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How to Create a Powerful Marketing Funnel Step-by-Step

Eric Siu — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 15:00:59 +0000

The key to automating a consistent flow of qualified leads is setting up a quality marketing funnel.

And in this comprehensive guide, we’ll show you just how to do that. When it comes to creating a powerful marketing funnel, we’ll cover:

What a marketing funnel is (+ examples)
The five stages of a marketing funnel (+ the AIDA funnel)
How to create each stage of your funnel
Qualifying leads in your funnel

Easier said than done, right?

If you need help and just want to create a simple marketing funnel that best fulfills your needs, read on!

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

What Is a Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel – aka purchase funnel – is a roadmap laid out by a company to guide potential customers from their first interaction with the brand to becoming a paying customer.

This roadmap usually consists of paid ads, social media, SEO, content marketing, and many other channels.

While the concept is simple enough, conversion funnels can be very complex for a multitude of reasons, including:

There are many different marketing channels to choose from (paid ads, SEO, etc.)
Your customers may have varied pain points (a doctor who wants a survey tool may have different needs from a teacher who needs a survey tool)
Every customer has a different level of awareness (some have heard of your brand and are looking at alternatives and others don’t even know that solutions exist)

Given these variables, it’s easy to understand how creating a marketing funnel can quickly become very complex.

Even if you’ve never sat down to formally create a marketing funnel, you probably already have a funnel without knowing it. Here’s an example of what a marketing funnel might look like:

However, the reality is that most businesses have multiple funnels. In addition to capturing people through blog posts, a business might also capture prospects through paid ads, influencer marketing, or some other channel.

I’ll discuss how to choose which channel to target, but for now don’t assume there is only one way to capture new prospects.

What Is an Example of a Marketing Funnel?

An example of a marketing funnel or purchase funnel could be someone who travels the buying journey via:

Blog Post > Email List > Conversion
Podcast Ad > Blog Post > Conversion
Facebook Ad > Landing Page > Conversion
Influencer Social Post > Landing Page > Conversion

Basically, if people are purchasing your product or service online, you have a marketing funnel whether you know it or not.

Here’s an important thing to keep in mind: Although your marketing model may appear quite clear and simple on paper, it is not always that linear in real life. There are often regressions and jumps as people actually go through your marketing funnel.

For example, in the marketing funnel below, even though both Customer A and Customer B came in through content marketing, they had very different customer journeys and experienced the purchase funnel differently:

This is one of the reasons why our strategy at Single Grain is to create an omnichannel marketing plan – because you never know where you will capture potential customers. Even after a customer has made a purchase, your funnel can continue with cross-sells and upsells.

Now that you know what a funnel is and how it works, you’re probably wondering how to build one that uses the channels most appropriate for your business and isn’t ridiculously complicated.

After creating a marketing funnel that earns our business enough valuable leads to sustain a seven-figure revenue, I wanted to share a marketing funnel framework that will help you reliably generate leads regardless of your current available resources and industry.

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How Does a Marketing Funnel Work? (Stages of the Funnel)

If you’ve ever used a paper funnel at the gas station to help you pour oil directly into your car’s oil reservoir and not all over the engine, then you understand the basic idea of how a funnel works.

A marketing funnel works via stages, from the broader section at the top (Top of Funnel) that pulls in many people, through the narrower section in the middle (Middle of Funnel), and down to the even narrower section at the bottom (Bottom of Funnel) that is populated by serious buyers:

That’s why the most important thing to understand when it comes to building a marketing or purchase funnel is that you need to look at it from the customer’s perspective. Doing so will save you a lot of guesswork and headaches.

With this in mind, let’s look at the various marketing funnel stages that customers experience.

Stage 1 – Problem/Need Recognition (TOFU)

Recognizing that you have a problem is the beginning of the buying process. This is the awareness stage.

If you don’t know you have a problem, why would you purchase a solution for it? You may have gum disease, but if you don’t see or feel anything out of the ordinary in your mouth, it won’t even occur to you to do an online search for gum disease.

On the other hand, if your furnace goes out in the middle of winter, you immediately know that you have an issue and will quickly jump to the next step (information search) in the buying process. You may do a little bit of research, but because your problem is so pressing, you won’t take long.

Other products or services will require much more education. An example might be purchasing a pharmaceutical drug. In this case, a person may recognize a physical symptom (“problem”), but it might persist for some time before they take action and look for a solution.

Stage 2 – Information Search (MOFU)

Recognizing a problem or need is the step that triggers a search for more information and brings potential leads to the second stage of the funnel.

The strategies used to gather information tend to vary based on the size and scope of the purchase. Recognizing that you’re hungry, for example, might result in a quick Yelp search for restaurants in your area. Deciding which provider to hire to install a new in-ground pool at your home, on the other hand, will involve doing some search engine querying, calling around, reading customer reviews, visiting showrooms, and talking with salespeople.

According to Trust Radius, in 2021 about 33% of buyers spent more time researching products prior to purchasing than they did last year, suggesting that this stage of the funnel is becoming more in-depth. At this point, people aren’t looking for promotional content; they’re looking to learn more about potential solutions for their need.

Stage 3 – Evaluation of Alternatives (MOFU)

Once customers are aware of a solution, the next step is to compare the alternatives that your article or ad has discussed. Again, the time spent in this consideration stage will vary based on the type of purchase being contemplated. Choosing a restaurant might be as simple as deciding, “Well, I feel like Chinese food, not Mexican, tonight.”

But say the customer is evaluating marketing automation programs to help improve the sales funnel they created. Because these programs can require investments of $1,500 a month, they’re likely to undergo a much more careful and thorough evaluation process. They might seek out referrals, request free trials of the different systems they’re considering, have online demonstrations with each company’s representatives or view training videos to get a feel for how each system will perform.

If you’re running an accounting business, at this stage, the middle of the funnel, your customers would be evaluating different potential service providers. They might need resources like pricing guides (so they know what ballpark rates are), how to evaluate the landscape of accounting services (i.e. whether to hire a solo accountant, an agency, etc.), or how to choose an accountant.

If you’re running a marketing services business, you might create content about:

The above examples are non-promotional, educational content resources we’ve created for our readers who are considering hiring digital marketing agencies.

Note that prospects reaching this stage are more serious about making a purchase than customers doing initial research. Therefore, if you have limited resources, you don’t have to start at the top of the funnel. Instead, you can start by targeting only bottom of the funnel prospects for maximum conversions from minimum effort.

Stage 4 – Purchase Decision (BOFU)

The purchase stage is the natural conclusion of the preceding three stages. The potential customer has determined that they have a problem, investigated their options, decided which one is best for them… and now they’re getting ready to pull out their wallets.

At this stage, optimizing your website for conversions (CRO) is an excellent way to increase sales.

You can also provide risk-free trials, money-back guarantees, and similar offers that make purchasing your product or service a no-brainer.

Stage 5 – Post-Purchase Behavior

One more thing. The customer journey isn’t over just because a purchase has been made. What happens after the sale is just as important.

If your new customers are greeted by a thoughtful onboarding process, personal attention and all the resources they need to use your product successfully, they’re more likely to become loyal customers that refer you to friends and colleagues. And when they’re confident, they’re more likely to pass on their satisfaction to others in the form of recommendations and product endorsements.

On the other hand, if your new customers experience disappointment after their purchase, they’re more likely to request refunds, write negative reviews and recommend that others in their social circles purchase from your competitors.

There’s not much content you can create to help facilitate a good post-purchase experience — apart from just creating a great product. If you have a great product that solves a problem, post-purchase behavior will take care of itself.

And there are certain actions you can take to help facilitate better post-purchase behavior, i.e. retention. For example, you could create FAQ content, add testimonials from brand advocates, make it easier to get customer support or solicit feedback on the buying process.

Related Content: 5 Ways to Re-Engage Those Long-Lost Customers

AIDA: Another Way to Remember Content Creation Stages

There’s another way to remember the stages of the sales funnel and match them to content creation — with the acronym AIDA:

Whether you prefer the traditional sales funnel stages or the acronym AIDA, the results are the same:

Customers enter the sales funnel and through a process of discernment, choose to either move to an alternative solution or purchase from you. The action at the end of the funnel, or the purchase, concludes the stages of the conversion funnel.

Although most people enter the funnel at the top, not everyone does. Some will enter at subsequent stages, but the process remains the same no matter which stage someone enters the sales funnel.

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How to Build a Marketing Funnel for Your Content

Now that you know how people make decisions, it’s time to create your marketing funnel.

As mentioned earlier, one of the main points is choosing which marketing channels to include in your marketing efforts. Ideally, you want to do all of the marketing channels below:

However, the reality is that few companies have the resources to tackle all of these channels (podcasting, paid search, social media, email marketing, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, etc.) effectively.

Therefore, although we’ll discuss each stage of the funnel, keep in mind that it might be more effective to start at the bottom of the funnel and work your way up, since those already at the bottom of the funnel are much more likely to make a purchase and become repeat customers.

Stage 1 Channels – Problem/Need Recognition (TOFU)

Your customer may be vaguely aware that they have an issue, though they may not be actively looking for a solution.

For example, let’s say you sell cooling vests that keep outdoor workers cool in the summertime. Your target audience may find that being hot is annoying, but they may not be aware that anything exists to solve it, so they likely won’t even be thinking of looking for a solution.

However, if they see or hear an advertisement for a cooling vest, they might have an “aha!” moment and do some further research on the subject.

Therefore, capturing people at this stage is generally going to consist of outbound marketing or advertising. Here are some of the channels that typically attract people at this stage in the process:

Podcast advertising
Billboards
Influencer marketing
Paid Ads (Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc.)
Radio ads
TV ads
Attending live events

As you can see, most of these channels also double as “brand awareness” channels. Some of them are likely to drive direct conversions (such as paid ads and influencer marketing), though the majority will not.

This is also interruption marketing as the listener/viewer isn’t actively searching for a solution – rather, you’re hoping they have a pain point that your message can resonate with.

Examples of Marketing Campaigns at This Stage

You sell a SaaS product and pay for ads on a podcast with a SaaS audience
You sell beauty products and partner with an influencer to post about it
You sell plastic surgery services and pay for radio ads to promote it to people in your geography

Action Tip: Discover where and how your competitors have been advertising the longest. If they have been advertising for a long time on a certain platform, it’s likely that it’s converting well for them.

Purchase Intent: This is the stage farthest from purchase intent. Start by optimizing your website for Stage 4, then Stage 3, then Stage 2, and finally Stage 1.

Stage 2 Channels – Information Search (MOFU)

Now that your customers are interested in finding a solution to their problem, the next step is to create the information they want to know.

At the conclusion of the campaign you ran in Stage 1, you should have included a CTA that points people to either this stage, or a stage further down the funnel.

For simple products that require little information to sell, you can send them directly to the sales page. However, for the sake of showing you each step that can be included in the funnel, we’ll assume the product has some complexity and requires some education. In your blog post, it helps you build trust with the audience if you can speak authoritatively on the pain point.

In this case, these are the channels you will probably be leveraging:

Content marketing (Blog posts, YouTube videos, etc.)
SEO
Social media

For most brands, the easiest place to start is writing blog posts. Although it is competitive, there is still room for improvement and, unlike the other channels, the results compound over time.

However, the keywords at this stage will draw a very elementary audience.

For example, if you are an SEO agency, the keywords people will probably search for at this point are:

“What is SEO?”
“How to Optimize My Website for Google”
“What Is Keyword Research?”
“What Is Link Building?”

At this point, there are plenty of people who are interested in doing SEO on their own, or it may not be a big enough pain point to hire an agency.

These top of the funnel keywords are also quite difficult to rank for, so unless you have already done all of the bottom of the funnel steps we’re about to discuss, I recommend against trying to immediately rank for top of funnel keywords.

However, if you have a larger brand and want to rank for these keywords, start by updating content that already ranks within positions 11-20 in the SERPs.

Look for ‘Striking Distance’ Keywords

‘Striking distance’ keywords are those that are currently in positions 11-20. By using content optimization techniques, you can upgrade your content which will very likely result in it being bumped up onto page one of the SERPs.

The simplest free method to find these is to simply go through your Search Console data and sort queries by position.

Once you have a list of target pages to upgrade, you can lean on various tools to help you with edits/upgrades to improve your page:

Use a tool like Frase to find relevant keywords and subtopics to cover in your article
To increase the average dwell time, use a tool like InVideo to make a video for your page and embed it.
Make sure your website loads fast. If your website is slow, consider using a CDN to increase your page speed (and rankings)

Nonetheless, if you’re absolutely against blogging (for example, if you sell in a super competitive industry like car insurance), here are some additional examples.

Examples of Content at This Stage

Create content for broader, top of funnel (TOFU) keywords
Create a YouTube channel that focuses on general how-to, what is, and other early educational topics
Produce social media content that informs users of basic pain points around your product/service

Action Tip: Discover what the first thing people search for is when they realize they have a problem, and then create content that shows up for that search.

Purchase Intent: This stage is still relatively far from purchase intent. Start by optimizing your website for Stages 4 and 3 first.

Stage 3 Channels – Evaluation of Alternatives (MOFU)

At this stage of the marketing funnel, your customers know that a solution to their pain point exists. Therefore, the next stage (if they continue down the funnel; most will simply bounce at this point until the pain grows strong enough that they take action) is to evaluate different solutions.

The purchase intent dramatically increases from the previous stage of people merely educating themselves on the pain to actively evaluating solutions.

Therefore, here are a few marketing channels you can try:

BOFU content marketing (competitor alternatives posts, competitor vs competitor posts, etc.)
Writing case studies of the product’s best users
Campaigning for more reviews
Retargeting ads
Optimizing pricing pages

At this stage, your messaging should be less about educating the audience on the pain point and more about educating them on why your solution solves their pain point the best.

For example, show off any unique features or a pricing model that make your solution preferable to the competition.

Examples of Content at This Stage

For the sake of simplicity, let’s pretend you are doing marketing for FreshBooks. In this case, you might:

Create content for keywords that demonstrate purchase intent like “best accounting software for small business”
Bid for branded competitor keywords like “Quickbooks”
Create retargeting ads for people who already visited the pricing page
Optimize the pricing page by building links to it and internally linking
Send out surveys to current customers and ask all happy, loyal customers to leave reviews

Action Tip: The great thing about this stage is that it is often the cheapest stage to optimize for as it targets a much higher-quality audience. Therefore, exhaust every single one of the steps on this list before moving up the funnel.

Purchase Intent: Purchase intent is very high at this point. If you have limited resources, start here and fully optimize this stage above all else.

Stage 4 Channels – Purchase Decision (BOFU)

By this stage, you’ve already done about 99% of the work. Now, all you have to do is make purchasing a no-brainer to turn the prospect into a paying customer.

