As Internet usage has increased more than tenfold over the past twenty years, the way people consume information has changed dramatically.
As a result, it’s not enough for businesses to have an “online presence.” To be successful, brands must provide the information their audience is seeking in the right way, the right format and the right place… all while following SEO, social media and content marketing best practices.
1.Strategy Development
Developing a holistic strategy is the first step to success with any business initiative, and the same is true for online marketing. Your strategy should be focused on effectively reaching your audience online, but should also support the business’ overall goals and objectives – the main goal typically being to drive revenue.
In addition to outlining your goals, to create an effective strategy you’ll need to consider the following:
What are our benchmarks? Record benchmarks of your traffic, conversions, leads, cost per lead, etc. to better measure success over the course of time.
Who are we trying to reach? Research your audience and where they hang out online, as this is where you need to be.
Who is involved internally? Identify internal stakeholders and their roles in the content marketing process.
How will we measure success? What metrics will you measure against? What does success look like to your business?
2.Ideation
Once you have developed a strategy, it’s time to get the creative juices flowing in the ideation step of the process. Every business has a story – but now it’s time to determine what your business’ story is, and how you are going to tell it.
To do this, first brainstorm how you can help your customers. What issues does your audience face? What problems do customers seek to fix time and time again? What information do people need to make a purchase decision?
Additionally, consider what your competitors are doing to help your audience. Are there gaps in competitor content coverage that you can capitalize on? How can you present the same information better?
The answers to the above questions will help mold your story throughout the ideation stage and provide inspiration for the next step: content creation.
3.Content Creation
With a solid idea of what information your audience wants and what your competitors are (or aren’t) doing in the space, you’re ready to create content. Though online content creation can be relatively low-cost depending on the format, your content can’t be low quality whatsoever. With the amount of content produced growing each day, only the cream of the crop will rise to the top of the SERPs and resonate with audiences.
Keeping that in mind, decide what type or format your content would be best presented in. Some options include:
Product/services pages
Blog posts
Infographics
Videos
Whitepapers
Case studies
As a publisher, you have the opportunity to earn your audience’s trust and turn each visitor into a customer through each and every piece of content you create. Make the most of that opportunity to help, educate and entertain your audience through every word and image on your website.
4.Optimization
In addition to creating content that is useful to your audience, you must optimize your content for search to increase findabiility, while maintaining the overall content quality. Though your content should be created first and foremost for your customers, keep in mind that you ultimately have another audience: the search engines that present your website to users in the SERPs. You’ll need to consider:
Keywords
On-site factors
Meta data
Canonicalization
Duplicate content
Optimizing your content will provide both visitors and search engines more information about your brand. As visitors can take these cues, like title tags and copy headings, into consideration when they are on your website, search engines can use the information to better rank your content for relevant search terms.
5.Content Promotion
Post optimization, your content is ready to be promoted. Your promotion plan will depend largely on the industry you operate in and your audience’s online preferences. If you’re targeting a younger audience, you may promote heavily on Facebook and Instagram. However, if your target audience is adult professionals, you may see the most success by promoting your content on LinkedIn, through media releases and your blog.
Additionally, link building and paid advertising each play a role in content promotion. Legitimate link earning can have positive content marketing results by possibly increasing search engine rankings, and in turn, visibility. Alternatively, pay-per-click and native advertising can increase traffic from users on relevant search pages and other websites.
6.Distribution
Furthermore, content distribution is another key element to winning at search, social and content marketing. While content promotion is about driving people to engage with content on your website, distribution focuses on reaching audiences off site, like on video and presentation sites and in industry publications.
To effectively distribute your content across a variety of channels, consider repurposing content you have previously created that has been successful. Content repurposing allows you to get the most out of your content investment by saving time, money and other resources by means of recycling the same content idea or theme.
For example, a webinar can be recorded and uploaded to YouTube as a video, but additionally, the presenter slides can be added to Slideshare. You can then write a blog post about the same topic, linking to the content posted on other channels. Create content once, but use the same piece many times by editing and tweaking for different platforms.
7.Lead Nurture
After successfully completing the first six steps, you should begin to see the fruits of your labor and find your content working for you – driving leads, customers and revenue. However, though you may be seeing some conversion, not every lead generated is turning into a sale. Luckily, that isn’t something unique to your business, and is to be somewhat expected.
Not every user who engages with your content will be ready to make a purchase. Some users may be doing research for an upcoming purchase and are in the early stages of the buy cycle, while others are possibly comparing vendors, trying to make a purchase decision.
However, disregarding warm, content-downloading leads is bad for both parties. Fortunately, lead nurturing can help turn those warm leads into hot leads. Through lead nurturing, you can help to pull users through the buy cycle by re-messaging with content similar to what they interacted with initially through an e-nurture stream. Similarly, you can set up a triggered delivery of content based on certain actions taken by a prospect through lead scoring.
8.Measurement
Remember those goals you outlined in the first step – developing a documented strategy? Tracking metrics against your goals and benchmarks is the only way to understand how successful your strategy is, where you need to make improvements, and most importantly, calculate your return on investment.
Overall, each of the eight steps in the process is critical to achieving success with search, social and content marketing. From developing a strategy and creating great content to optimizing for search and promoting and distributing across networks and channels, together the eight steps make for a winning approach to online marketing.
