Statistics show that 91% of marketers see an increase in web traffic by investing just six hours a week in content marketing. Since a few hours of work can offer such staggering results, it only makes sense to have a content strategy to guide your inbound marketing efforts.
The main objective of your content marketing strategy should be to build awareness about your company, while offering relevant information to your target audiences. This will help you generate leads, build brand recall, establish expertise and drive purchase. To ensure that your content marketing strategy achieves all this and more, ensure you incorporate the 5 Cs.
Customer
The main objective of content marketing is to inform, educate and entertain your target audience, as well as to urge them to act. Thus, your content marketing strategy should be centred around the customers’ needs, problems, attitudes, triggers and purchase patterns.
Content
Once you identify your target audience and what they’re looking for, the next important step is to focus on creating content that addresses this. Apart from being relevant, informative and compelling, it must stand out. To ensure this, employ long-form content formats, like white papers and e-books, at various points in your sales funnel and make the most of other snackable content types, such as snippets, podcasts, GIFs, videos, infographics, and gifographics.
Consistency
Apart from adding to your audience, you must also work on retaining your audience. The key to achieving this is being consistent with your content marketing efforts. This means continually putting out content so that your audience has a reason to come back. Remember, to have a long-term relationship with your customers, give them a reason to stay!
Circulation
The next step is to circulate your content in such a manner that it doesn’t go unnoticed by your target audience. To align your content with your clientele’s consumption patterns, you have to evaluate content insights. Analyse where most of your traffic is coming from, which days of the week customers are more active online and at what time. Accordingly, chalk out how, when and where you’ll publish content. If your audience engages with blog posts in the first half of the day, for example, make sure that this is when you publish and promote new ones.
Conversion
Content is an investment that you make and conversion is the ultimate ROI. At the end of the day, your content marketing strategy must result in conversion in the form of subscriptions or purchases. While this will happen organically, you can speed up the process by creating content that promotes products/services, the ethos of your company, testimonials and reviews. Such content establishes you as a trustworthy entity, and encourages a greater segment of your audience to become paying customers.
Base your content marketing strategy on these 5 Cs and ensure that quality content is at the core. For a professional approach towards content creation and publishing, grow your business with Edisol.
