Content Marketing a More Subtle Marketing Channel
 

Building a useful website is only half the battle. One of the toughest challenges when launching a new site is to get new users to "sign up," make a purchase and tell their friends. As consumers trust brand advertising less and less, making your site "useful" to potential consumers has become an effective tactic. We encourage our clients to do this by publishing informative content.

It's All About the Choice of Topics

Allowing your writers to write about any topic they randomly choose seldom generates new customers. The goal with content marketing is not to entertain to simply fill a page with any words. We identify targeted consumer segments most likely to purchase your product or service. Then, we identify topics each segment tends to search for on Google.

As consumers trust brand advertising less and less, making your site "useful" to potential consumers has become an effective tactic.

The topics we present to you are not highly "sales-y" articles that say "Company X's products are the best." In some cases, our topics may not be 100 percent aligned with sales. For example, although a company may sell flooring and carpeting, a "how to" article may be titled "How to refinish a hardwood floor" or "how to clean Berber carpeting." By offering these free resource tips, your company can build trust with the consumer. Potential customers think, "Hey, this company really knows its stuff and there were some facts here that I was not aware of. I trust them."

You can also use this content in your email marketing campaigns by including these topics in your editorial plan for your newsletter.

Calls to Action Are Crucial to Obtaining a Sale

Most writers tend to place a passive mention to promote your product at the end of a long article. Key to content effectiveness is placing calls to action strategically throughout the body of each article. (Remind them of the benefits of signing up for your newsletter, or ordering a particular item you sell that solves a problem identified in the article. We work with your staff to assume these calls to actions reflect what is currently promoted on your site and assure these mentions can be easily changed as your sales and campaign change.

This new content can be videos or lists, but is often "How to" articles that inform the reader. They are not highly "sales-y" articles that say "Company X's products are the best."

Who Creates Content?

It is key to give the writing task to internal staff who is highly familiar with the typical customer's personality and knows the details about the industry. We can train internal staff to become effective writers or we can recruit freelance writers who are not part of your company. We are able to manage these internal or external writers, who write "how to" articles matching the topics we recommend.

Results

Long-form content is a way to obtain qualified, engaged consumers to your site. Informative content will steadily attract new orders and sign-ups for your email newsletter forever. Unlike Pay-Per-Click campaigns, you need not continue paying for these new customers each month. While a pay-per-click campaign can end, your content will keep promoting the site forever!

Justify a Content Marketing Program

Publishing content that is aligned with topics your consumers are searching for on Google can save your campaign dollars. By choosing topics that match consumer's search queries on Google, you effectively save the cost you normally would have paid in Pay-Per-Click advertising.

Here is an example: An exercise equipment site launches a content marketing program and publishes an article on carb loading on its site. Its cost for developing this article is $147. The average cost per click in Google Adwords for "carb loading" is 87 cents. Once the company sees 169 visitors enter its site from Google and directly to its carb loading article, it has matches the cost of publishing the article.

(169 visitors valued at 87 cents per visit = $147.)

Each visit to the carb loading article after the first 169 is profitable.

It is important in this analysis to not count visitors who are already on your site or who click from an email newsletter in which the article was included.

Bonus! Learn two ways content can be used to help your other marketing channels perform better!