To accomplish this, you can deploy various CRO tactics.

Here are just a few conversion rate optimization tactics you can leverage:

Add a 30-day money-back guarantee
Offer a free trial (or $1 trial to prove intent)
Offer a pay-by-performance pricing model
Add customer support chat for last minute objections
Better yet, add an FAQ section made up of last minute objections
Add reviews around your purchase page

You can also use a heat map like CrazyEgg that shows where people are scrolling on your website and provide insight on how you can remove roadblocks.

Action Tip: You can either read our guide on CRO, or you can even just hire a CRO expert. You may also want to try different versions of your sales/pricing page to see which one converts the best.

Purchase Intent: People are ready to make a purchase and just want reassurance of the value you will provide them. This should be a priority after stage 3 (usually, if you nail stage 3, they won’t have many objections).

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Qualifying Leads in Your Sales Funnel: MQLs and SQLs

At this point, you have a great marketing campaign outlined.

In order for your marketing funnel to be truly effective, you need to take things one step further by determining how leads will be qualified throughout the process.

This allows you to better utilize salespeople by bringing prospects into the sales process only when then are qualified prospective customers.

Unfortunately, not everyone who makes it through the first few stages of the funnel will be a good fit. As an example, a prospect might complete stages 1-3, but not have the financial resources available to complete the purchase.

Or a lead might be enthusiastic about the product, but is not the decision-maker in his or her organization. While content is helpful in educating all prospective customers and moving them through the different stages of the funnel, you want to understand these two concepts:

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)

What Is a Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)?

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a prospective customer who has demonstrated a particular level of engagement that leads the marketing team to conclude that real sales potential exists.

The level of complexity involved in this assessment will vary based on the resources available to the team as well as the length of the sales cycle.

You might conclude that anybody that fills out an online demonstration request form is an MQL. Another company might set the bar of MQL qualification at something involving a combination of viewing specific pages, interacting with certain forms, and opening a certain number of email messages. For that kind of analysis, we recommend using a marketing tool that can automate the process.

Once an MQL has been identified, it can be passed on to the sales team for future follow-up.

What Is a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?

When a salesperson qualifies a lead and deems it likely to eventually lead to an opportunity, this becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL).

Like MQLs, it’s up to your business to determine what that is.

Salespeople qualify the lead by looking at interest and fit. Interest refers to how invested the prospect is in moving forward with your company’s type of solution. Fit refers to how closely the lead matches your company’s definition of an ideal buyer (e.g., role in company, industry, budget).

This analysis results in four possible primary combinations:

Low interest/low fit – The leads don’t meet your company’s target criteria and are unlikely to make a move soon. A common example of this type of lead is the low-level employee who’s browsing solutions out of curiosity, not an immediate need.
High interest/low fit – These MQLs are often people who are searching for a solution, but are unlikely to ultimately go with yours. If, for example, you sell a cloud-based software program and the prospect is clearly more comfortable with a desktop solution, you could be dealing with this type of MQL.
Low interest/high fit – Typically, these leads closely resemble your target customer, but aren’t actively seeking solutions. Even though they may not be a good fit right away, it may still be worth pursuing them to create brand awareness that will pay off down the road when their need becomes apparent.
High interest/high fit – These MQLs are the “sweet spot” of people who are actively seeking your type of solution and are likely to convert to buyers. These leads should be the highest priority of your sales team.

Sales teams with both junior and senior sales representatives may choose to have junior representatives conduct initial calls to qualify prospects before assigning only those that fall into the “high interest/high fit” category to senior reps for online demonstrations.

The specifics of each stage of qualification aren’t particularly important. What is important is that marketing and sales set these parameters.

This helps you identify the marketing campaigns and content leading to the most new qualified prospects, and ensures that you’re using your salespeople’s time effectively.

Marketing can iterate based on the MQL to SQL conversion rate, as well as feedback from sales. Sales can look at their processes if they’re not converting SQLs to purchases.

Which Marketing Funnel Metrics Should I Track?

So now you’ve created your funnel and defined exactly how your personnel will interact with it. The final step in the process is to figure out which metrics you’ll track to determine how well your funnel is functioning.

It’s crucial to work with the SQL and MQL data here to track patterns between who closes and how they interact with your site, content, channels, ads, etc. Once you have more information, you can continuously optimize your funnel.

A quick word of caution, though:

With every piece of content you create for every stage of your funnel, you’re generating data. Though all of it is useful to your sales process in some way, it’s easy to get bogged down in data and metrics tracking instead of focusing on the few key performance indicators (KPIs) that will actually give you the information needed to make meaningful improvements.

For that reason, while you might want to experiment with tracking all the different metrics below (or any others that you think could be valuable), it’s best to choose 2-5 to focus your attention on.

You can always add more later, but be sure you’re actually making changes based on the data you generate from these few metrics before expanding your data operations:

Sales funnel conversion rate – If you’re going to choose only a few metrics to focus on, make sure this is one of them. This metric tracks the number of prospects that enter your funnel at any point and how many convert into customers. As you make changes to your marketing strategy in the future, seeing this number improve will let you know you’re on the right track.
Entry sources – Monitoring the sources from which people are entering your funnel can be useful data to track, as it gives you ideas for expanding the reach of your marketing campaigns. If, for example, you see that a large number of your prospects are coming from a single guest blog post you did, you can upgrade and expand on it, add a free consultation opportunity on that blog post, and/or find similar guest author positions.
Time in stage – In an ideal world, your marketing content would be so compelling that people move from the TOFU to BOFU in a single day. But since that’s rarely the case, it’s worthwhile to know if your prospects are getting hung up in one of your stages. If so, you’ll want to add more content to your site that answers the questions that are unique to this stage of the funnel.
Exits from stage – Similarly, seeing an excessively high number of people falling out of a particular stage is an indication that you aren’t doing enough to answer their questions or you’re asking them for too much of a commitment too early. Add more content to give them the information they need to move forward or make it easier for people to convert (e.g. don’t ask for a phone number when they’re downloading a certain e-book).
Content piece engagement rate – If you have calls to action on multiple blog posts or other onsite content pieces, you’ll want to know which are sending the most converted customers through your funnel so that you can replicate your success by updating that piece of content, sending paid traffic to that blog post, promoting it via email, and/or creating more content pieces like that. Tracking engagement rates on each CTA will give you this information (you can easily set up Google Analytics goals in order to see which posts drive more conversions).
Opportunity arrival rate – Opportunity arrival rate refers to the number of opportunities that are currently in your funnel. Track this rate and see how changes to your marketing strategy impact it. Ideally, you’ll see positive increase in the number of opportunities you’re able to generate.
Close rate – Your close rate (or “win rate”) refers to the number of these opportunities that turn into eventual sales. If your close rate is lower than you expect, look at some of the other metrics you’re tracking for ideas on improving the success rate of your marketing funnels. You may be sending sales unqualified leads because your content is for a far more technically savvy audience while your ideal customer is a novice.

There are a number of different tools on the market today to help you track these and other metrics, though for most businesses Google Analytics represents the most comprehensive, easy-to-implement solution. Since it’s free, use the service’s funnel-tracking tools until you determine that you need something more advanced and then move on to another sales analytics program or a complete marketing automation program.

Final Word on Marketing Funnels

Make no mistake, creating a sales and marketing funnel using the process described above is no easy feat. This isn’t a project you’re going to complete in one afternoon — it’s a pursuit that you’ll want to actively address as long as your company is in business.

Creating a marketing funnel is not a simple undertaking, but it’s one of the few opportunities you have to drive significant improvements in your efficiency and effectiveness when closing deals.

Need help with creating high-converting sales funnel? We’ve got your back! Just click the orange button below 👇

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The post How to Create a Powerful Marketing Funnel Step-by-Step appeared first on Single Grain.

The Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Audit

Eric Siu — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 17:00:41 +0000

It’s enough to strike fear into even the most experienced of marketers and bloggers. It can seem like torture. It’s often the stuff of nightmares. What is this unholy monster?

The content audit.

A well-executed content audit done on an annual basis can deliver big insights into your website’s blog and content marketing strategy that far exceeds its ho-hum reputation.

Too often, we post something and then never go back to it again. Years later, it’s outdated, stale, and completely irrelevant. Good practice demands that we return to our content periodically to ensure that everything is as fresh and beautiful as the day it was released to the world.

In this post, we’ll show you two ways to do a content audit, one quick version and one long version.

What Is a Content Audit?

A content audit involves taking a look at all the content on your website and assessing its relative strengths and weaknesses in order to prioritize your future marketing activities. It’s a qualitative assessment and evaluation based on the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you select beforehand.

This process should not be confused with a content inventory, which is simply an accounting of all these different assets. In other words, it’s a quantitative collection. Although a content inventory is part of the audit process, the audit itself goes much further in depth. The Content Analysis Tool (CAT) can make content inventories a snap. When you start off on the right foot, the rest of the journey is that much easier.

When performed correctly, a good audit will help you to answer questions about the content pieces on your site:

Which ones are performing best?
What topics does your audience most connect with?
Which posts have overstayed their welcome?

An audit will tell you where you need to focus your future efforts in terms of both an SEO and content marketing perspective. And it can even give you insight into potential changes that will improve your lead generation, sales, and marketing processes.

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Before Beginning Your Content Audit

If you’re struggling to understand your visitors’ behavior on your website or why your current marketing initiatives aren’t working, a content audit is easily one of the best things you can do for your business.

But before we get into the step-by-step process of conducting one, you need to answer a few questions.

Why Am I Conducting a Content Audit?

There could be any number of reasons. There’s no one correct approach for conducting a content audit – the exact steps you’ll take will depend on your reasons for undergoing the process in the first place.

Typically, content audits are conducted for two primary reasons:

SEO – Conducting a content audit for SEO purposes helps you to identify any weak spots in your site’s search engine optimization. By cataloging the different keywords, word counts, optimized images and other elements that are associated with each content asset on your site and comparing them to your current page rankings, you should be able to determine what changes need to be made to improve your site’s natural search performance. And as most traffic coming to your site is from organic search, this is a crucial business exercise that you should be doing at least annually.
Content Marketing – Another great reason for performing a content audit is to assess the current status of your content marketing efforts. Instead of looking at page optimization factors, you’ll concentrate on things like page length, visit metrics, and social shares to determine how your audience is responding to each content piece you’ve created (and, consequently, how you could alter your content marketing efforts in the future to improve its performance).

Of course, there’s no reason you can’t do both. While you’re digging through your SEO metrics, it’s easy to jot down your content marketing data as well.

Or you might be approaching your content audit from a slightly different perspective. Whatever the case may be, being clear about your intentions ahead of time will help to streamline the process and minimize extra effort. Know why you’re doing before you start doing it.

What Resources Do I Have Available for My Content Audit?

A good content audit is a time-consuming process. If you’re currently swamped with other priorities, undertaking such a massive project may not be the best use of your time or energy. If you can’t devote the proper resources to it, it’s better to wait until you can.

That being said, there is more than one way to approach a content audit. In this article, we’ll offer both a comprehensive step-by-step audit, and a quick high-impact method. If you don’t have the resources to undertake a complete content audit, the shorter version will help you focus your time.

And keep in mind that you do have options. Instead of undertaking the entire audit process by yourself, delegate some of the data-gathering steps to another employee in your organization or to an outsourced worker hired through sites like Guru or Upwork:

You also have the option of completing only small sections of the audit at any given time, or paying for tools that help to automate parts of your research process (gone are the days of having to manually sift through everything yourself!). More on this later.

What Do I Hope to Get Out of My Content Audit?

Before you begin, be clear about the reason you’re conducting a content audit in the first place. If you aren’t going to take action based on the data that your audit produces, you might as well skip the process altogether. An audit for the sake of an audit is a waste of time and resources.

Any of the following are potential content audit goals. You may have others that are not on this list, and you’ll likely have more than one in mind as you go through it.

Identify ways to improve organic search performance
Pinpoint which past content marketing pieces have performed best
Determine which content topics your audience seems to prefer
Locate gaps in the content you’ve provided for different stages of your sales funnel
Discover pages to be consolidated because of overlapping content
Highlight pages with high impressions, but low conversions
Generate ideas for future content pieces
Eliminate content that no longer reflects your business, niche, or corporate culture

That’s the theory. Now let’s put it in practice.

Meet John, Our Hypothetical Business Owner

To help illustrate how to do a content audit, we’ve created John, a business owner with a heart of gold. He runs a small software company that’s developed an SaaS budgeting tool.

He’s invested in content marketing for about a year, but he isn’t sure whether all the time he’s spent blogging, creating videos, and releasing infographics has paid off. As a result, he decides to conduct a content audit to see how his individual content pieces are performing and what – if anything – he should do differently in the future.

Because John only has five employees – all of whom are busy wearing multiple hats already – he decides to take on the audit process by himself. Because he’s a busy guy, he keeps the scope of his audit small, checking only the content he’s created in the past year and tracking only a few variables that indicate success to him.

Remember, the size and scope of your audit is completely up to you. This is not an all-or-nothing scenario. Do what you can when you can do it.

We’ll revisit John a little later on.

The Content Audit Process

If you’ve finished your homework (you did answer the questions above, right?), it’s time to get started.

Let’s begin with the quick version. Try this if you’re tight on time and resources. These steps will help you quickly find and focus on the highest-impact tasks, with a smaller amount of total time invested.

Or if you have the resources available, keep reading for the full step-by-step process to complete your website’s first content audit (and feel free to amend it for subsequent ones).

How to Do a Content Audit: The Quick Version

Whether it’s because you’re tight on time, or you’re just not sure it’s worth doing, this is a great place to start.

These first three steps will help you find the highest impact areas to start with. They include key techniques that ElectricityRates.com recently used to increase organic clicks by 327%.

It’s possible to do this without any software, but it’ll take a lot longer.

How to Do a Content Audit: The Long Version

Step #1 – Create a Spreadsheet of All Your Content Assets

Unsurprisingly, the first step in completing a content audit is to find all your content. You have two different options for doing so:

Use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 URLs) or URL Profiler (paid plans) to identify all the URLs on your existing website and download that data as a CSV file (just hit “Export” after it’s done crawling). These tools are also capable of automatically collecting various other SEO data points for you.

Manually enter the URLs into your spreadsheet (you probably don’t want to go this route if you have 2,000+ pages, but a dozen or so is fine). The easiest way to do this is to log into your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Posts > All Posts, and then click on each one in turn to get its URL. Fancy? No. But it does the trick.

Enter or import all the URLs you find into an Excel or Google Docs spreadsheet, leaving plenty of columns for the data you’ll gather in Step #2.

