to research and discover where your target
audience hang out online. Ask yourself; what conversations and topics do
they contribute to? What type of content do they respond to? What
topics grab their attention?

This can be done through competitor and market analysis; study your
competitor posts, which topics have the most user responses? Analyze
your own posts for insights into what style or content your target
audience engage with most. Consider analyzing your audience through
surveys and Google Analytic. This will enable you to target them
directly, as you know their online behaviors and what platforms they use
to share and interact with online.


Set Clear Goals and Objectives

Prior to the group brainstorming session, you must visualize
the goals you want to achieve. Set out clear objectives to focus on,
this will help the team work towards something collectively as they are
all on the same page. For example; ‘Brand A seeks to provide delicious
foods suitable for people with coeliac disease, to give them more choice
and a varied diet. Isolating the factors in this statement can be done
easily, for example – Your target audience would be people with coeliac
disease, your content would be from recipes, and the coeliac society.
Your main objective would be to provide people suffering from coeliac
disease with more food options.



It is also important to plan and outline the type of content you will be creating:

• 40% recipes, advice, and interesting content to encourage user engagement
• 20% content curation from other sources
• 20% brand promotion (press release/mentions)
• 10% product focused ideas
• 10% promoting company culture, and recruiting of new talent

Content Research

The creation of relevant and engaging content necessitates
research. Google Alerts can save you time, in that Google will notify
you by email when it discovers fresh results on topics that you have
flagged would be of interest to you. This tool detects current,
real-time updates on web pages, blogs and articles. It can be used to
keep track of trends, interesting topics and insights within your
industry.


Google Alerts can also be used to tell you when your brand has been
mentioned online, so you could respond to a customer
review/query/complaint efficiently. This is an excellent avenue to
remain current/up to date on the latest news stories, videos and topics.
Enabling you to take inspiration from these findings to create relevant
and current blog posts which you know will be of interest to your
audience, as this is done in real-time.


Think Evergreen Content

The Evergreen process is slow and steady; results will be seen over
time, rather than a surge in traffic due to a ‘trending’ topic.
Evergreen content will not become obsolete any time soon; take ‘spin
selling’ – this was a very popular topic ten to fifteen years ago, it
was highly searched. Now very few people are talking about it, as this
model has since been overtaken.


Entrepreneur Syed Balkhi
states that Evergreen content is useful for long-term sustainability
and is SEO friendly. It will theoretically drive traffic for years and
will continue to be a popular search.

‘I like to write 20-30 evergreen titles that will rank well
over time. They should reflect the style and tone of your target
audience: If you’re catering to a market of entrepreneurs and creative
professionals, they should be more informative, with an approachable yet
cordial tone’.

Team members will know that the focus of their content should not be
self-promoting; instead it should be informative and educational for
their audience – focusing on solving their problems.





Choose Your Medium

Gather team members together for a brainstorming session,
everyone will have different ideas and opinions, but the mission
statement that you created earlier will keep everyone on track and
focused on the same goal. Through team brainstorming exercises, you can
define which medium should be used to communicate what content.


Blog posts are hugely beneficial for getting your point across, but
explaining how to use computer software for example would be best suited
to a demo video. Stats would be more engaging on an infographic rather
than a long list of bullet points. This could also help in targeting
more readers, through different platforms – you could use an infographic
on Instagram with a link to the full article in the bio.


Content Consistency Is Key

Once you have defined your content strategy, create an
editorial calendar. This will help you schedule posts, and articles.
Your resources, such as your team and budget will determine the
frequency of your content. Although it is inherent to be consistent with
your content – posting three quality and relevant blog posts a week
will get the attention of your audience. Your target is now accustomed
to seeing your helpful and insightful content, and they know of the
brand you represent. What happens if you become side-tracked by another
task and post only one blog the next week? You will appear flaky and
dis-interested to your target.


Having your calendar to reference will remind you that perhaps a blog
post is due in two days. If you do not have time in your schedule, give
your team the assignment of creating and sharing the blog. There needs
to be a concrete plan of action set out, so blog posts and interactions
are relevant, executed in real-time and followed up on accordingly.


Publish, Promote and Track Your Posts

While quality of content is paramount, there are still many other
factors to consider. Keep in mind that posts should be relevant,
engaging and informative. They should have an appropriate tone suited to
the reader, in a B2C setting for example – be careful not to speak
corporate and overload the customer with jargon. You must also be
cautious of the grammar police, double check, even triple check your
spelling and always ask a colleague to proof-read your post.


Enhancing your content for SEO purposes could improve your brand’s
page ranking on Google. Study the analytics from your posts, this will
guide you when creating new content, perhaps a certain topic or phrase
is more popular than others. You can then create similar content or a
modernized version, of how Social Selling has evolved in the past year.


Your bounce rate should also be considered, you must ask yourself why
users read a post and do not navigate elsewhere on your site. What can
you do to keep them on your site and looking around? Perhaps there is an
increase in referral traffic from another site, why not interact and
link with this website for a mutual benefit?


