Create a DYNAMIC Content Strategy for 2014 BY BLASTWAVEDIGITAL.COM SAY HELLO@BLASTWAVEDIGITAL.COM
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING? “Is content marketing worth it? Will it even affect my business growth?” Content marketing attracts and retains customers by curating and creating relevant content with the intention of attracting customers to your website and retaining them (getting repeat visits). Content marketing doesn’t ‘pitch’ a product or service. It educates your customer, and encourages them to build a relationship with you. The theory is that providing your customers with valuable information results in them being loyal to your brand. Does it work? Hell yeah! Huge companies such as Exxon, Walmart and At&t create regular content as well as thousands of small businesses and one man bands!
80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles rather than from an ad. If you’re still messaging your target audience with a sales pitch about why they should buy from your company - then you’re missing a trick! What does Content Marketing cover?
- blogs - podcasts - whitepapers - ebooks - magazines - emails - case studies - infographics - guest writers - interviews - faqs - case studies ... y’know, stuff like that.
BECOMMING A PUBLISHER “Wait - this is starting to sound like a lot of effort! “
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hy is it so important? Well, although posting links to other peoples content has it’s use, if you’re serious about generating leads from social media and increasing your web traffic - you need he modern digital landscape means that to create content that’s available on your site. businesses have had to adapt to building a site to assist sales. In more recent times, a • Draw traffic to your site that makes people aware of your business. business site should be the central hub of inbound and outbound sales. Websites should be a living, • Encourage people to book mark your business site. functional entity that can change fluidly when need- • Keep people on your site for longer. ed - rather than a static ‘business card’ type of set- • Highlights ‘call to action’ buttons. up. If your website isn’t easily updatable - it’s time to find one that is! Businesses not only need to be ready when it comes to their website - the also need to become small scale internet publishers! Sound like a lot of work? It is! But it’s well worth investing in.
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Social Media +Content Marketing = ROI
Become a ‘thought leader’ or industry influencer (aka someone who knows what they’re on about)
“I need some ideas please!’” Why not try: • Blogs • Podcasts • E-books • Magazines • Tutorial • Videos • Animations • Guest writers • FAQ (frequently asked questions). • Create a bundle of blogs on a certain subject that can be downloaded. • Create memes on megenerator.com • Make a visual text post for Facebook. Make the colours bright in a bold text to grab attention. • Take fun pictures of your work environment. • Case studies
ANALYSING YOUR COMPETITION “Where do I start?”
Don’t worry if you’re late to the content marketing game - it’s never too late to start. The best thing to do is to have a look at your competitors. Make a list of your five main competitors. Do they have a social media presence on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter? Take a look at how many followers they have on each profile, how frequently they are posting, what kind of content they are writing and how engaged are they with their audience.
Make sure you stand out from the crowd. Now you have a bench mark of what you need to beat, but most importantly you have an idea of the general environment your business is being marketed in. If you know what your competitors are doing you now know how important it is to do it bigger, better, but most importantly, differently.
TOOLS TO HELP: These tools will help provide information on the back-end stats of your competitors content production and social media activity. You will find some very useful insights. RIVAL IQ SIMPLY MEASURED WHOS WINNING IN SOCIAL
“What should I post where?!”
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witer posts need to be short and snappy. 120 - 130 charachters have the best results. Use action verbs to encourage click throughs! You can get away with posting on Twitter very regularly, so make use of it by posting frequently to make sure your content gets seen morning, noon and night.
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inkedIn is a good place to post for group discussion. People will often comment if they have enjoyed the article. People on LinkedIn also like motivational quotes and stories. You have peoples attention span on LinkedIn for longer than on Facebook and Twitter, so take advantage of that by
posting intelligent and well thought out blog posts. Posting to LinkedIn groups is a very effective traffic generator. People don’t want to see your office party photos on LinkedIn - save that stuff for Facebook.
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acebook has best results when posted to evenings and weekends. (Most people aren’t allowed on Facebook at work). Facebook gives you a good platform to post visual content - and this gets seen and appreciated much more than on any other kind of platform. Words like ‘I’ and ‘Me’ go down well on Facebook as it’s a very personal platform.
WHO ARE YOU CREATING FOR? How do I know I’m writing something people will like?” Who is your typical customer? Why do they want your product or service? What problem does your business fix for them? For example, our target customer could be a small business who can’t afford to outsource a marketing department but know they need it - for them we would write content such as ‘10 free tools to help you manage your social media’ - so they would build trust with us and contact us when they are ready to buy. Or, we could have an older more established customer who might be able to afford social media but doesn’t see the point in it as they’ve managed without it for 20 years. For this customer we might write ‘ why you’re missing out on new customers without a digital strategy’. • Create a ‘bioprofile’ for each kind of customer you have. Write what their job title is, what there professional and personal needs are. What they do in their free time. How they talk, things they might be likely to say. This will help you, or more junior people in your business understand them and write for them. • What problems does your potential customer have that you can fix? Think about it from this angle rather that a ‘what’s so great about my business that I can sell’ type of perspective. • Sounding knowledgable about issues your customers might be having adds reputation and trust to your business (and it’s earned trust, not a quick fix, so your customer will appreciate it more).