Or, if you’d rather not reinvent the wheel, you can add your links to any of the following freely-available content inventory and audit templates:

Content Inventory Spreadsheet – MaadMob
Content Audit & KWM Template – GoInflow
Content Audit Template – Spears Marketing
Content Inventory and Audit Template – Kevin P. Nichols
Content Quality Audit Template – Content Strategy Inc.

Most audits use a spreadsheet to organize the data, but it’s not the only way. If you despise Excel for some reason (no judgement), you could opt for the WordPress Content Audit plugin. This tool allows you to create a content inventory directly in the Edit screens in WordPress. Set a few conditions, and you’re good to go.

Just go with whatever you’re most comfortable with. Set yourself up for success by using the tools and methods that work for you.

Which brings us back to John, our savvy business owner from Seattle. Because his site is small and he’s pressed for time, he uses Screaming Frog to create the URL list pictured below:

To upload your CSV file into Google Sheets, go to File > Import > Upload and select the saved file from your computer. Easy-peasy.

John is well on his way with a handy list of all his URLs. Step 1? Check!

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Step #2 – Gather Asset Data

Remember those columns I mentioned earlier? Now’s the time to set them up and fill them out.

The exact data points you’ll want to gather will, again, depend on the goals of your audit, as well as the complexity you want to achieve. Although the lists below may look daunting, it isn’t necessary to collect data on every possible variable. In fact, you may be able to achieve the goals you set for yourself with only a handful of possible data points.

Potential SEO data points to gather (many of these are automatically generated by Screaming Frog):

Page Title
Target Keyword
Meta Description
Page Headings Used
Inbound Links
Images Present
Image ALT Tags
Date Last Updated
Page Visits (measure for at least three months, if possible)
Page Entries and Exits
Page Bounce Rate
Average Time on Page
Broken Links

Potential content marketing data points to gather:

Word Count
Type of Content (article, blog post, informational page, landing page, infographic, etc)
Content Condition (out-of-date, evergreen, etc)
General Topic
Assigned Tags or Categories
Author
Content Owner (as in, who is responsible for editing it)
Number of Comments
Number of Social Shares
Accessibility on Desktop and Mobile Devices
Call to Action
Associated Sales Funnel Stage
Conversion Data

Other items to track:

Content Inventory Date
Page “Score” (determine your own grading scale to quickly assess content effectiveness) or Action (Keep, Delete, Consolidate, Update)
Page Status (keep, modify or discard)
Date to Re-Review in the Future
Additional Notes as Needed

Once you’ve selected the data points you’ll measure as part of your content audit, label a column in your spreadsheet for each one.

Now comes the fun part — time to do the heavy lifting of data collection (and yes, “fun” is subjective)!

Let’s get back to our pal John…

Since his primary goal is to determine what’s working with his current content marketing strategy, he decides to evaluate the following metrics:

Page Title
Page Visits (measure for at least three months, if possible)
Page Bounce Rate
Average Time on Page
Number of Social Shares
Conversion Data
Page “Score”

While he could track other pieces of data as part of his audit – and probably glean additional insights from doing so – analyzing only this limited number of metrics makes it possible for John to complete his content audit while juggling his other responsibilities. The way he looks at it, he can always go back and add more to his analysis if he has the time down the road.

To find the data points he’s decided upon, John uses the following resources:

Screaming Frog gives him the page title tags (and even title tag length…50-60 characters is optimal) for each of the URLs he’s tracking.

Google Analytics provides page visit, bounce rate, and average type on page data (check out Reporting > Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages for a great place to start. You can export the data by clicking Export > CSV under the report title, and then import directly into your spreadsheet.).

Shared Count gives him the number of times each post has been shared socially (there is a bulk upload feature, but you need to be a paying member to use it. Otherwise, you just enter each URL manually.).

Act-On (the marketing automation program John is using) gives him conversion data by page (although he could have opted to use Google Analytics for this if he had goals already set up on that platform).

Once John is done gathering this data, he goes back through his list and assigns a score to each page on an “A – F” rating scale of his own creation.

Pages that receive “A” scores are his cream-of-the-crop, top-performing pages, while those that earn “F” scores are ones he’s embarrassed to find on his site. He also adds a note to his spreadsheet showing the date that his audit was created for the purpose of planning future audits.

And even though John didn’t do this, you could also head over to the Google Search Console to pull even more conveniently organized data. Click on Search Analytics, select Pages, and check Clicks, Impressions, and CTR to get a quick snapshot of how individual pages are performing.

There’s a “Download” button at the bottom of the page if you want to export the data as a CSV file and add it to your ever-expanding spreadsheet.

Learn More:
* How to Set Up Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics
* SEO & CRO: How Rankings and Conversions Complement Each Other
* How to Optimize Your Site for Search Ranking with Your Web Analytics Data

Step #3 – Analyze Your Data

If your site is large, expect the data-gathering process to take a long time. It’s not uncommon for audits to take days, weeks or even months to complete, depending on the size of the website and the organizational resources that are available for the process.

But even if your content inventory is completed quickly, you’ve still got another important step to take – actually putting all your information to use.

To be sure you’re getting something substantive out of your content audit process, you need to establish a set of recommended actions you’ll take once the audit is complete. And in order to do that, you need to dive into the data you’ve collected in order to draw conclusions.

It could be as simple as adding one more column to your spreadsheet: “Action.”

Here, you make the call as to what should happen to each individual content asset, like:

Keep (your top assets, the ones with a healthy “A” or “B”)
Update (your solid “C” or “D” assets that are decent, but could be improved)
Remove (your bottom assets, perhaps those with an “E” or “F”)
Consolidate (assets that are perhaps too short or not meaty enough and would benefit from being combined with another asset). Don’t forget to complete a 301 Redirect for any post that is absorbed into another one so as not to lose any SEO equity it had built up.

Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules that say, “If your content data indicates [this], do [that].” Instead, you’ve got to look at the data you’ve gathered and see if you can identify any trends that could inform your eventual recommended actions.

Take a look at John’s spreadsheet below and see if anything jumps out at you:

Here are a few observations you might have made:

Visitors stay an average of two times longer on John’s video blog posts than they do on his text posts. This could suggest that John allocate more of his future content creation resources to video production.
John’s highest conversion rates appear on the blog posts he publishes with list post titles. As a result, he may want to add more posts like this in the future.
Although John’s infographic posts have the most social shares, they have the lowest conversion rates overall. This could suggest a few different things. He could be reaching the wrong people with his social media marketing efforts, the calls to action on his infographics could be weak, or he could be creating infographics on the wrong topics. John will want to dig deeper into each of these possible conclusions and determine whether to change his approach or continue to enjoy the potential SEO advantage that comes from having more social shares.

After further exploration, John decides to take the following actions after the completion of his content audit:

Rewrite or remove all content pages that scored lower than a “C” in his analysis.
Spend more time promoting his highest-converting pages on social networking sites.
Create four evergreen content pieces that are similar to these highest-converting pages.
Commit to publishing at least one new video post a week.
Develop more content on the topic of budgeting, relative to other categories.

An audit might focus on content quality, the customer experience, content performance, or any combination of these.

Use the results of your content audit to come up with 5-10 actions you’ll take after completing it, based on any patterns that emerge from your data.

Then, set deadlines for yourself in order to put these actions into play and block out whatever time you’ll need to do so on your calendar. Add a deadline right into your spreadsheet (when it comes to columns, you can never have too many!).

One important thing to note here. When you’re staring at the mountains of data your content audit may generate, it’s easy to find yourself struck down by analysis paralysis. Basically, there are so many conclusions you could draw and so many things you could do, that you wind up doing none of them. Don’t let yourself fall into this trap.

Content marketer Pawel Grabowski offers many helpful suggestions to combat analysis paralysis, such as focus on what’s most important, break decisions down into bite-sized steps, and don’t worry about being perfect!

As long as you’re tracking your metrics and regularly revisiting the content audit process, you’ll see these shifts occurring and be able to remedy them long before they become big problems plaguing your site’s performance.

Taking Your Audit Further

If you’ve caught the auditing bug while going through the content analysis process, you can always take the skills you’ve learned to expand your audit beyond the borders of just your website.

Look at Your Competitor’s Websites

So now you know everything there is to know about your own content. But unless you have a truly unique product or service, you’re not the only show in town. You have competition for customers.

The performance of your content will always be tied, in some ways, to the content that your competitors put out. Even if their pieces don’t directly prevent visitors from seeing yours, there is a limited number of consumers out there and they all have a finite amount of attention. If they’re using all their energy focusing on the competition’s content, they may not have enough mental focus left to pay attention to yours.

Conducting an audit of your competitor’s content is similar to assessing your own, but with a few limitations. There are a few metrics that you may not be able to pull without having direct access to your their website and accounts. Bounce rate, average time on page, and conversion rate are three in particular that are difficult to discover without accessing the site’s Google Analytics profile or marketing automation account.

But that said, there are still plenty of different things you can track. You can evaluate the number of links pointing at your competitor’s content pages using tools like Majestic Site Explorer or BuzzSumo’s Backlinks.

You can measure social shares by looking for a share counter on the post itself, or entering the post URL into a service like BuzzSumo to see a detailed breakdown with their Most Shared feature. It might not be a complete audit, but even conducting this limited level of assessment will give you plenty of actionable data on areas where your competitors are currently outperforming your site.

What works for them? Can you improve on it in some way (the Skyscraper Technique is a fabulous way to bring in oodles of traffic)? Which sites are linking to them that might potentially link to you if approached with a powerful piece of content or a fantastic guest post idea?

Track Offsite Content Performance

Another way to expand your content audit is to include your off-site content assets (if they’re relevant to your audit goals). For example, if you’re assessing the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts, you’ll want to include as much data as possible on any infographics, slide decks, or other external content pieces you’ve released to promote brand recognition and viral sharing.

Again, your ability to track the metrics listed above on these content pieces will vary based on the sites hosting them. Gather what you can, but also look for other types of data that are unique to external content sources.

As an example, looking at your Google Analytics account should show you the number of visits that each external piece sent to your site. Comparing referred visits across external content pieces can be a great way to determine the direction of your next big content release.

Check out Reporting > Acquisition > Channels for a general breakdown of traffic by organic, direct, referral, and social (and select Referrals if you want to see the specific points of origin).

And if you utilize custom URLs with UTM parameters, for example, you can instantly see what content is sending the most traffic your way from offsite.

Expand the Audit Process to Other Marketing Channels

In addition to assessing your offsite content pieces, you can apply the audit process to your other marketing channels. If you run print ads in trade publications, try to determine how many inquiries you’ve received from each ad (hint – this is easiest to do if you record the source of your first touch with a new prospect in your CRM after your first conversation).

Or take a close look at your e-mail marketing campaigns. Is the content in your autoresponders still up-to-date? Do you have some messages that have a higher open rate than others? Services like MailChimp and AWeber have robust analytics at the ready.

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In Summary

When it comes down to it, a content audit isn’t just a one-off process that you conduct once in a blue moon. It’s a mindset that you should apply to both your website content and the other marketing channels you use.

By carefully inventorying your existing content pieces and assessing the data you’ve gathered for each item, you can make informed marketing decisions that will help you to save time, cut costs, grow your brand, and improve your overall advertising ROI.

And remember, there is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Content audits can take many shapes, routes, approaches, and scopes. It all depends on your needs and your goals.

The post The Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Audit appeared first on Single Grain.

Startup Content Marketing That’ll Help Your Company Grow📈

Ron Stefanski — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 20:40:30 +0000

A lot of startups like Blue Apron and Design Pickle are famous for achieving staggering growth rates through content marketing. With the right content strategy, you, too, can experience phenomenal results in your business.

In this article, we talk about the best content marketing strategies for startups that will help you drive viral growth.

You will learn the most effective tactics for analyzing your audience and competitors to craft an advanced content marketing strategy, as well as how to create content that will outperform your rivals and propel your business to success.

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The Importance of a Content Marketing Strategy

There are many reasons why having a content marketing strategy is crucial, particularly for startup companies.

The Content Marketing Institute reports that over 63% of businesses don’t have a formal or documented content marketing strategy.

Source

It will come as no surprise to learn that the businesses that have written content marketing strategies are often the most successful.

Of the businesses without content strategies, the ones that do manage to find success often do so as a matter of luck since they don’t have any idea of what works and what doesn’t. Without a written strategy, there is no way to measure your results and you risk all your marketing efforts going to waste.

5 Reasons Why a Content Marketing Strategy Is Important for Your Startup

1) Content Marketing Is Affordable

Compared to traditional marketing, content marketing costs up to 62% less, and yet it generates almost three times as many leads. It’s undoubtedly one of the most affordable methods of marketing available to businesses right now.

2) Content Marketing Boosts Your Brand’s Presence

With the right content marketing strategy, you will be able to increase your startup’s presence online. By producing high-quality content, you will have more to put on your website and share on social media.

As a side note, If you’re struggling to keep up with all of the demand around posting to social media on a consistent basis (like I have in the past) there are a lot of different Facebook automation tools to help. And if Facebook isn’t your focus, you can find guides on automation for all of the social networks to help you out.

The more frequently you update your site, the better your SEO, and the more likely that your ideal customers will be able to find you in the search results.

3) Content Marketing Helps You Establish Your Expertise and Authority

Customers want to do business with companies that know what they’re doing. When you produce and publish content on relevant topics in your industry, as well as help to solve problems your audience is having, you’re showing that you have a good grasp on what is going on within your industry.

4) Content Marketing Increases Brand Trust and Loyalty

A Nielsen survey shows that over 70% of people trust the information on branded websites more than any other type of owned media. So if your startup’s website is full of valuable and helpful information and content, it’s more likely that customers will put their trust in you.

5) Content Marketing Helps Your Startup Grow

With content marketing, you will be able to drive explosive growth in your business. Over 66% of startups reported that content was the major driver of their company’s growth.

These are just some of the reasons why having a solid content marketing strategy for your startup is essential, but the list of benefits goes on.

In addition to offering you all these great benefits, content also has a massive influence over your other online marketing strategies. For instance:

Do you want visitors to sign up for your business’s email newsletter? Content can do that.
Are you working to improve your SEO strategy? High-quality, relevant content will boost your SEO.
Don’t know what you should be posting on social media? One important strategy is to share your blog posts.
Are you looking for ways to make valuable contacts or connect with influencers in your industry? Mentioning the people in your content is a good way to reach out and start a relationship.
Want a better way for onboarding SaaS sign-ups? Do it with content!

Basically, you can use content as the basis of any other marketing strategy that your business is using to lure more traffic to your website.

Understanding What Content Actually Means

Sure, everyone understands that content is valuable. But what exactly is content?

