An effective content marketing project drives target traffic and generates leads. Search engines like Google tend to rank websites that feature regularly updated and quality content. But sadly, some marketers and webmasters today do not realize that relevant content is one of the most critical success factors in digital marketing and SEO.
Amidst the global pandemic affecting most countries of the world, businesses more than ever interact with customers and prospects not face-to-face but through digital content. According to Content Marketing Institute, in 2020 buyers engaging with websites encompass 77% of the sales cycle and only 21% talking to a person with salespeople.
If you haven’t yet, you need to realize that content has a bigger lead generation potential than talking to a person, that’s impressive. Your content marketing projects are your sales opportunities in fact.
In this article, I’m going to give you some advice regarding content marketing and promotion. Here I describe 4 basic rules that can help you plan and implement your content marketing projects.
When you work on the development and promotion of your website(s), obviously you need a kind of marketing campaign that could allow you to get and promote great articles. But how do you go about making your content marketing project effective?
Marketing’s holy grail is getting the right content to the right people at the right time. This sounds simple in theory, but making it happen requires thorough planning and coordination.
In this regard, I suggest that you follow these 4 basic rules:
- Pay for Quality Content
- Calculate ROI
- Prioritize Expenses
- Syndicate Content
#1. Pay for Quality Content
Success of any website project (a blog, online shop, news portal, or whatever else) greatly depends on the quality of content it offers to its visitors. Website owners who hire good copywriters are likely to reach target audience and get high ranking for their online projects. Why? Because they realize that content quality (along with other factors such as on-page SEO, socializing, link building, others) is the driving force for website ranking.
If you’re going to pay for cheap and irrelevant articles, your content marketing project is likely to fail and make your website uninteresting for visitors and suspicious for search engines. That’s why, be ready to allocate a considerable amount of money dedicated to relevant high-quality content.
Rule #1: The quality of your website’s content is critical to successful marketing. Allocate an adequate budget for your marketing project that will let you hire good writers and pay for quality, not quantity.
#2. Calculate ROI
Everything that you do within your marketing project needs to be measured and compared to some basis. For example, you purchase a well-written article at $20, then you publish it, and after some time your target customer reads it and does a needed “Call To Action” (e.g. purchasing the software you sell). As a result, the customer pays you say $200, and “Wow!” your net profit is $180!
But how do you know how many call-to-actions your target customers do in a given period of time? And what will be the net profit?
I suggest you calculate expected return on investment (ROI) each amount you invest within your content marketing campaign. If you pay say $300 for 10 articles, estimate how much money you can earn per article within 1 month (or another period, but not less than 1 month).
To track your sales leads and calculate ROI, learn to set and follow ecommerce goals in your web analytics system (like Google Analytics, Matomo, Clicky, others).
Rule #2: Keep track of your spending and earning and use ROI to determine the financial success of your content marketing project. Also consider using key performance indicators or KPIs (such as Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate, Visitor Loyalty, others) in your web analytics system to find out how many leads each article generates.
#3. Prioritize Expenses
When you use ROI and other KPIs in your content marketing project, you are able to understand which articles make more money and thus which expenses in your budget are better to cut off or increase.
The key is to keep everything prioritized. By using your web conversion analytics you can determine which articles are of higher priority because they generate more leads.
Through prioritizing you don’t have to break your project budget as the expenses of your content marketing campaign are always aligned with your funds and are allocated to lead-generating content. And if you set right priority, you are likely to see an increase in traffic and sales soon.
Rule #3: Set priority per expense item in order to allocate your budget to target content. When you get everything prioritized, address the most urgent content needs first.
#4. Syndicate Content
It is a best practice in SEO and web content promotion to publish articles on authoritative, relevant blogs and websites all over the web. It is about syndication. Syndicated content is published on multiple different articles directories and e-zines.
The idea behind using syndication within your content marketing project is to add your articles to different newspapers and content directories all over the world in order to get plenty of quality back-links and earn targeted traffic.
Rule #4: Write quality content and publish it on different authoritative and relevant e-zines and article directories. In such a way you can tell everybody you’re an expert in the given field and generate traffic that doesn’t depend on search engines.
Conclusion
Effective means having the desired result. In this regard, an effective content marketing project means that the marketing objectives (e.g. website awareness, more sales leads, increased traffic) are achieved and the target problems (e.g. lower conversion, high bounce rate, poor ranking) are solved.
In this article I wrote about 4 rules you can follow to make your content marketing project effective. Those rules are about paying for quality content, using KPIs, prioritizing costs, and syndicating articles. Hopefully, my suggestions will help you do your marketing projects much more effective as they are. Good luck!