• Conduct a survey to find out more about your customer and get to know them better. • It may be tempting to present yourself and business as an intellectual expert but remember your customer is likely to know much less about your service or product than you are, so write it in a simple way that anyone can understand. They’ll appreciate you not bombarding them with buzzwords that make you sound clever!
Customer talk more with us about this on LinkedIn
ELIMINATE anyrisks Buying is a risky business for any customer. There is a lot of risk involved - which goes up the more money they are investing. For a large purchase that your customer is held responsible for, they may have a big anxiety about buying. Help to soothe this anxiety with content marketing and social media.
Good Content Making good copy writing is easier than it sounds. In the past businesses tried to assert themselves as an authority by using long, dry words and speaking in a very formal tone. They thought it would make them seem like a bigger business or seem ‘important’ or reputable. Nowadays, it’s much easier to start up a business than it was 50 years ago! So many businesses are small and it’s not much of an issue anymore. Just be yourself! With social media our customers can reach out to us and talk to us on a much more personal level - so don’t alienate them by talking back to them in a stuffy formal manner.
• Make your content mobile and tablet friendly. There are several design tablets available online that are already optimised for mobile/ tablet. • Make your content in a large(ish) font. You’re dealing with busy, modern people with many distractions so make it easy for them to follow. • Don’t use big words. You may be dealing with intelligent, professional people but using words that sound like they come from a victorian novel with alienate your customers, not impress them. • Write how your customer talks (not how you talk). Sales people learn to talk to their
customer on the level they want to be spoken to, whether it’s a CEO or assistant - they can adapt their language depending on who they’re having a conversation with. Us marketers need to do the same. • Write in short paragraphs, keep is snappy. People like to read short things - you don’t want to make them feel like they’re studying for their A-levels all over again. • Assume people aren’t going to read the whole of your content. Format your copy to suit that style of reading. Make it easy to ‘pick’ at an article/blog rather than plough through the whole thing.
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Long Term Your customer is your long term partner, don’t just aime your content at new leads! Make content to your customers to aim for repeat business. Use content marketing to make your customer feel special.
“Can I sell through content?” Before we answer this question, lets go through the ‘buying cycle’; Cold sales eliminates the early process of a buying cycle. Cold calls are ‘interruption marketing’ . It takes 8 attempts to reach a prospect on average (Telenet and Ovation sales group). The average sales person only makes 2 attempts before giving up (Sirius Decisions). Only 2% of cold calls result in an appointment (Leap Job). Email marketing has 2x higher ROI than cold calling, yet businesses continue to invest tens of thousands of pounds in outsourced call centres. Instead of throwing your time/money down the drain with cold calling, invest that money into warming up your leads - so that prospects are sourced further down the buying cycle and already know and trust your brand before a sales rep even picks up the phone. Companies who invest in lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads (Forrester).
PIPELINE
So yes, you can use content to produce fiscal results, but it works as part of a complete process. Don’t expect people to pick up the phone and make an enquiry based on one blog or tweet interaction.
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BUYING CYCLE Awareness ‘What’s this?’
Social media, blogs, e-shots.
Research/EducaEbooks, webinars, tion video tutorials. ‘Do we need this?’ Comparison ‘Is this the best business to buy off?’ Purchase ‘I deffo want it!’
Case studies, demos, testimonials.
USING CONTENT TO CLOSE It’s all very well and good creating content that’s fun, interesting and shareable, but content with no call to action won’t cut the mustard! Your content cycle should look something like this...... 1. Social media directs to content on website 2. Content directs to sign up, or some way of capruring data. 3. Data captures desrired information about customer which can be used for sales team/ email marketing. 4. Customer is rewarded with more content.
Create varieties of content so that you have an insight about your customer based on what they’re downloading/reading.
“How do I create call to actions?” Here’s some tips for creating killer call to actions: • Create awareness of a need/ desire for product in main content. • Create urgency ‘free trial only available today!’ , or ‘20% off everything this week!’. • Attract people with a bright call to action button - read more about those on our blog. • TELL people what you want them to do. Too many sigh up/ fill in this/ etc call to actions don’t tell people what’s actually expected of them. • Give a reward - customers should be thanked for being your customer. ‘Thankyou so much for keeping up to date with our blogs, we really appreciate it. As a thankyou, please follow this link and input your details for your free E-book’. • Free, new, instantly, quick - these words stimulate peoples brains. Words that indicate speed creates a vision of a problem being solved immediatley which creates satusfaction.
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