When most people think about content, the first thing that comes to mind is written text. But content isn’t always just blog posts. It can also be YouTube videos, social media content, images, audios, and so on.

Content is the presentation of information, in any form, and through any channel, to an audience. It has to have a purpose and be outcome-oriented.

Once you understand that content is not equal to blog posts, then there are endless opportunities to create amazing content to drive growth for your startup. If content is king, then a variety of content must be king of kings.

You need to focus on different types of content if you’re going to keep your audience engaged over the long-term. So in addition to written content, you also want to include graphic content, video content, and audio content.

There’s a long list of different types of content and you can create using these formats, including:

Blog Posts
White Papers
Articles and Reports
Original, Unique/In-depth Research
Case Studies
Testimonials
How-to/Ultimate Guides
Webinars
Checklists
Short or Long Videos
Opinion Content
Animations
GIFs
Memes
Photographic Images
Reference Content:
Podcasts
Infographics
… the list goes on!

So, if you want to experience phenomenal results from your content marketing efforts, it’s important that you go beyond simple blog posts when creating content. Consider what types of content would attract your target customers, and then incorporate those into your strategy accordingly.

Any piece of content you create should have the following important characteristics:

Your content has to be informative
It must be practical, functional and tactical
The content should have a specific purpose
It should also be outcome-oriented

Understanding exactly what content is and how it fits into the growth of your startup will be the key to your content marketing success.

Marketing on a Startup Budget

If you are getting ready to create a content marketing strategy for your startup, the first thing you need to look at is your budget so that you can set realistic expectations.

Creating content may be a lot more cost-effective than other means of marketing, but it still costs money – especially if you want high-quality, great-performing content.

The majority of large companies can afford to splurge on a variety of marketing methods, but if you are working with a small startup budget, then it’s particularly important to be innovative in your content strategy.

Here are some of the questions you need to answer:

Do you have sufficient resources to allocate for your startup’s content marketing strategy without affecting your other core business processes?
Do you have the time to creating and implementing your business’s content strategy?
Do you have the necessary skills to get the job done well, or do you need to hire qualified professionals to assist you?

You need to invest a lot of time into executing and monitoring your content marketing. In addition to writing blog posts and creating other forms of content, you also need to do content promotion and outreach.

And that’s not all. You also need to measure results, test the different options to see what works best, tweak, and improve your process – and then do it all again.

As you can see, a lot goes into implementing a great content marketing strategy.

Here are some of the most familiar roles in content development:

Marketing Strategist: Plans the content you or your team will develop
Content Writer(s): Use their expertise and skills to create desired content
Content Editors: To proofread content and ensure accuracy of facts
Content Promoters: To do outreach and promote your content on various channels
Graphic Designers: Create eye-catching visual content for your business
Videographers: They produce video content as per your business’s requirements
Content Analysts: To analyze content performance and find what’s working best

Whether you’re doing everything by yourself and trying to make a little extra money blogging,, working with a team, or outsourcing, you still need to ensure that you have enough resources (time, money, skills, etc.) to get the job done and to get it done right.

Content marketing is not something you can approach half-heartedly, otherwise, you’ll just be wasting your time.

If you want to see real results, you’ll have to put in the time and/or money necessary to do so. So make sure you allocate the necessary resources and plan your strategy accordingly.

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When It Comes to Content, Less Can Sometimes Be More

Most startups make the mistake of trying to be everywhere doing everything at the same time. For instance, they will try to create blog posts, videos, and social media posts, and promote them on every channel they can think of.

When it comes to creating content, if you spread yourself too thin, then you’ll find it very hard to provide value to anyone, let alone see any real results from your marketing efforts.

If you are just getting started with your business’s content strategy, it’s important to focus on just two or three tactics in the beginning. After you master those few, you can then add more. However, you may not see the need to do so once you have a few successful tactics as you can easily scale your processes to get twice the results without putting in much additional effort.

When considering the types of content strategies you can start with, play to your strengths. For example, if your forte is writing, then start with blogging. Choose a couple of channels for promoting your posts and focus on that until you have achieved good results before moving on to another strategy.

You can choose to start with guest blogging, email marketing, or any other content marketing strategy. But whatever you do, stick to one medium until you’ve mastered it. Once you have your systems in place for creating, publishing, and promoting content on a consistent basis, you can then branch out in a different direction.

When considering which channels to start with, you must choose the ones where your target audience spends a lot of their time. For instance:

If your audience enjoys reading, you may want to start by producing e-books.
If they spend their time on social media, then focus your efforts there.
If they’re on YouTube, then instead of blogging, you may want to focus on creating useful and informative videos instead.

No matter what you decide to start with, always make sure that the content is aligned with your business objectives.

Source

Understanding Your Audience Before You Start

Before you create your first piece of content for your startup, it’s important for you to understand your audience.

If you don’t know who you are creating the content for, then it’s going to be impossible for you to create content that caters to their needs and wants. If readers don’t find your content helpful, you won’t be able to generate any leads.

The last thing you want is to spend all that time and money creating content that isn’t relevant to your target audience.

So your next step is to get to know your audience by performing audience development and persona research.

Here are some of the most important characteristics to help you identify your relevant audience:

Demographics: Find your target audience’s age, gender, location, ethnicity, income, job title, etc.
Psychographics: Determine their hobbies, beliefs, interests, habits, etc.
Pain Points: What problems are they facing in their lives that your product or services can solve?
Challenges: What type of challenges do they face that make them search for your products or services?
Seeking Information: Where is your target audience searching for solutions to the problems they are experiencing?
Content Preference: What type of content format or structure do they prefer?
Your Solutions: How can you help your target audience find and use the information they are looking for?

You need to create a primary audience for your content marketing strategy, as well as a secondary audience. The former should be made up of those who are most likely to buy your products or services. All your content should be targeted at them.

Your secondary audience should be made up of those people who require a little more convincing before they can be part of your primary audience. This will require your content team to be a bit more strategic with the type of content they develop for this segment of your audience.

Once you’ve strategically identified the people you should target with your content, you will be able to easily determine the right ideas, topics, and keywords that you need to incorporate into your strategy.

Analyze Your Competition

In addition to understanding your audience, you also need to understand your competition before you start creating content.

You must study the ground to identify what’s currently working and what’s not, as well as any possible opportunities and problems that you might encounter in your own content marketing campaign. They are a lot of tools that you can use to help you in this regard, but I highly recommend using Ahrefs, a powerful, yet simple to learn software that allows you to gather useful data, clues, and insights on your competitors’ content strategies.

With this tool, you will be able to spy on your competitors and get a good idea of how they are performing on the market. First off, look for your direct competitors. Once you know who you’re competing with, there’s a lot of information you can find out by simply paying attention to the type of feedback that they receive from customers. Pay particular attention to the relevant comments, ideas, and solutions that they get from your ideal audience.

Ahrefs will help you gather data so that you can connect the dots and figure out how you can improve on the current state of affairs within your niche.

Here are some things you can look for during your competitor analysis:

Analyze your competition’s product strategy.
Analyze their content marketing strategy (with the aim of identifying content gaps and opportunities for content improvement).
Analyze their strategy for SEO.

Learn as much as you can about your competition. By looking at what they are doing, you will be able to develop exceptional marketplace understanding and better-inform your content strategies.

Your final step is to put all the information you gathered to use to help you create a more advanced content marketing strategy for your startup.

In the next section, we take a look at how you can come up with better content that will outperform your competitors in the area where it matters most – the search results.

Creating Content Better than Your Competition

Now that you know your competition’s strengths, weaknesses, and the opportunity gaps in their content marketing activity, you can start to create better content than theirs.

It goes without saying that every piece of content you create should be of the highest quality, but here are some other tips to help you outrank your rivals:

Use the Skyscraper Framework: This involves creating content that builds on an existing topic or idea that has already been proven to be popular with your ideal audience.
Fill Content Gaps: Create the types of content that have been ignored by your competitors.
Include Eye-catching Visuals: Create and share better images and visuals in your content to make it more likely that your content pieces will outperform your competitors’.
Increase Content Length: Research has shown that longer posts tend to outperform shorter ones.
Reach Out to the Right People: Successful content marketing involves more than just writing or creating content. It’s also about doing cold outreach better than your competitors.
Make Sharing Easy: Make it easy for your readers to share your content by including share buttons at the top of your posts.
Make Your Content Snackable: Make your content easier for your readers to consume by using formatting best practices.
Write Click-worthy Headlines: Create and test headlines to find the best-performing ones for your posts.

By following these steps, you will be able to create high-quality, engaging content that will outrank and outperform your competitors.

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Content Marketing Tips for Startups to Keep in Mind

In addition to the steps above, here are a few more tips to follow when creating content for your startup:

Set clear content marketing objectives
Make your goals measurable so you can track your success
Make your goals achievable – aim high, but be realistic
All the content you create should be targeted at your ideal audience
Make sure you cover all the different stages of the customer’s journey
Set a timeline for achieving specific content marketing goals
Spend more time promoting than you do creating the content
Invest in effective content marketing tools like Ahrefs

Nurturing Content Success with Other Platforms

Social media, email marketing, video marketing, and analytics can help make successful content even better. Here’s how:

Social Media

There are many different ways you can use social media to expand the success of your current marketing campaign. For instance, you can share every post you publish on your blog multiple times on social media.

You can even repurpose each blog post into many different snippets, as well as other formats, and use those to appeal to different segments of your audience. For example, some members of your audience would rather watch a video or listen to a podcast than read a blog post.

Email Marketing

Once you start creating high-quality content, you will be able to promote it effectively using various email marketing strategies. So, if you create an awesome blog post or video, share it with the people on your list.

The main idea here is to feed high-quality content to your email subscribers with the aim of increasing conversion rates and maintaining consistency. Also, you can grow your email list by offering your epic content in exchange for your visitors’ names and emails.

Make sure you use a quality landing page builder as that is a prerequisite to gathering as many emails as possible.

Video Marketing

YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine and it’s a very effective channel for startups to grow their brand. Tens of millions of searches are made on YouTube daily and you can generate a steady stream of leads (and income) for your startup by incorporating videos into your content strategy.

This has the added benefit of helping you rank in Google, as well, since the search giant is now featuring more and more videos in universal search results. The quality of your videos is, of course, very important. Not just to keep the attention of viewers, but to build credibility and get subscribers.

I realized this early on with my own YouTube channel, so I created this guide to help startups and individuals understand what the best YouTube editing software is.

Analytics

Measuring your effort is perhaps the most important step in executing a successful content marketing campaign. No matter what type of content you create for which channel, the only way to achieve consistent results is to know what’s working and what isn’t. And the only way you can know that is by monitoring the content you publish.

Without analytics, there’s no way to know which types of content are effective and which ones you need to improve on. Measuring helps you analyze the effects of your content marketing campaign so that you can optimize your processes.

Once you get improved results, you can then double your efforts and budget, in order to get double the results.

Doing this will allow you to scale your business so you can experience explosive growth.

Final Thoughts on Content Marketing

Hopefully, by now you understand the importance of content marketing for startups. You now know that the only way to outperform your competition is through the creation and implementation of an effective content marketing strategy.

All that’s left is for you to test, measure, optimize and scale.

This is a process that you will need to do on a consistent basis if you want to see consistent results.

Use this article as your resource to help you brainstorm ideas and come up with a content strategy that will help you outrank the competition and grow your startup.

Get My Free Content Marketing Plan

The post Startup Content Marketing That’ll Help Your Company Grow📈 appeared first on Single Grain.

12 Types of Interactive Content to Drive Better Engagement

Daniel Pintilie — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 15:00:16 +0000

Content is no longer king.

Nowadays, interactive content is the boss, with 93% of marketers rating interactive content as highly effective at educating prospective customers:

Today’s online shoppers want to interact with brands. They want to actively engage with products and services before making a purchase.

Consumers want to see product images, watch videos, and play around with different types of interactive content to get a feel for what it would be like to purchase a product or service.
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In this post, we’re going to show you how to make interactive content work for your business.

Let’s dive in!

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

What Is Interactive Content?

Interactive content is any type of content — such as calculators, assessments and interactive infographics, white papers and videos — that requires and encourages users to actively engage with it rather than passively consume it.

Over the years, there has been a litany of sources pointing to the supposed decline of the human attention span, putting us below the reputedly absent-minded goldfish. While many people bought into the concept of the eight-second attention span, the BBC and Ceros have since ripped the theory to shreds:

“Think about it. If our attention span is really 8 seconds, how are Netflix binges a thing? How was the hit of the summer a 45-minute long music video? Why are more people spending longer hours playing video games?”

Whatever your opinion on that matter, something we do know for sure is that modern-day consumers love interactive content, as proven by these stats:

Visual content is 40x more likely to be shared on social media — and it increases conversion rates by 86%.
360-degree videos are watched 28.81% more, and double the viewers watched the video to 100%.
People spend 4x as much time watching live videos than pre-recorded videos.

The Benefits of Using Interactive Content

As any good marketer would ask: Is interactive content worth the hype?

The short answer is yes.

Here are three good reasons why you should use interactive content in your marketing strategy:

Generate Higher Engagement Rates

80% of online users will watch a video, but only 20% will read the content.

Interactivity not only enhances conversions to 40-50%, but people just love to share cool, unique interactive content pieces, by as much as 28%:

Even the most basic types of interactive content can elicit a reaction, which immediately makes it more engaging than a written article — even a well-written one.

William Comcowich, CEO of CyberAlert, believes that:

“Content marketing is becoming less about the words you put on a page, and more about the experiences you create for the consumer.”

Competition is fierce, across all industries, and in all niches. Standing out isn’t easy, which makes it all the more important to optimize your content so that it offers a more engaging, immersive experience.

Quite often, brands offer interactive content as a lead magnet to collect email addresses. The people who subscribe to this tend to have a genuine interest in the brand. Therefore, they are more engaged and more likely to convert.

Capture More Data

This is the data-driven age, in which the data we collect about online users is arguably the most valuable information for marketers. The more data you get — and the more accurate and relevant it is — the better you can optimize your marketing campaigns.

The problem for many companies is finding effective ways of getting data in a way that people trust and respect.

Data breaches like the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal have damaged the world’s trust in big corporations, making people cautious about sharing personal information online:

So how can interactive content help?

When you create immersive content that grabs a person’s attention and offers a personalized experience, you’ll find it easier to persuade people to provide their info. Users will enjoy the experience, and you will get valuable data for lead nurturing.