Be conscious of misleading headlines, you may get an influx of
traffic to your site with a misleading headline, but once the user
realizes the article is not relevant to the title, they will click back
straight away. You should bear in mind that Google will penalize you
based on your ‘click back’ rate.


Conclusion

While content marketing can be intimidating and does require resourcing,
the sooner companies adopt this process the sooner results will flow.
It is not only hugely beneficial in enhancing brand image, engaging with
potential customers and increasing inbound traffic to your site but
content marketing is now a core business activity.

Buyers and consumers want to engage with companies who demonstrate
industry knowledge and insights. Evergreen content marketing also
contributes heavily to building back links to your site, so it is
imperative to have a joined up content marketing strategy in place to
bring the pieces together.





An Effective Content Marketing Strategy | Instant Lead Generation For Social Selling

Content marketing is powering social selling – The Bitter Business

Content marketing is powering social selling – The Bitter Business



The creation and use of content marketing is key to getting social
selling activities right. In fact content marketing is now powering most
selling and sales activity as it is the smoothest route to build up a
relationship with prospects or buyers. It also gently reinforces a brand
without over ally interrupting people with sales messages. In today’s
digital aware environment, brochure selling is a big turn-off and no
longer cuts it with buyers.


The sales professional today knows that selling is now about genuine,
beneficial interaction with existing and potential customers which
builds trust over time. Content sharing also has the dual effect of
building brand awareness, a business may never actually sell anything
directly over social media but they will generate awareness.

What content is shared will impact the results.

To really make social selling work, the target audience has to be
interested in what the sales person has to say and, ultimately, the
customer believe in what they are saying.


 “Creating content your potential prospects will find useful or enjoyable is key to success”.


Quality, insightful and useful content brings a brand to life, giving
the business a personality and allowing it (if they work hard enough)
to eventually become an industry thought leader. Content can also help a
business differentiate them from the competition. .


As content marketing plays such a central role in enabling social
selling activity, here are some tips to help make a business brand stand
out from the crowd:


What does a business need to consider when developing a content marketing plan?


There is no “magic wand or instant success formula” to creating
effective and impactful content as each buyer grouping and seller is
unique, each with its own buyers journey and value proposition. While it
is helpful to review other content marketing strategies and competitor
approaches by doing some internet searches, ultimately any company’s
content marketing plan needs to be tailored to its customers and market
needs. However any content plan should include the sales team sharing
information that is of interest to their target audience (of which a
portion should be nothing to do with their brand). Information worth
sharing might include market insights, industry news, analyst reports or
independent market research.


They say people buy from people, and in the social network world
people follow people who share things that enlighten them or educate
them. Also a business should consider social selling training so sales
people develop their own style and not be a channel to spew out branded
sales updates.


A good starting point is maybe blogging about observations or
customer opinions about the industry in which a business operates which
can also be a handy means of kick-starting some social conversations.
“Maybe research shows some validated trends that all companies or
customers are embracing. Then create a nice content piece about it and
to add in your observations maybe with some independent quotes.


There is always LinkedIn group discussions, Twitter conversations or
any other forums in which the target audience can be found to share
insights. But don’t be a bull in a china shop, marketing and sales
people need to listen and understand what is going on in the social
world for their customers in order to get to grips with the relevant
topics to engage on.


The marketing department should ensure that everyone involved in
social selling has access to pertinent content as and when they need it
or as part of a schedule, this content can be developed internally,
aggregated from social media or taken from approved third party sources.


The content marketing strategy needs planning, production schedule,
promotion plan and a means to measure the effectiveness of the activity

• A business needs to define and set content marketing aims plus ensure they support business objectives.
• To identify the target audience and gather as much information about
  them to understand their characteristics and interests via social
  media.
• Clearly define what kind of content will help achieve the business goals.
• Develop a content marketing execution plan. Including a weekly or
  monthly content calendar so that the sales teams understand what content
  and marketing campaigns are in the pipeline.

Content marketing is about sales and marketing combining in order to share with customers the right content at the right time.”

Final suggestion on this tip is for sales and marketing teams to hold
a content meeting each month to decide which segments or messaging they
will focus on and then agree what content is necessary to create or
source.


How businesses can ensures it exploits its content plan effectively


The first step is social media training for all in sales to ensure
they maximize the content that will be made available to them. This
social selling training should cover how to/not to use the various
 social media platforms, what the company’s social guidelines are to
training on tone of voice and language on social media.


Business needs to make it easy for sales people to interact with
marketing in order to understand what content topics are working and
which are not, then repeat the things that do deliver results (make sure
results is defined to all) and stop any content production to those
topics not delivering. In this regard monitor and report on the
analytics whether it is leads generated, white paper downloads or social
followers etc. Monitoring the analytics from social activity in detail,
and drawing up a reporting pack will help the business stakeholders
what content drives what activity plus what the target audience has
read.


Other basic marketing activities such as monitoring click on URLs,
content/blog page views can provide a business with useful data to shape
the content marketing plan accordingly and tweak where necessary.


A crucial element in content success is ensuring that the business
(sales and marketing) have a daily plan to actively engage in social
conversations. This means taking the time to impart value-add comments,
liking or re-sharing content with less emphasis on broadcasting sales
messages.

