Are you struggling to bring in consistent new leads for your business? Did you know that companies who utilize inbound marketing increase their leads by 72%? If you’re not fully utilizing the power of content marketing, then you’re leaving money on the table.
Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about inbound marketing and using the right content marketing tools to grow your business.
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Content marketing is not a new trend
Content marketing isn’t new, however, in its current form as a subset of digital marketing, content marketing has changed the way companies attract new clients and sell their products or services online.
Content marketing has three main tenets, or goals, these are:
- Deliver valuable, consistent content
- Attract the target audience for your business
- Convert those visitors into a valuable and profitable action
Imagine how content marketing can scale your business, as it drives consistent leads and sales every day. That is the power of using content to drive your marketing machine. However, any machine is only as good as the tools you use to run it.
Top content marketing tools
When people think of content marketing, they might jump to thinking that posting on social media and submitting press releases is the answer. However, these are simply tactics that can help you reach your goals. What you need is to create a foundation that can help you use content marketing to bring in new customers regardless of the tactic or platform.
And the best way to do that is to use these five content marketing tools we’ll show you today. With these in your toolbox, you’ll be able to stay agile with your marketing and stay relevant regardless of which social media platform emerges in the coming years. So, whether you’re posting videos to TikTok or long-form content to LinkedIn, you can use these tools to set up your business for success.
1. Follow marketing trends
The first and most important tool in your toolbox is market research. You must become intimately knowledgeable in every aspect of your industry. Take the time to know what your competition is doing and what your customers are asking every day.
The best way to do that is to follow the SEO trends. When you follow the data and track the trends over time, you’ll start to see when change is coming, so you can be in front of it instead of always reacting. Your competition is paying attention, so don’t risk falling behind by not taking the time to track the trends in your industry on a regular basis.
When was the last time you ran a complete competitor analysis on their content? Was it when you created your content marketing strategy as you were starting at the company? If so, then it’s time to do it again, and then schedule time each quarter to return to this task and watch the trends in your market.
Running a complete content gap analysis can help you to identify what you are missing and help you define what your next steps are.
Finally, take the time to listen to your customers, both current and former. One of the best ways to do this is to sit down with your customer service team. What questions do they find themselves answering over and over again, and what complaints do they field regularly?
Listen to the feedback and you’ll quickly find valuable information that your future prospective clients might be asking. Then you can create the type of content that resonates with your audience and builds your authority in your field.
2. Create a winning SEO strategy
Once you know what is trending in your industry, it’s time to create your strategy. We touched on the concept of rushing into tactics too soon. Unfortunately, too many marketers confuse strategy with tactics.
While separate and unique, your strategy and tactics work best when they work in conjunction with each other. Your strategy is the overarching plan for how your marketing will enable your company to reach its overall goals. Your tactics are the tasks or action steps that you’ll take to accomplish your strategy.
To see the best success with your content marketing, you must have a winning SEO content strategy in place. Your strategy is based on intensive research and planning. Too many businesses don’t see the value in taking the time to do the initial research necessary that will enable them to create the best strategy.
Then create your content marketing strategy in the second step.
3. Optimize your old content and reshare it
Making sure that you keep your content up-to-date and optimized for SEO is essential for increasing traffic and staying on top of Google’s search results. Using tools like Google Search console to check which keywords you are ranking for and their clickthrough rates can help you to optimize your content and stay ahead of your competitors.
Without optimizing your old content, it will eventually be relegated to the bottom of the pile, leaving it wide open for your competitors. Updating your content more regularly so that it keeps appearing at the top of the search engines. This will ensure that your traffic will increase and you’ll beat out your competition.
Make sure that you are always adding new value to your content, and up-to-date links to your old content.
Then as a final step, promote your most popular content more regularly so that you get traffic to these pages more regularly.
4. Test, test, test
Testing should be a major part of your content marketing. You can A/B test headlines (Just like the New York times does) to see what gets more engagement.
If you’re doing press releases, you can even try different press release templates and see what works the best and bring more traction to your campaigns.
Plus, don’t just limit this to on-page headlines. You can split-test social media posts as well and test to see what works best for your audience. Facebook has its own tool you can use, and Hootsuite offers A/B testing.
This way you can finetune future posts to appeal to your audience more and increase your traffic.
5. Start an affiliate program
Affiliate marketing can help to boost your traffic. It’s a low-cost strategy where a business gets people (websites, influencers, comparison sites, etc.,) to promote their products or services in exchange for a percentage commission on every sale.
You can work directly with affiliates to organize specific campaigns around your business. Oftentimes affiliates are great at marketing and know what type of campaign will drive the most traffic to your website.
By bringing on affiliates, you can drive a continual flow of traffic and new leads to your website. And, as we’ve shown, when you use the right tools, you can build upon your foundation successfully.
Remember, not all traffic was created equally
Creating content just because you want more traffic is fun, but if it isn’t the right traffic then that will result in lost sales and poor conversation rates. That’s not so fun.
Instead, laser focus your content on your audience and their needs. And look at your content gap analysis and strategy to assess what the best steps are in terms of content. Evergreen content is an absolute must – you can simply update it whenever you need to without worrying about whether it will be obsolete in a year or two.
Before you start to write, always ask yourself “What is the purpose of this content?”. This allows you to be strategic and helps you to attract people who may be interested in your product or service to your site.
Good content should always answer questions, help customers with their pain points, and provide a solution.
Use buyer personas, pain points, and the customer service team as resources to find ideas for content to create for your audience.
Tip: Improve your conversion rate
All the traffic in the world won’t do you any good if you can’t convert your website visitors into prospective leads. That’s why the final tool in your toolbox needs to be conversion rate optimization.
You want to convert your traffic into profitable action. This action can include a multitude of options and must align with your overall business goal.
If you’re operating a SaaS business model, your desired action will be to convert visitors to try your product for a free trial period. Your funnel will then focus on providing the most amazing product and customer service during that trial period to convert to a paying monthly subscriber.
If you’re in the B2B market, you could offer a white paper report. Or if you run an e-commerce store, you could offer a coupon off their first purchase. Regardless of what you offer, you need to ensure that it does two things:
- Solve a real problem your audience has
- Naturally leads to your paying offer
As you can see your content marketing doesn’t stop with that initial post on social media. You must also have an informative and compelling website. And, finally, you must also have optimized bottom of the funnel content that converts as well.
Planning out your funnels in advance is essential for success.
How content marketing can increase your bottom line
Creating a strategy around your content marketing can help you to increase your traffic. Without, you’ll spend most of your time guessing. Instead, pay attention to your competitors, create a strong SEO strategy including updating old content. Test everything. Focus on your end-users, and not just on increasing traffic – you want the right traffic for your business. Consider an affiliate marketing program to boost your traffic. Hopefully, these tips will help you to grow your traffic.
Now that you’ve built a solid foundation in your content marketing, what will you do with the traffic you’re converting? Your content marketing efforts are only part of the puzzle when it comes to building your business. Once you’ve attracted the attention of possible prospects, it’s time to turn those results into income.