Increase Brand Loyalty

Quizzes, polls and surveys are a few examples of interactive content that you can use to capture lead data which, in turn, enables you to create personalized content. Follow the E.A.T. Principle to establish yourself as an expert:

Expertise: the page needs to have quality content written by an expert writer
Authority: the site itself needs to have some authority on the subject
Trustworthiness: the site needs to have other authoritative links pointing to it from trusted sites

As you gather data through interactive content, you learn more about your audience, making it easier to create content they will love. This approach to highly targeted content marketing will soon establish trust and authority, so you can grow a bigger audience of people that come back time and time again.

Final Word on Interactive Content

So, there you have the 12 best types of interactive content for your modern marketing strategy.

Sure, text-based content still has its place, as do emails, e-books, white papers and good old-fashioned blog articles. But the undeniable truth remains: People want to interact with brands, and they want more interactive content and immersive experiences.

And so, content as we know it is set for an interactive makeover.

Additional writing by CJ Haughey.

The post 12 Types of Interactive Content to Drive Better Engagement appeared first on Single Grain.

How (and Why) to Conduct an Effective Blog Post Audit

Ana Gotter — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 15:00:41 +0000

Are you putting a lot of time and energy (and probably money) into writing your blog posts?

If you’re using content marketing as a key part of your marketing strategy, there’s a good chance that you answered “yes.” It’s essential, therefore, to make sure that the blog posts you’re writing are working for you.

That’s where the blog post audit comes in.

At Single Grain, we’re all about ROI, and we want to help you make sure that you’re getting the biggest return on your blogging efforts possible. We’re going to take you step by step through the blog post audit process that we use to maximize success on our own content.

The process can be long and a little tedious, but stick with us: We promise it’s worth it!

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Difference Between a Content Audit and a Blog Post Audit

Content Quality

The Headline/Title
The Introduction
The Visuals
The Format
The Overall Quality
The Statistics
The Conclusion and CTA
The Length of the Post
The Breadth of Topics

Visitor Connections

Social Media Icons
Social Sharing Tools
Email Subscriptions

Site Structure

Permalink
Post SEO
Category Page Optimization
Search Engine Accessibility
Meta Description
Title Tag
Alt Text for Images

Metrics Tracking

Monetization Strategies Offered
Goal and Funnel Setup
Gather Feedback
Split Testing

A Successful Blog Post Audit

Difference Between a Content Audit and a Blog Post Audit

Blog post audits are different from site audits and content marketing audits:

A content audit reviews the performance of your blog posts and how effective your overall content strategy is at driving leads or sales. (If this is what you’re looking for, check out The Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Audit.)
A blog post audit, on the other hand, looks at the execution of each blog post. Are the headlines weak? Is the structure sound? Are there enough in-post CTAs to drive real action?

While blog post audits can be an extension of a content marketing audit, it’s best to conduct them separately. This will give you the best shot at getting a big-picture view and seeing how each individual puzzle piece fits into place.

When you consider that over 4 million blog posts are published every single day, it’s easy to see why each and every aspect of every blog post needs to be perfectly optimized to get you the results you want.

Let’s get started.

Content Quality

The first thing I look at is the quality of the content, because if you’re not giving your reader something of value (whether it’s educational or entertaining), nothing else will matter. Blogging is a highly personal, text-based medium, and in order to be successful, it must deliver content that’s informative and engaging, while standing out from other posts in its niche.

To evaluate the quality of a blog’s content objectively, you need to look at a number of different factors.

1) The Headline/Title

Blog post audits are so essential because these seemingly small details can make a world of difference. It won’t matter if you have an excellent content strategy, for example, because if your headline is weak, it’s game over before you even get started.

Listen to Mr. Ogilvy. He was Don Draper before Don Draper was even a thing.

A strong headline is attention-grabbing, informative, and makes you want to click it to read the full article. It shouldn’t be boring or vague, and should definitely not include info you don’t actually address in the body of your post (i.e. clickbait):

To make your headlines more compelling, try a few of these quick tips:

Numbers: People love lists and listicles, so include numbers and facts (12 Ways to Include Numbers in Your Blog Post Headlines)
The 5 Ws: Titles that begin with the famous five Ws – Who, What, When, Where, Why + How – let the reader know that they are going to learn something (How to Write Blog Titles that Make People Click)
Length: Limit your headline to about 55 characters (or else suffer the red bar from WordPress), as Google tends to cut off any titles longer than 50-60 characters.

Keywords: Use your keyword(s) near the beginning of the headline, as long as it makes sense. (Why Keyword-Optimized Titles Get the Best Results)
Formula: If your strength is not in writing click-worthy titles, don’t be shy to use a headline formula or template (Top [number] Formulas to [verb] the Best Titles that Make People [emotion])
Actions/Emotions: Speaking of which, opt for a good mix of action words and emotional appeals to give your headline energy. (6 Lies Bloggers Will Tell You to Get You to Click)

Check out CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer for suggestions to improve any headline quickly:

Too many writers or marketers use the first headline that comes to them. It shouldn’t be an afterthought. Your headline is pivotal to blog success. For example, which headline is better?

Get More Traffic for Your Blog (meh)
7 Easy Tips for Instant Blog Superstardom (wow!)

Give them an exciting reason to stick with you.

Learn More: How to Write Hero Headlines to Skyrocket Click-Through Rates

2) The Introduction

The job of the headline is to get people to click on your post – but you’re not in the clear just because you got the click. You need to have an introduction that is enticing enough to get them to keep reading.

A great introduction should build on the headline and let the reader know exactly what to expect by illustrating what the benefit is to them (why should they spend their precious time reading it?). Check that your intro gets to the point without too much preamble or beating around the bush. You don’t need five paragraphs of build-up.

A good article intro is like a good ad: simple, connects with the reader, and has a clear benefit/CTA.
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According to Neil Patel, the best introductions have three parts:

The Hook: This is the first sentence or two that should grab the reader and pull them in, and is often a question, controversial statement or awe-inspiring statistic to arouse curiosity:

The Transition: This sentence connects the headline and body and further excites the reader to keep going:

The Thesis: This explicitly states the benefit that the reader will get from reading the post in its entirety – what it’s about and why they should care:

3) The Visuals

Let’s just state the obvious: You need high-quality and engaging visuals for your blog.

Visuals – images, screenshots, infographics, GIFs, videos, graphs, charts – increase click-throughs, shares and engagement, to say nothing of the fact that we process visual information 60,000 times faster (yes, you read that right!) than text:

The proof:

Infographics are shared 3x more than any other content on social media.
Posts with images get 94% more views.
We remember 65% of what we see visually, but only about 10% of what we read.
Posts with colorful visuals make people 80% more willing to read it.

This blog post from HubSpot goes super meta, featuring infographics in their blog post about how to create infographics:

When it comes to the images on your page, there are a few best practices to keep in mind:

Use high-quality images that are relevant to the content, not just random stock photos.
Compress images with a tool like TinyPNG for faster load times and less data consumption.
Consider adding a relevant caption under each image, as people read them 300% more than the body text itself.

Ask yourself: Does each blog post contain one or more (depending on the length of the post) high-quality and relevant image? Have you used a variety of images, screenshots and charts? If not, consider adding them.

You should definitely have an interesting header image, plus multiple supporting images, screenshots or even videos in the blog post to increase engagement.
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Finally, and perhaps most importantly, ensure that you have permission to use the images and videos. If you have an account with a photo service such as Shutter or 123RF, they’ll state on each photo how you can legally use them.

Learn More: Overlooked SEO: Optimizing Images and Video for Search

4) The Format

Stand back and look at the post as a whole. Is it scannable? Does it look good (this may be partially subjective, but answer truthfully)?

You want a post that’s easy to navigate and consume for your readers, and that means using headers to break it up into sections (and subheadings to further break down large sections), bulleted and numbered lists to neatly group info, bold/italics/underlines for important words and phrases, and a good text-to-image ratio (try and include at least one high-quality and relevant image for every 500 words).

Your headers and subheadings should make it clear what each section is about and give a decent summary of the post itself if viewed together, and they’re also important for when the search engines establish context.

Headers help the crawlers get a handle on everything, so use the H2 tag for main headers and the H3 or H4 tags for subheadings within each section (if needed). Ideally, each section won’t contain more than around 300 words for readability purposes. Readability will keep your users engaged and it may be factored in by search engines.

Keep paragraphs fairly short – no longer than 3-4 average-length sentences – and use a variety of sentence lengths for flow.

5) The Overall Quality

If you want your content to be taken seriously as a professional writer or marketer, then make no mistake (literally) – spelling and grammar matter.
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Always proofread your writing and, when in doubt, take note that there are multiple tools that can help with this. It can be difficult, after all, to catch your own mistakes or spot awkward phrasing immediately after writing the content yourself.

Some of the best tools for this purpose include:

Hemingway – a free editor that will help you use correct grammar and syntax while offering suggestions to both simplify and strengthen your sentences.
SEMrush’s SEO Writing Assistant – which can improve your writing and give you suggestions about how to improve its potential SEO rating.
Grammarly – a mostly free proofreading tool (you have to upgrade tp premium for full features). I do prefer the other two much more, as Grammarly will sometimes hit you for language that isn’t even incorrect.

Explain what you’re detailing in your post, elaborating on why it matters and how the information is valuable to your audience. Make sure that any tutorials have clear, easy-to-follow steps, and always outlink to other resources if needed to give readers the full picture.

Learn More: 4 Ways to Signal to Google that You’re an Expert Content Creator

6) The Statistics

When you’re writing content, you want people to trust you and, unfortunately, we’re living in an era where less-than-reliable information is being spread online. Because of this, statistics can help you back up your claims while bringing in a third party to validate them. People like to see the evidence behind your advice and opinions.

Make sure your stats are current and pertinent to your point. Anything older than 1-3 years, depending on the topic, is likely outdated. This will depend on the field; quotes from quickly advancing industries like the tech or medical field, for example, should be as recent as possible.

You can find more up-to-date data using the Search Tools > Any Time > Past Year command on Google:

And make sure that if you find a quote from a curated list of statistics, you check the original source for any caveats, exceptions, explanations and, of course, the original date.

7) The Conclusion and CTA

Unless you’re just blogging for fun, remember that businesses typically rely on their blogs to accomplish some sort of specific marketing goal. If you aren’t properly optimizing each blog post to reach said goal, you’re guaranteed to be underwhelmed.

This is where a call to action (CTA) comes in. At the end of your post, you should always include some sort of CTA to drive users to take whatever action it is that you’re focused on. It will significantly increase the likelihood that they do.

A good CTA might encourage users to:

read a related post (provide the link)
leave a comment about some aspect of what you covered
sign up for your e-mail list (give them a compelling reason to do so)
answer a question you’ve asked
download your e-book
share the post on their social media accounts
like the post
sign up for a free trial
purchase or try something that you’ve discussed in the post

It all depends on your particular goal for writing the piece, but ultimately, it’s about extending the engagement and driving meaningful results. Get them to do something.

Learn More: How to Create CTAs that Actually Cause Action

8) The Length of the Post

Once you’ve gone through the piece from top to bottom, consider the length of it. While there’s no magic word count for a blog, remember that it’s difficult to say anything substantive on any topic in fewer than 500 words.

In many cases, 500 words just doesn’t cut it for most subjects with any nuance or technical details involved. If you want your posts to be actionable enough that they set you apart as an industry leader and that they’re valuable to your audience, you’ll need at least 1,000 words or more.

In addition to that, the shorter your posts are, the less opportunity you have to get your content indexed for particular keywords within the SERPs. Fewer than 300 words and you’re probably going to be ignored.

A healthy mix in length is your best bet. Quick posts will be appreciated by your readers because they can read them in a short period of time, and longer posts will deliver the biggest organic SEO bang for your buck.

Recent studies from HubSpot have found that 2,100 words is the sweet spot for blog posts when it comes to writing engaging, valuable content that will do well in search and by appreciated by readers. To be safe, you can shoot for a word count range of 2,000-2,500.

When you’re deciding how long you want each post to be, keep search intent in mind. Someone who wants to know “when is daylight savings time” may not be interested in a full-length, 2,000-word article about the history of daylight savings time; they’re just looking for a quick answer.

Base your article length and your interpretation of the search intent on the keywords you’re targeting.

Learn More: Do You Really Need to Write 1,890-Word Blog Posts to Rank on Page 1?

9) The Breadth of Topics

People read blog posts to learn something or help them solve their own problems. Whatever you’re writing, you need to make sure that you address the pain point, questions and concerns that your audience has around that topic. For the best results and to reach as many members of your audience as possible, this will mean having a wide range of topics that still appeal to your niche.

You can ask your audience questions through your e-mail list or with a tool like Qualaroo to display survey questions in order to ask them what their biggest challenges are around the subject that you want to write about:

https://www.singlegrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/qualaroo-email-surveys.mp4

While the specific niche you’ve chosen for your blog may influence how wide of a range you’ll be able to cover, look for any missing holes or unanswered questions that arise from past blog posts. Chances are if you’ve stumbled across any gaping holes missing from your breadth of topics, your visitors will have noticed these omissions as well.

Use a tool like BuzzSumo to find popular content from your competition – and then use the Skyscraper Technique to really improve it:

The Skyscraper Technique has you look at the top-performing content on a particular subject, and then creating something even better. Better could mean:

adding more information that your audience would benefit from
including new research or statistics
providing more details about action steps, explanations or best practices

In short, you want your content to be more valuable than your competitors’ content.

Take it a step further and consider which posts worked best, which were shared the most, and which ones resonated with your audience. Google Analytics can give you a detailed breakdown. You may want to revisit and expand on those topics.

Learn More: The Skyscraper Technique: How to Build High-Quality Backlinks to Your Content

Visitor Connections

Of course, unless you’re writing for yourself, improving the quality of your content is only part of the battle. As blogging is an inherently social medium, it’s also important that you provide your readers with the tools necessary to share your content with the world.

Here’s what to look for when conducting your own blog post audit:

1) Social Media Icons

Every page on your site should have links to your social networking profiles to encourage readers to connect with you on these platforms. For maximum visibility, most blog owners include these icons in their blog sidebars or footers:

CMS platforms like WordPress make this easy. You can use a plugin like:

Or go the extra mile and find a custom icon set that reflects your blog color scheme and style at:

2) Social Sharing Tools

In addition to encouraging readers to connect with your brand on social networking sites, it’s even more beneficial to get them to share your content on their own profiles (since this is what typically causes articles to go viral).

To do this, you’ll need to have social sharing tools (for example, the WordPress plugins Digg Digg or Shareaholic) installed on every single post-level page on your site.

A floating icon bar stays with the reader for easy sharing, but in some cases this can be annoying to users, especially if there’s a glitch and it somehow ends up blocking too much of the text.

Social share bars at the top and bottom of each posts may be preferable:

Allowing your readers to easily share content can increase the likelihood that your content will spread virally. In fact, according to HubSpot:

Using social sharing can lead to 7x more mentions.