“Buyers want to see that sales people are knowledgeable in their own right, not just conduits for branded marketing campaigns.”

Strike a balance so the target audience do not get bombarded with too
much content or feel like they are being stalked. Mix up different
types of content, whether is it informational, infographics, video,
white papers, case studies or images to make the social interactions
more meaningful.


The aim is to share quality content that people enjoy reading, also
in social selling sales people need to come across as being unbiased so
providing impartial advice works really well.”


Social selling is NOT plastering half-price offers on social media. A
business needs to be engaging and give audience food for thought.


What are the key challenges a business is likely to experience?


Delivering real business results using content marketing combined with social selling can be tricky and which some companies struggles with date due to a number of factors.


Content Quality! It can be challenging to create really engaging
content that cuts through the huge amount of social chatter. The volume
of content and information sharing on the social network is huge so it
requires any content marketing campaign to be “targeted and relevant” to
a clearly defined audience.


Don’t force it. Too many companies try to push the sales teams and
people to become a brand advocates with little choice. Start by
educating and tapping into the people are really interested in social
media where their passion can lead to other team members getting
involved. Forcing people to update their LinkedIn profile or Twitter
account every hour can lead to social fatigue. Think Smarketing. Where
sales and marketing work together to plan and put in place goals that
everyone will contribute to. Both teams and departments working in
unison can the difference between success and failure in running content
marketing campaigns. “If either sales or marketing try to push out this
activity alone, it probably will not work. Avoid headless activity
where people detach themselves from the brand values and focus on their
own goals which can be wasteful. Clearly defined goals, objectives and
constant feedback is what makes content marketing powering social
selling successful.

Lead Generation Software

The increased focus on ‘Lead Generation’ has resulted in companies
plugging tools and software which claim to automate the Lead Gen
process. Firstly, we should begin by explaining some misconceptions
surrounding Lead Generation software, as the term has been hijacked
somewhat. Marketing Automation and CRM Platforms are NOT Lead Generation Tools. These are in fact activities used to manage or nurture the leads – once they have been identified.

Lead Generation tools and software actually identify and pinpoint where
sales teams should focus their new customer acquisition efforts.





In a recent survey focused on “Lead Generation Challenges”, 35% of
sales managers stated that they lacked access to quality leads while 49%
stated they wanted the volume of leads to increase. Lead Gen software
should solve salespeople’s challenges in sourcing fresh leads, these
results should be tangible and results driven.

So how does this software work? Lead Generation or Social Prospecting,
as it is increasingly being known as involves defining who the target
audience is; their job title, industry, location, keywords. Today, most
lead generation is done through social media platforms.


These prospecting criteria are then inputted into the Lead Generation
Software, which crunches data from the social networks to provide sales
professionals with a list of leads they could pursue. Salespeople can
then Social Sell by creating relevant and helpful content in order to
engage with and nurture their lead (become a trusted advisor/problem
solver).


Below are some benefits of using Lead Generation Software:


Time Saver:

Gone are the days where salespeople would Google prospect companies,
search and search to find the decision makers name only for them to
reject the call as they are unfamiliar with your brand or service. Lead
Generation software saves time, in that salespeople are not searching
the web for hours, sometimes procrastinating to delay the inevitable
cold-call. Salespeople know exactly who requires their service; they
will not waste time being interruptive or invasive toward a prospect who
is not interested. This time can be better spent engaging with a
qualified lead, and solving their problems, rather than exhibiting
products that are not required.

Eliminating the pressures of Lead Generation will give salespeople the
time to concentrate on their primary role – which is selling. This would
in-turn increase morale, as it can be deflating to spend hours sourcing
leads only to fall at the first hurdle.


Reduced Cost Per Lead:

Lead Generation software can reduce the cost per lead plus it makes
sense that, if your sales reps are not selling; they are costing you
money. Many companies will calculate how much it costs to generate a
lead or prospect plus the cost of the sales professional on top of this.
There are also costs incurred when training sales teams to generate
leads, not to mention the costs of monitoring their efforts internally.

It is more cost effective to automate or outsource Lead Gen efforts, as a
business can have peace of mind that the volume and quality of leads is
ongoing. Automated lead generation is a 24/7 solution, allowing sales
people to focus on selling – not sourcing.


Continuous Lead Flow:

By using a Lead Generation tool, you will receive a continuous steady
flow of prospects every day resulting in a more efficient sales process.
Realistically, sales teams will suspend their prospecting efforts once
they have secured a qualified lead. When this deal is finally complete,
salespeople have to begin the lead generation process all over again,
starting from scratch.

The impact on revenue can result in peaks and dips, in turn making it
harder to forecast and budget. This see-saw effect can see a company
experience a spike in revenue once sales are made, but when the sales
professionals are busy prospecting; revenue can drop as they are not
selling. Using Lead Generation software will eliminate these
inconsistencies and provide a business with a regular flow of sales
leads.



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Lead Generation Software Tools | Instant Lead Generation For Social Selling