The content marketing works provided you go about it the right way. The problem with this discipline is that there isn’t really a middle ground: you can have incredible results, or you can not have the slightest economic benefit from your content.
In this article, we come back to the different practices to put in place to obtain a convincing ROI (return on investment) with your content marketing strategy.
Set your goals:
To know your return on investment, you must first know the goals you want to achieve. Whether it’s writing a blog post, a LinkedIn post, or creating a 30-page e-book: you need to know why you’re doing it and what you’re aiming to achieve.
What is the purpose of your content? Ideally, what should your readers do after consuming your content?
To take my example, the purpose of this blog is to:
- Building the Thought Leadership of Sortlist
- Bring traffic to our transactional pages
What’s also important to understand is that your goal will determine what kind of content you create and where you distribute it.
Here are some examples of goals:
- Increase your brand awareness
- Improve customer loyalty
- Increase your turnover
- Acquire new customers
Defining your goals is therefore the first step to having ROI in content marketing.
Determine the important parameters of your campaign:
Once you have set your goals, you need to determine the indicators you are going to monitor. Concretely, how will you measure the effectiveness of your content? For example, you can monitor:
- The number of leads generated by your content
- The quality of these leads
- The traffic generated by your content
- The commitment rate your brand on social networks
In addition, the criteria you choose will strongly depend on the goals you set for yourself. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, it will be the number of clicks, mentions, and website traffic that you need to watch.
Find topics relevant to your readers:
How do I find ideas for interesting topics? It is not enough to think of ideas and go for them on instinct.
To be successful in content marketing, you need to adopt a keyword research strategy.
There are several steps to follow to find these keywords, and therefore the topics you should cover:
- Start with general keywords related to your industry, products, or services. Since this is just a starting point, you can easily brainstorm about it.
- Think about what your audience needs to know about the topic in question. Remember that this knowledge should help them in one way or another.
- Use keyword research tools to find out how competitive these terms are and how searched for.
To find additional keywords, you can use a tool like Also Asked or Answer the Public. But you can also use Quora or Reddit to see what are the most asked questions, related to your industry.
The idea, in doing keyword research, is to see what topics your audience is looking for information on. This will let you know where the demand is, and how your content can meet it.
At this level, good content includes:
- Useful and relevant information for your readers.
- Keywords with low competition and on which you can rank easily.
- Some examples that illustrate your point.
Promote your content:
Producing content is only part of the job. We must also promote it. In your strategy, you should plan to promote your content to ensure that it will be visible.
For example, you can:
- Partner with other sites to promote your content and generate backlinks .
- Work with influencers to improve your visibility on social networks.
- Invest in online advertising to give more visibility to your content.
Of course, there is a limit to how often you can promote content without disturbing your audience.
Plus, don’t just promote your content when it’s just published. A topic you touched on a few years ago may resurface and become topical again, which is a great opportunity to introduce it to your readers.
Recycle your content:
To maximize your return on investment, use each of your content to its full potential. For example, if you are posting a blog post, consider how you can reuse it on another platform:
- Instagram Story
- Twitter Thread
- Post LinkedIn
- Script for a video
- Infographics
- Etc.
It will also allow you to release the pressure and produce content more easily.
Update your content regularly:
Time flies and the content ages. Faced with this observation, you have two possibilities:
- Produce so-called “Evergreen” content, which is supposed to remain valid for several years (eg: “How to structure a press release” or “How to change a light bulb”).
- Update your content regularly, and come back to it periodically.
The best thing is to combine the two methods: producing Evergreen content for the long term and devoting time to updating your other content.
These regular updates have a number of advantages:
- Your readers will see that the information is up to date and that you take the time to provide articles that stay current.
- Google pushes new content to the top of search engine results.
- Updating your old content gives you a good excuse to promote it again. This means that you can reach new audiences besides those who missed it the first time around.
So take the time to come back to your content to keep it up to date.
Do not abandon:
Content marketing takes time. It is a long-term strategy, which requires a lot of financial and human resources. So much so that some businesses are losing patience with their content marketing investments and going out of business far too soon. This compromises their chances of having a significant and lasting return on their investment.
The ROI of content marketing is all about long term results. Of course, there are measurable results in the short term, like increased web traffic and the number of conversions. In general, it is only after 6 months of constant investment that the first results begin to appear.
Conclusion:
As explained at the beginning of the article, content marketing works and can bring significant results to a business. That said, it is necessary to follow certain steps, to do it the right way, and especially to invest for the long term.
It is also strongly recommended to work with an agency specializing in content to maximize your results.