To further increase your chances of scoring that valuable share, you might consider offering a content upgrade in exchange for a reader sharing your post with their network. Tools like Pay with a Tweet (which works with all the major platforms, not just Twitter) reward those who share with something extra and exclusive, like a template, resource list, e-book, checklist or white paper mentioned in the post.

3) Email Subscriptions

Finally, keep in mind that not all your visitors will be active on social networking sites, so make sure that an e-mail opt-in is clearly advertised to give these readers additional opportunities to follow your blog:

A pop-up box can be an effective way to grab visitor details, and you can set it to appear when they arrive on a page, after X number of minutes, or after scrolling down X% of the page (the last two of which indicate clear interest in whatever it is you’re writing about).

And while people claim to hate these pop-up boxes, they’re marvelously powerful tools:

The very best pop-ups average a 9%+ conversion rate
Entrepreneur’s pop-ups increased subscriptions by 86%
Yoast added 10,000 subscribers in a month by including pop-ups

Two free tools to try out include:

SumoMe’s Welcome Mat (whole page pop-up)
Scroll Box (less intrusive slide-in box)

A simple way to do this is to present your opt-in copy above the fold with an incentive, like Noah Kagan does on his site, OKDork:

In addition to displaying forms prominently on your site, be sure that the benefit of subscribing is clearly advertised to encourage signups. People love a little social proof, so if you have a lot of subscribers already, highlight that number.

Learn More: How Correctly Used Pop-Ups Can Help Increase Leads

Site Structure

Part of what makes blogging so challenging is that, in addition to making your site as engaging as possible to readers, it must be appealing to the search engines in order to generate a steady stream of natural search traffic.

Any good blog post audit should include a look at your site’s structure, as well as the identification of any issues that could be preventing it from being indexed correctly by the engine spiders.

1) Permalink

For maximum keyword exposure, ensure that the permalink structure you’ve chosen for your blog incorporates your post title in some way. This is better for your readers and the engines.

The default style in WordPress includes a lot of random numbers but no title, so click on the “Edit” button and change the permalink to the title of the post:

2) Post SEO

WordPress and other blogging platforms make post optimization (SEO) a snap with handy plugins like:

However, these plugins only work if you use them correctly, so make sure that you’ve installed and optimized them for each post on your site for best results.

The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress gives you a green, amber or red light (or smiley face), as well as a readability and SEO score, plus the analysis results and suggestions so you can see where you need improvement:

3) Category Page Optimization

When readers choose to delve into your past blog posts, they’ll likely do so by examining your category archives (collected by related topic) instead of reading past articles by date.

For this reason, it’s a good idea to ensure that your category pages are optimized for both readers and search engines to improve your overall SEO.

Categories can be added in a number of different CMS platforms, including WordPress. It’s best to assign each post to a single broad category so that users can easily browse topics they’re interested in.

You can then use optional tags to specify individual elements about the post. For example, if your brand writes about video creation, you might have topics like “Video Ad Industry,” “Video Marketing” and “Video SEO.” They’re specific enough to help your audience navigate accordingly.

Learn More: How Correctly Used Pop-Ups Can Help Increase Leads

4) Search Engine Accessibility

Because WordPress relies heavily on scripts to function, it’s important to make sure the presence of these code snippets isn’t preventing the search engines from indexing your content correctly.

To learn more about accessibility for both readers and search engines alike, read this well-written post from Moz:

“Do you know anyone who is visually impaired? Maybe they have low vision or color blindness, or are fully blind. Think about how they use the Internet. Close your eyes, or at least squint really hard, and try to find today’s news or interact with your friends on Facebook. It’s a challenge many of us don’t think about every day, but some of what we do in SEO can affect the experience that people with visual impairments have when visiting a page.”

Here are some elements in which SEO and accessibility can overlap:

Video transcription
Image captioning
Image alt attributes
Title tags
Header tags (H1, H2, etc)
Link anchor text
On-site sitemaps, table of contents, and/or breadcrumbs
Content ordering
Size and color contrast of text
Semantic HTML

On the Single Grain site, we have an accessibility widget to help folks out. When you click on it, these options open up:

5) Meta Description

The short paragraph that appears under the title of your post in the SERPs is your meta description, and it tells readers and searchers exactly what the post is about:

The meta description is like the blurb on the back of a book or a DVD, and you should absolutely always add one; it gives you a chance to capture interest and show that your post is delivering on search intent.

Each post should have its own unique description included in the section of the HTML. A plugin like Yoast SEO has a convenient section labeled “Meta Description”:

Use it. Include your targeted keyword and keep it to 160 characters or less to avoid it getting cut off when displayed.

6) Title Tag

When you hover the cursor over an open tab on your browser, you see the name of the page. That’s your title tag. It may be the same as the post headline, but it doesn’t have to be.

You can change the title tag for your website in WordPress under Settings > Site Title and include the optional Tagline if you wish, as well as for individual pages on the page dashboard under title (or SEO title using a plugin like Yoast).

Keep it short (60 characters or less), include the keyword, and make it relevant. The title tag is a ranking factor for your SEO, so make it count.

7) Alt Text for Images

When you add an image to your blog post, one of the available fields is the “alternative text” field, or “alt-text”:

This will be displayed if the image doesn’t load or if users are relying on a screen reader to help them access content if they have low sight. Accessibility is crucial to consider, especially considering that ADA-related lawsuits have been increasing quickly over the past five years.

Alt-text also gives search engines more to go on when determining what your post is all about. Search engines can’t actually understand what an image is just by scanning it, but they can take those text clues in the description to show the image in relevant visual searches.

Long story short: It’s good for SEO, and it’s good for accessibility, so take a few seconds to fill out the alt-text field every time you upload an image and optimize your images and video.

Metrics Tracking

Finally, when conducting your blog post audit, keep in mind that blog posts should be treated like any other web property when it comes to metrics. If something isn’t being measured, it isn’t being managed, so use your audit to ensure that all of the following areas are addressed:

1) Monetization Strategies Offered

Take a look at the different monetization strategies being used and ask yourself the following questions:

Are my chosen monetization strategies a good fit for my audience?
Are my monetization elements featured prominently or are they buried in content?
Do my monetization elements provide demonstrated value for my users?

Your monetization strategy should work for your audience. It might be affiliate marketing (which allows you to earn a profit when someone converts from an affiliate link you share), it might be online courses that build your reputation, or it might be original e-books and other resources.

Becoming a publisher for the Google Display Ad network can also be profitable, though you’ll generate the most revenue in specific niches.

Learn More: 7 Steps to Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing for Your Business

2) Goal and Funnel Setup

As with traditional websites, blog owners should have explicit website goals that are being measured with web analytics goals and funnels.

If these important tracking features aren’t present on your site, add them as soon as possible in order to improve the effectiveness and results of your blog.

You can create Google Analytics goals on the Admin tab, in the View column:

Click on the red +New Goal button, select a template or custom goal, and a destination, duration, pages/screens per session, or event as the goal type:

If you select “Destination” as the goal type, you’ll be presented with the option to create a multi-step funnel in the next step (this is a very good thing):

Once created, your funnel can show you exactly where customers are leaving, where there’s a bottleneck, and where you need to improve the customer UX.

You want to gently walk them from Point A to Point B (whatever action you want them to take). If they’re disappearing before then, you need to know where so that you can determine why, and then fix the problem.

Learn More: Google Analytics for Content Marketing: How to Track and Improve Your ROI

3) Gather Feedback

A great way of knowing whether your content is being well received by your audience or not is the simplest of all: just ask them.

By using a tool like Intercom, you can start real-time chat conversations with readers as they’re engaging with a post:

https://www.singlegrain.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Intercom.mp4

For example, when reading a post on our site, users will see a message that asks them which marketing topics they’re most interested in learning about. When they answer, this gives us a better sense of what kind of marketing content to create in the future.

You can also use tools like SurveyMonkey to collect reader feedback, ask questions of your followers and fans on social media, or send a quick follow-up e-mail to those who purchase or sign up on your website:

Ask, and ye shall receive. Most people are more than willing to share their opinions.

4) Split Testing

Split testing (running different website versions against one another to determine which combinations of factors give the best results) is a vital website development task.

Although setting up split tests on blogs can be more challenging than on static websites, services like Optimizely and WordPress plugins like Nelio AB Testing exist that can take the pain out of the process.

You can dive even deeper by doing A/B SEO testing, which allows you to run experiments in order to determine the optimization tweaks you need to make.

The benefits of running SEO tests on your website include:

Achieve a higher conversion rate and convert more visitors into buyers
Improve the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy, which leads to lower bounce rates and higher dwell time
Maximize your ad spend and minimize cart abandonment
Test every element, like images, text, links, CTA, colors, videos, menu, etc.
Instead of running a separate customer feedback campaign to understand what people like the most, you run SEO tests and identify the elements that receive the maximum customer engagement
Understand what changes resonate best with your audience and keeps them engaged
Avoid mistakes that could otherwise tie up your resources for minimum or negative gain
Stay up-to-date with the latest consumer trends and quickly adapt to changes, which leads to an increase in engagement

A Successful Blog Post Audit

Blog post audits won’t be the most fun part of creating and running marketing campaigns, but they are essential to your success.

A thorough blog post audit can clue you in to the changes, subtle and massive, necessary to drive significant results.

For best results, we recommend conducting blog post audits regularly, at least once every six months. As you’re doing so, double check for any new best practices, including those that may be influenced by changes in search algorithms. Being successful in marketing requires some degree of agility and adaptability, and that goes for content, too.

The post How (and Why) to Conduct an Effective Blog Post Audit appeared first on Single Grain.

What’s the Right Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel?

Eric Siu — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 16:00:54 +0000

Imagine if every new visitor to your website bought a product. Not some day in the future after navigating your complex purchase funnel, but right then on their first visit. How much easier (and more profitable) would your life as a marketer be?

In this post we’ll discuss:

what a content marketing funnel is
what kind of content belongs at which stage
content for attracting leads
content for engaging prospects
content for delighting customers

Ready to learn how to choose the right content for each stage of the marketing funnel? Let’s jump in!

Creating Content for the Modern Consumer

The thing is, selling isn’t that easy. In fact, it’s probably more difficult today as a result of the average customer’s access to information and competitor deals. Today:

The average customer engages with 3-5 pieces of content before talking to a sales rep
87% of shoppers now begin their search on digital channels (so having the right content is key to gaining their attention)

Modern consumers are savvy. They’re checking multiple pieces of content across several sites before moving on from one stage of the purchase journey to the next.

Finding the right content to answer the customer’s questions, nurture their opinion of and relationship with you, and ultimately convert leads into paying customers is hard. So hard that most brands and marketers are lost when it comes to choosing the right kind of content.

In our experience, lots of companies don’t know how content marketing comes together, and they ask questions like:

How many blog posts should I write?
How often should I be tweeting every day?
Is there a specific percentage of my budget that I should be spending on video?
Do I really need to write white papers and e-books?

What these companies fail to understand is that when done correctly, content creation isn’t solely about budget, beating the competition or a simple case of frequency.

A great content strategy is closer to a Q&A: You research which questions your customers are asking and then answer them in detail, thus building trust and bringing customers closer to your brand.
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In this framework, every piece of content you create is an opportunity to bring a new lead closer to a sale or to inspire an existing customer to take action. Content synergy is the most important element here; there’s no point in creating 100 blog posts if you’re just going to send all your readers to your homepage.

If you struggle to come up with relevant and interesting material, want new ways to repurpose your curated content or want to learn how different types of content target different parts of the funnel, this blog post is key.

What Is a Content Marketing Funnel?

A content marketing funnel is a system that takes as many leads as possible through a step-by-step content flow and converts them into actual customers who pay for your products or services.

Picture the wide top of a funnel. This is where a large number of people might become aware of your products or services. All these people are your leads – or potential customers.

As they move through your funnel towards the much narrower neck, many will drop off. Finally, a very small number of leads will make it through to the bottom of the funnel and become a customer.

A basic marketing funnel includes TOFU, MOFU and BOFU stages:

Also called a content marketing funnel, its three stages can be labeled as:

Discovery – when a lead first discovers your brand or the product you’re selling
Consideration – when a qualified lead (or prospect) decides to find out whether your product or service is the right fit or not, often comparing it against others in the market
Purchase – when the prospect gathers the last bit of information they need before deciding to buy and finally becomes a customer

An inbound marketing funnel is similar, but has a slight difference:

Attract – Showing your prospects that your brand has the solution they need. This is where you grab their attention and get that initial small opt-in.
Engage – Here, you take that initial opt-in and build the relationship through some value-building action (email nurturing, retargeting, etc).
Delight – The follow up from the engagement is to make the experience better than anything the user has experienced elsewhere. You delight them so they not only promote you to their friends (refilling the attract stage), but also come back for repeat purchases themselves.

A great content marketing funnel isn’t about a one-time purchase. A great funnel takes your best customers and uses them to refill the top of the funnel. It’s less a linear progression and more a cyclical strategy that continually builds goodwill and trust:

And, finally, one of the most common marketing funnels of all uses the AIDA model to take prospects through the funnel from from top to bottom with specific types of content:

Your business is going to interact with people at each and every stage of the funnel, so as these leads continue to interact, you need relevant content to persuade them to take the next step.

Learn More: How to Create the Ultimate Marketing Funnel (Templates Included)

Which Content Type Goes Where?

Now for the burning question that every marketer wants answered: What kind of content belongs at which stage?

Here’s the expanded four-stage content marketing funnel with different examples of content that is ideal for each of the four stages:

Attract
- Ads
- Landing Pages
- Videos
- Infographics
- Checklists

Engage

Delight
- Surveys
- Special Offers
- Contests & Giveaways
- E-mails
- Social Media

We want to be very clear that this is just our map for content types — there is no real consensus on which types of content work best in each stage because it depends a lot on your sales cycle, your industry and your audience. There is also a lot of overlap between content types and stages.

That being said, this is the best we’ve figured out for now, and it holds true for the vast majority of companies with successful content marketing campaigns.

Let’s learn more about each type of content, and why it works in its respective stage of the funnel using the start-up company Canary, “a complete security system in a single device”, as a case study.

Content for Attracting Leads

1) Ads

Running ads is one of the most efficient ways of quickly increasing your site’s traffic.

Generally speaking, you’ll focus on one of two types of ads:

Search ads (like those on Google/Bing, including Google Display Network)
Social ads (for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc.)

Both are a great way of getting your brand in front of your audience. According to Google, for every $1 spent on Google Ads, businesses earn an average revenue of $2, and research shows that overall social ad spend is increasing. You’ll just need to spend a little time upfront figuring out who your audience is and which approach is best suited for them.

