Many people will tell you that an important aspect of online marketing is content. They will say that there needs t be a content strategy that will leverage social, keyword research, voice definition and so on to build a successful online marketing campaign. What needs to be the core focus of your content strategy is HOW to use content, which will help drive sales and conversions. Did you know that there are a number of ways that content can be used to help give us information about those people who are in the buy cycle of the marketing funnel?
The creation of content for your business can be quite difficult to do if you want people to share it with others. Large enterprises tend to write content that is usually there just to sell what the company is selling. Some businesses will create content just to create it, and they don’t realize that anything has been done in content strategy, besides building links and increasing SEO. But it doesn’t really matter if you’re getting higher page rankings on the search engines if you’re sales aren’t going up, right?
Here is a question to ask yourself. How can you create engaging content when you’re selling something that isn’t sales related, or just plain boring? It’s one thing if you’re selling something that’s exciting like a new car, or a hit movie that just came out. That’s easy to write content for.
How do you go about writing appealing content for something that isn’t sales related, but will still make people want to share and engage in the content you’ve created?
How about creating informative webinars about healthcare reform? Those who have signed up for the webinar are also entered into a Healthcare Reform specific nurture campaign. Using marketing automation and your CRM, give these people quality content that will provide even more information about healthcare reform. Once in a while, throw in some indicator content on a problem that your service or product can solve.
Assuming that the potential customer has taken your lead, the person’s contact information is transferred over to the inside sales team. The customer is then invited to a sales webinar, which would include EMR implementation and coding services. Regardless if the webinar is attended by that person, they’ve shown interest in your service. This can have a much greater impact on customer relations than giving them a call, explaining why they need what you’re selling.
Even better, if the person takes the sales content that you’ve provided, then they will probably be fast tracked. In this case, you just scored a sales conversion with the right type of content. And as long as you’re continuing to creating quality content, you should be golden.
By creating content in this way, you can engage other potential customers. Creating informative bits of content that can end up helping people, you’re building trust. Content, like webinars and white paper, are great for getting people aware of your service or product, and can lead into a nurturing campaign that is tailored to their needs and interests. Many people who love putting leads into their nurture campaigns tend to do it wrong. They will group everybody together and then spam them with everything you’ve created. This will not work, as most of the content you’re showing them won’t mean a thing to them. You want to show people only the content they want to see.
A good, clean and effective strategy requires us to build a level of trust amongst those who consume our content. Once you’ve built up that trust with your consumer base, people will be more willing to listen to your sales message. And guess what? You’ll get more customers, and sales will follow.
You can’t worry about trying to prove that you are getting a great ROI on every campaign. Just be cool about it and get out a great conversion. Patience and consistency (which is even more important that patience) is required in content marketing. With an effective content strategy, you can prove causation.
The easy part is creating content for your brand. Creating high quality content can be quite difficult. Having interesting and engaging content can be used to pinpoint those who are in the buying cycle. What needs to be understood is that having links and social shares is good, but make sure your content is high quality, or you’ll end up looking bad.