Running successful ads is a topic all on its own and deserves dedicated articles (like this one and this one).

However, there’s one thing I want you to take note of: the idea of push vs. pull headlines. Pull headlines pull the user in by showing them that you have exactly what they need. They’re perfect for search ads like this:

That top ad from Charles Tyrwhitt literally parrots the search term back to me. When I’m searching for a specific item, mentioning it in the ad copy is almost guaranteed to get my attention.

However, on social platforms people’s intent is not necessarily to buy, but rather to procrastinate, catch up with friends, or check out funny pictures and videos. So to grab attention there, you need to push your way into their attention with something that stands out:

The above ad, whilst not particularly inspired or interesting, does stand out from the usual social media updates. It’s not a collection of photos, video or just a plain wall of text. It does its job of pushing its way into your attention by the simple fact that it’s different.

Dive Deeper:

2) Landing Pages

If you’re running paid ads, then landing pages are where you’re going to send most of the traffic.

However, there are a few rules I’ve learned over my years of writing landing page copy that can help massively increase conversions – lessons that many brands don’t adhere to.

The most important lesson is: keep your messaging focused.

Find one thing you want to communicate, and build your page around that message. This image is the landing page from the Canary website that does this well:

One of the first things that you’ll notice is how simple it is, with more negative space than text. They also stick to one specific angle, which is focused on the financial savings that customers could get. For example, they offer:

Free shipping
60-day money-back guarantee
1-year premium service for $169

These discounts will quickly grab the attention of the average browser because, well, who doesn’t love a discount?

These kind of offers are great to turn a lead sitting on the fence into a paying customer and will go a long way in filling the top of their funnel. And if the prospect scrolls down a little further, there is an excellent example of trust-building mixed with a financial saving element:

Canary not only mentions how much money they’ve saved their customers, but offer a quick call-to-action that achieves two things:

Explains exactly how much you could save if you’re insured with one of the two mentioned insurers
Sends you to a more relevant sales page that offers even more benefits for purchasing one of their products:

When you’re writing your landing pages, keep one focus in mind to make it easier to communicate the benefits and grab attention.

Dive Deeper: The Ultimate Guide to Creating a High-Converting Landing Page

3) Video

For completely unqualified prospects who know absolutely nothing about your brand or product, videos are a great way of communicating a lot of information in a short period of time.

Unqualified leads either don’t know who you are or have never seen any of your products, so you need to catch their attention with more riveting, “intro”-types of content.

Video often produces higher search engine optimization and stronger engagement:

84% of consumers were convinced to buy a product because of a product video.
Video will account for 82% of all Internet traffic by 2022.
Including a video on your landing page can increase conversions by more than 80%.
Video is also mobile-friendly, which means it puts you in front of the 5.1 billion unique mobile users across the globe.

Here’s where Canary gets really smart. They know the reach that mobile offers and they also know how beneficial it is to have some form of mobile app for their service. If only there was a way to leverage the mobile usage of their service to attract new potential users… 😉

Canary takes advantage of some of the interesting videos from their users to populate their YouTube channel and their Instagram. These short videos are often shared with the hashtag #CaughtbyCanary.

Whilst their follower count on both platforms isn’t huge, the engagement these posts get is. It’s a great way to leverage mobile’s preferred medium (video) to reach new people and attract them to the brand.

The beautiful thing about Canary’s approach is that they’re not just using video – they’re using video captured with their own product. Something that both validates the concept of security and shows the camera’s quality.

They can also reuse many of these videos in places like landing pages or blog posts for greater reach and impact.

Dive Deeper:

4) Infographics

A good infographic is one of the easiest ways to capture attention, generate backlinks and grab yourself some easy social shares.

People love stats that are relevant to their industry or interests and when used well, they can have profound effects on your marketing:

65% of B2B marketers use infographics for their content marketing
People process images 60,000X faster than text and retain the data for 3 days if coupled with a relevant image:

Infographics perform 3x better on social media:

40% of marketers report that original graphics perform the best in terms of engagement:

Infographics are the most obvious addition to your marketing if you’re dealing with data you need to visualize (hence why they’re also called “data visualization”). Infographics meet at the intersection of information, illustration and design to present data in a easy-to-consume (and, often, fun) way that might otherwise be bland and boring.

Take this infographic example we put together for the growing AI trend:

Infographics aren’t just eye-catching; they have the benefit of communicating vast amounts of information in a relatively short period of time.

Infographic Examples:

5) Checklists

Customers at the top of the funnel have a problem they’re looking to solve. In other words, these folk aren’t looking for “Adidas Predator 18 Soccer Cleats”. They’re searching for things like “how to improve my free kicks”, “how to increase acceleration on the soccer pitch” or some other specific problem-related search.

To grab these users’ attention, you’ve got to take your eyes off the sale and try to help them solve their issue, or their pain point. And a handy little checklist will give your potential customers a step-by-step process to do this. If you manage to help them, then they’re more likely to remember your brand and come back to you when it’s time to buy.

Take the below video, Ultimate 6-Point Facebook Advertising Checklist, as an example:

Of course, you want to make sure that the user comes back in the future and one of the easiest ways to do this is to add a downloadable to your free checklist. Something like a highly designed visual version of the list that requires an email opt-in. This will give you readers’ contact details for future follow ups.

Content for Engaging Prospects

Once you’ve attracted potential customers to your brand, you need to keep them engaged. A social follow or email sign-up is worthless unless you take the time to keep in touch and build the relationship.

Trust is almost as important to customers as quality. If you’re not fostering the relationship with your customers, you’re missing out on a ton of potential revenue.

Here are a few types of contents that will help keep your users engaged in order to build trust in your brand.

Dive Deeper: How to Think Like an Investor to Win at Content Marketing in 2023

1) Blog Posts (How Tos or Guides)

Your leads have now seen your landing page, found your social media accounts, laughed at your viral videos, and probably shared a few of your compelling and impeccably designed infographics. Now they’re ready for more.

One of the first things a prospect will want to know after deciding that a product or service might be useful is whether they can trust the brand behind it. And the best way to build that trust is by establishing domain expertise as a helpful thought leader. And helpful leaders usually offer free advice.

In fact:

55% of marketers say blog post creation is their top priority for inbound marketing
Using statistics in blog posts improves consumer trust
Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13X more likely to see positive ROI
43% of B2B marketers say blogging is their most important type of content
Content marketing gets 3X more leads than paid search advertising

Establishing a detailed blog that helps answer users’ ongoing questions is key in keeping them engaged and building more trust.

Let’s take a look at this in action by heading back to Canary’s blog:

Canary offers blog posts aimed to entertain (Mother’s Day 1 Year Later) and inform (Security & Privacy 101) their potential users. They make use of their user-generated content and tackle issues and questions that people considering buying home security might have.

But how will Canary’s prospects find their blog posts? Will they have to visit their website to see what’s new? Nope, that’s where social media kicks in.

Dive Deeper:

2) Social Media

It takes quite a while to rank on Google and see a decent level of organic traffic. You could just sit around and wait until people find your blog, but that’s a huge waste of time. This is where social media comes in handy.

Social media can be a great way to attract new leads. However, it’s also just as good at engaging with those you’ve already caught the attention of:

66% of marketers use blogs in their social media strategy
97% of marketers are using social media to reach their audience
65% of salespeople who use social selling fill their pipeline, compared to 47% of reps who do not
There are 2.77 billion social users globally

Social is a great way to foster a sense of community engagement. By creating regularly updated content channels on the social platforms where your target audience hangs out, you provide your prospects with easy access to your advice.

You also give them a chance to see what other prospects and customers are saying. A prospect can instantly scan through dozens of eye-catching pics, announcements and satisfied customer comments.

Social media is the quickest, surest way of getting prospects and customers to engage and eventually become brand evangelists (which is why it shows up in the “Delight” stage as well).

Canary continues to share their users’ posts and engage in other ways through social media such as Twitter:

The ideal social media strategy includes regularly updating all your business’s social media accounts to maintain a strong and consistent presence and catering to your followers as needed.

If you check out our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, you’ll see they’re all regularly updated with content that is both informative and lighthearted, but still relevant to our brand:

Social isn’t just for attracting new leads with ads, but also for engaging with your potential customers and getting them to trust you a little more.

Dive Deeper: The Beginner’s Guide to Crafting a Highly Effective Social Media Strategy

3) White Papers/E-books

Sometimes a blog post simply isn’t going to cut it. Maybe you need to offer more detail, delve deeper into the topic or just want something that better demonstrates your expertise.

This is where a white paper or e-book comes in. Interested leads who are a little further on in the funnel love this longer-form content:

75% of B2B buyers say they would share contact information for a white paper
71% of B2B buyers turn to white papers when researching purchasing decisions
HubSpot’s e-books continually get thousands of shares

Longer-form content is wanted by your audience and goes even further to building your authority. When most people are willing to exchange their email address for a copy, it can be a vital part of your overall nurture funnel.

One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is on Backlinko. Brian Dean takes an interesting approach, though. He not only offers the full guide for free, but then asks if you want to download it. He doesn’t gate the content, but still offers the email download option. Take his backlinks guide as an example:

4) Case Studies

Case studies are another great way to build your authority. They show that you’re an expert in your chosen field.

Traditionally they’ve been used in sales decks or as a downloadable asset, which makes sense as they’re one of the best deliverables for accelerating the purchase decision for B2B brands. However, there’s been a shift in recent years resulting in some inventive uses.

The guys at Grow and Convert do a great job of using case study pieces on their blog, using them to detail how they achieved a certain goal for their clients. Take the below content strategy case study as an example:

These pieces aren’t just great at grabbing a potentially interested customer’s attention, but in building trust and relationships with those who are interested in hiring them. You can make them long and detailed, like this case study on Single Grain’s content marketing growth strategy by Bastian Ernst, or a shorter “just the facts, ma’am” one, like these case studies:

Case studies no longer have to be locked behind a content gate. If you want to nurture more of your leads, see what making them completely open can do for you.

5) Webinars

Video may be taking over the world, but webinars are able to take that concept to the next level.

As opposed to just presenting a recorded video to explain your expertise or demonstrate something, a webinar is an online seminar or workshop in real time in which your audience can interact with you by asking questions. In fact, 92% of webinar attendees want a live Q&A session at the end of a webinar.

The more interactive (and thus human) element of webinars leads to some impressive stats:

People will give you almost 1 hour of their attention (compare that to the seconds or minutes someone will give an article or even a video)
The average number of attendees for the average webinar is 148
60% of marketers are using webinars as part of their content marketing strategy

Webinars are a great way to engage curious potential customers before encouraging them toward the purchase decision through demonstrating your knowledge. Neil Patel says:

“Webinars are one of the best ways to hook in new leads. They are great for teaching people the hands-on methods that you’ve used to see success….Webinars turn you into a trusted expert and a thought leader in almost no time.”

Dive Deeper:

6) Ratings & Reviews

Ratings and reviews are commonly thought of as something for after purchase, but they can (and should) be used to inform how you engage with your audience.

Every review of your product or that of your competitors is a direct line into the consumer’s mind. It’s a cheat sheet of the problems they’re facing and what you can do to make your content more engaging.

Let’s imagine that you offer products or services based around productivity. You head to Amazon to look at some reviews of productivity products, like the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity, and you see these reviews:

If you see lots of similar negative reviews, then you have a good idea of what the competition’s product is lacking:

“Amazon reviews of products in or related to your industry can help you create or upgrade your products, determine what content will best resonate with your audience and even hone your marketing messages. But not all reviews. Remember, people leave reviews when they love a product, hate a product or got paid to post a fake review about a product. Take those people out of the mix and you have your data set: the ones who leave 2- and 3-star reviews.”

Dive Deeper:

7) E-mails

With a return on investment of $32 for every $1 spent, email is still the ROI king. It’s also one of the best ways to keep your current leads engaged, interested and moving down the funnel towards that eventual purchase.

The best thing about email is that you can automate it with detailed targeting which can be used for a number of different goals. You could run a simple welcome sequence that helps build a better image of your brand after someone signs up for a free e-book all the way and send triggered emails with offers if someone views your pricing page multiple times without purchasing.

These prospects aren’t leads anymore, and they’re going to start scrutinizing everything a little more closely. In other words, you must deliver helpful and detailed content right into their inbox that is tailored to the email subscriber’s specific problem or pain point. Such content might be special offers that are relevant to them, in-depth how-to guides, and product demo or testimonial videos.

By tracking on-site and in-sequence action, you can almost hold your potential customer’s hands on their way to their purchase. To read more on how to do this effectively, check out this piece:

Once you’ve demonstrated your helpfulness and expertise without strings, a prospect is going to be far more comfortable with and serious about your brand.

Dive Deeper:

Content for Delighting Customers

Now that you’ve made the sale, don’t think this is where your effort ends. In many ways, it’s where the real effort begins.

A sale is the end of that initial purchase journey, but it’s the beginning of the far more important customer journey. It’s here that you’re really going to make your money because customer acquisition is 6-7X more expensive than retaining customers.

However, more recent research indicates that overall CAC has risen almost 50% in the last 5 years:

It pays to hold on to the customers you’ve already acquired. It pays to give them a reason to come back time and time again. And the only way you can do that is to delight them after the fact.

Below are examples of the content that’ll help you achieve exactly that.

Dive Deeper:

1) Surveys

We could just say that doing X or Y is the best way to keep your current customers engaged and delighted. But we don’t know your business and we don’t know your customers. And, honestly speaking, you might not know them as well as you should either.

This is where surveys come in. A good survey will help you understand how you can better serve your audience. It’ll highlight a few things you can use to increase conversions. For example, you can use surveys to understand:

How to optimize your overall site experience
How to optimize your checkout process
What customers want from you after the sale has gone through

All of which can be great ways of improving the customer experience, making it easier to delight each and every shopper. You just need to figure out the best way to survey your audience, and what kind of questions you’ll want to ask them.

Get this right and your audience will tell you exactly how you can make them happy.

2) Special Offers and Loyalty Programs

Too many e-commerce brands operate on a simple “one and done” policy. They want today’s sale and never look at how they can engage their previous customers — which, as you’ll know from above, is a massive missed opportunity.

One super easy, always popular method of delighting your customers is to provide exclusive offers and loyalty programs. In fact:

58.7% of consumers rate loyalty programs as one of the most important elements for frequenting a brand
79% of consumers look for loyalty rewards and offers before making a purchase
59% of customers are more loyal if the brand shares small gifts as a reward

Setting up a reward program will continue to engage and delight your best customers. It’ll keep them coming back for more, increasing their lifetime value, and usher them along the path to becoming brand ambassadors. But keep in mind that “typically members lose interest [in loyalty programs] because they either don’t understand the benefits or the incentives aren’t worth the purchases they must make to get them.”

Starbucks has a loyalty program in which customers receive free drinks and food after a certain number of purchases, free refills, and a free item on their birthday. Amazon, of course, has Amazon Prime, where members get free 2- or same-day shipping for eligible purchases, streaming of movies, TV shows and music, exclusive shopping deals, etc. Prime members spend 4.6x more money on Amazon than non-Prime members do.

There are numerous methods to explore for this including:

A point-based system ($1 = 1 point), where point thresholds equals discounts
A tier-based system (gold tier get 25% off on category X)

If you’d like a little more information on building brand loyalty to delight your customers, be sure to check out this 3-minute Marketing School podcast: How to Improve Brand Loyalty

3) E-mails

Emails are great at every stage of the customer journey (which is why we’ve included it twice), including delighting existing customers. But the main aim with emails at this stage is to re-engage, entertain and delight — which isn’t that hard.

You just need a good CRM that stores customers’ details so you can send timed and targeted emails, preferably that include some form of offer. For example, you could try running some of the below:

Birthday/anniversary/other occasion offers (like the below)
Up- and cross-sell emails
Surveys and questionnaires to understand how to better help customers
Simple thank you emails
A sequence on how to get the most out of the product they’ve purchased

There’s no secret to success here; it’s a simple case of staying in touch and adding value in as many natural ways as possible.

4) Social Media

Social media was initially meant to help friends connect with one another. But as the user base has grown, brands of all sizes have started relying on social platforms to acquire and engage with users.

And customers have embraced social with open arms — especially for customer service:

48% of customers expect a response to their question on social within 24 hours
42% expect a response within 60 minutes
32% expect a response within 30 minutes

And keep this important detail in mind: Everything said on social media is completely open to the public. So when 54% of the 3.2 billion people using social media check social before making a purchase, responding to those customer queries and offering a great service is of paramount importance.

If you want to delight your customers, you have to have a section of your customer service team dedicated to social media, not just to offer the kind of service that turns an unhappy customer into an advocate, but because each problem solved is a potential new acquisition method.

Final Thoughts

We’re living in a self-service world. An increasing number of customers want to conduct their own research, progress at their own speed, and purchase when they’re ready.

So brands who help them progress through these steps with valuable, high-quality information are the ones who will continue to grow. Why? Because those great experiences that lead to delighted customers lead returning customers which lead to brand evangelists. These are the people who will go out of their way to promote your brand to their friends.

The ultimate goal is not to generate X sales or increase certain metrics by Y (although these can be important); the goal is to adapt your content funnel to better serve your users so they will handle most of your marketing for you — i.e. word-of-mouth marketing. It creates a cyclical journey that leads to an ever-increasing number of sales and revenue for you.

Every company, from the small Mom and Pop store to the behemoth multinational, can and will benefit from a detailed content funnel. This article provides a good outline of the stages of the purchase journey and the kind of content that best for each stage. However, it’s up to you to figure out what is best going to resonate with your specific customers.

And if you want help figuring out what this might be, feel free to get in touch with our experienced team here!

The post What’s the Right Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel? appeared first on Single Grain.

5 Steps to Developing Successful Pillar Content

Eric Siu — Wed, 11 Sep 2019 15:00:22 +0000

It’s no secret that publishing blog posts or articles on your business website is a great way to both build the content needed to enhance your site’s SEO strategy and to connect with your audience on a more personal level. Where many marketers go wrong is prioritizing quantity over quality, and pumping out short content pieces every day because they think it’s going to bring in more traffic.

The Content Marketing Institute reports that 73% of B2B marketers think that blog posts and articles are the most effective content types for demand generation in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, or the top of the sales funnel. And yet, only 27% rate their company’s content marketing efforts as extremely successful or very successful. Where’s the disconnect?

The truth is, creating a lot of high-quality content isn’t easy. There’s a big difference between a business blog that’s chock-full of lackluster, uninformative posts and one that’s bursting at the seams with the type of high-value content that naturally draws in readers.

As you’ll obviously have better business results with the second scenario, you need to take the time to create the pillar content that solidifies your blog’s reputation as a go-to source for good content within your industry.

What Is Pillar Content?

Pillar content is content that provides a complete answer to any question a user may be searching for on a given topic. It’s specifically designed to provide value for the reader, and also to rank highly in the search engines.

Another name for pillar content is 10x content, which Rand Fishkin from Moz describes as “content that’s 10x better than the highest ranking result for a given keyword.”

Source

The basic characteristics of pillar content include:

It solves a problem or answers a question with comprehensive, accurate information.
It’s different in scope or detail from other content on the subject.
It’s some combination of trustworthy, useful or interesting.

As it relates to business blogging, pillar content can also be defined as a series of posts that represent your site’s best work. These are the posts you’ll refer new visitors to, as well as the ones that will continue to be useful to readers long after they’re initially posted.

Blog posts and articles are great examples of ideal pillar content, but infographics, videos or other informative pages are also useful content types that can be included on a pillar page to support the topic.

This foundational content provides important knowledge for anyone in your niche and, if done right, can be valuable to your target audience for the foreseeable future, never losing relevance and always achieving a high ranking.

Dive Deeper:

Benefits of Pillar Pages

The benefit of pillar pages to users is obvious: it provides all the information they are searching for on a topic in one place. But there are even more benefits for website owners, including:

Longer time spent on your site’s pages. The more content available for users to consume, the more time they’ll spend doing so.
A decrease in bounce rate. If users find what they’re looking for on your page, they won’t go back to Google to find another source.
Backlinks and a ton of social media shares. Pillar pages get shared widely and often, especially among influencers in a given space.
Gets traffic throughout the lifetime of your blog or website. Pillar content is evergreen content, so its value doesn’t diminish over time.
A high Google ranking. The high word count, shares and backlinks will all contribute to improved visibility on SERPs.

Because pillar content goes above and beyond standard blog posts, it requires some extra effort to develop. If you’re interested in making use of this potent business tool on your own website, take a look at the following 5-step process for creating your own series of pillar articles.

Step 1: Understand Your Audience

Building pillar content for your personal or business blog might seem like an individual pursuit – after all, isn’t this an opportunity to pour out your innermost thoughts and most meaningful pieces of advice to your readers?

Well, yes and no. Writing pillar content that’s uniquely yours is important, but it’s even more important that the topics you choose to address resonate with your audience members. If you’re counting on these critical articles to represent your business in the best way possible, it’s important that they be of the greatest possible use to your readers.

To do this, you must first understand who your audience is:

Take a close look at your social media analytics tools, Google Analytics and your CRM database in order to answer the following questions:

Is my audience primarily male or female?
What is the average age of my audience members?
Which ethnic groups do my audience members belong to?
Where are my audience members located geographically?
What do I know about my audience’s average education level?
What is the average socioeconomic status of my audience members?

Answering these questions will give you some idea about how to best address your audience within your pillar content posts, but you’ll need to conduct an even more thorough analysis on the following subject before you start writing.

Dive Deeper:

Step 2: Identify Your Readers’ Most Pressing Needs

Now that you know who your audience members are, it’s time to uncover the issues that are on their minds, as understanding their pressing needs will help you to develop relevant topics for each of your pillar posts.

There are a number of ways to use your audience to determine the best content ideas:

Are you a member of your target audience? If so, try to remember how you felt and what you thought about when you were a beginner in your industry. Think about the questions you had and the things you were most desperate to learn, and then use these ideas as the basis for your pillar articles.
What are your audience members talking about on social media? If you aren’t a member of your own target audience, you can still get a glimpse into their mindsets and interests by monitoring ongoing conversations on social media platforms, especially Twitter (try using Twitter’s Advanced Search) and LinkedIn. Read through your followers’ posts and take a look at which topics are mentioned, which articles are shared most frequently and which messages get shared most often. This information should give you a starting point for producing your pillar articles.

What types of pillar content do other bloggers in your industry have? If you’re still struggling to come up with topic ideas, take a look at the content pieces from your competitors that are popular. You can perform a competitive analysis using tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs. As long as your audiences are similar, the topics that are playing well on other sites in your industry will likely translate well to your own audience (just be sure not to plagiarize!).
What kind of presentation would be ideal for your target audience? There are several different types of pillar content with the potential to be high ranking and convey your information, including how-to guides, list-based posts, statistic-based posts, quick reference guides and roundup posts.
What are your user’s success gaps? In business, there’s a gap between the company’s desired result and the user’s desired result known as the success gap. For example, if you have a productivity app, your desired outcome is to get people to download it and use it. The customer’s desired outcome is to be more productive. Your app alone won’t make them productive – they may have bad work habits, time management issues or be prone to procrastination. Addressing those gaps with content will help your existing customers be successful and also pull in new people who struggle with similar issues – people who are likely to want to use your app.

Because you’ll be investing significant resources into developing your pillar content, give the specific topics you’ll cover some serious consideration before moving on to the next step.

Dive Deeper:

Step 3: Create Damn Good Content

At this stage of the process, you should have a few ideas for pillar content pieces that’ll meet your users’ needs, not just now but in the future. Now it’s time to start creating your pillar articles!

As you approach the content creation process, remember that your pillar content articles should be so helpful and engaging that audience members feel compelled to bookmark your page and share them with their friends, family members and colleagues.

The links at the end of this section can help you with the writing process, but these are the main points you’ll need to hit:

Headline – It’s been said a zillion times before, but remember that 80% of people will read a headline while only 20% will click to read the rest of the blog post. This is the very first thing people will see, so make it catching, intriguing and informative (no click bait!).
Hook – More good news: even after people click on your article, only 18% of your readers will read the entire thing. Your lede (or hook) — that attention-getter at the start of the blog post — must make the reader want to keep reading. Here are some good hooks:
- Interesting facts that they haven’t heard before
- An anecdote, a cliffhanger, or the end of a story
- A direct question that the reader resonates with
- A current events reference
Story – People love stories because it creates a human connection based on empathy. Just because you are writing an article and not a novel doesn’t mean you can’t use storytelling techniques in your post about how you built up your podcast to 109K listens per month. 🙂
Structure – Unless you’re devising a new torture method, don’t force your audience to read a 2,000-word article that has no headers, no images, no bullet points, no paragraphs.
Research – Have you ever read an article that said something like “Most people own an iPhone”? Sounds legit, but if you do a little research, you’ll find that “62% of first-time phone buyers tend to lean towards Android.” There’s no better way to lose the trust of your readers than to not back up what you’re saying with reputable, up-to-date research. And this goes with quotes, images and stats, too: always, always link to their source.
Action/Takeaway – Now that you’ve wowed the reader and performed a miracle by getting them to read your entire blog post, you need to tell them what you want them to do. End your piece with a clear call to action, such as “Get Your Free Marketing Consultation” if you’re a digital marketing agency:

Take the time to revise and edit several drafts of your pillar content posts before publishing them – asking yourself each time whether or not the content you’re sharing goes above and beyond what your readers will expect. If you’re just churning out the same content as everyone else in your industry, it’s not worth the effort.

Note: Some people think that because pillar content is so useful, it should be gated, meaning a user has to give an email address or other contact information before they can access it. I think this is the wrong approach. Your pillar page content should be the lead generator. If you have e-books or white papers on a similar topic, by all means promote them from your pillar page. But give away all the value from that page for free. It helps you establish authority and speak directly to people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service.

Dive Deeper:

Step 4: Promote Your Pillar Articles Regularly

Once you’ve created and published your pillar articles, the last thing you want to do is let them sit and languish on your website. Instead, keep them in front of your audience by promoting them in a number of different places:

Link to them from your “About” page.
Share the content in your online communities and groups. If the members find it valuable they’ll likely share it on their blogs and increase your chances of your content getting more exposure.
Post to your social channels, and if you have the budget, boost the posts for more exposure.
Link out to influencers within your blog post and then email each of them to let them know you did so. Also, tag them when you post to your social channels.
It’s imperative to link to your pillar posts from your homepage whenever possible as it increases visibility traffic and search engine rankings.
Add internal links within current blog posts – especially popular ones.
Always add new and best-performing material in your email newsletter.
Include a list of recent or most popular posts throughout your website, such as a sidebar or at the bottom of a page:

As long as your pillar articles are top-notch and deliver a lot of value, you shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about promoting this same series of posts over and over again. After all, if you’ve carried out your research and content creation processes correctly, these articles should continue to have enduring value to your audience – making them worthy of being shared regularly.

Dive Deeper:

Step 5: Update Pillar Content as Needed

Finally, keep your eye out for any industry changes that require you to update your pillar content.

Proper upkeep is essential for every type of pillar post, as these are the foundations of your entire blog and should always stick out from the rest of your content. Don’t be afraid to be draconian with your editing and check regularly through all your pillar posts to ensure their relevance.

If shifts within your industry make your articles out-of-date or irrelevant, you’ll want to update your content so that it continues to provide excellent value to your audience. This is especially true if you plan to promote your pillar articles frequently, as referring visitors to out-of-date or incorrect information can have a negative impact on your reputation over time.

Updating blog posts on a regular basis also aids in boosting Google rankings. But don’t forget to update the actual date on the pillar content as Google requires that step to recognize that the piece of content has actually been updated. Add a simple note at the top of the piece to indicate that it’s been updated:

Whenever you update a piece of content, promote it throughout all your marketing channels, stressing that it’s new or updated. Those who engaged with it the first time will likely go back to see what’s new, and it will tell your audience that you are an authority in your industry, who stays on top of trends and news.

Examples of Pillar Content

We rounded up three very different approaches to pillar content that you can use to help you think of ideas for your own.

HubSpot: The Ultimate Guide to the Best Productivity Apps

This is billed as a guide post, but it’s really a list post. A long list post. The 30 apps that HubSpot chose to include each get a couple of paragraphs explaining the features, uses and prices of each one. It’s broken into categories like chapters for easy navigation:

Within the post, they promote a gated guide to increasing workplace productivity, using the pillar content as a lead-in to the landing page. It’s smart – someone who reads a whole guide about productivity apps is likely looking for ways to boost their own output. If those people deem this content to be useful and trustworthy, they’ll be ready to give up their contact info for more.

Backlinko: The 2019 SEO Services Report

Original research is usually a slam-dunk when it comes to pillar content, and Brian Dean of Backlinko is a master at that. Bloggers and journalists within your industry are hungry for recent stats on the topics they write about, and if you can give it to them, you’ll get a link in return.

In addition to key takeaways, the information in this Backlinko post is presented in both text and eye-catching visuals:

Single Grain: How to Create the Ultimate Marketing Funnel

Rule #1: Always promote your own content within your other relevant content. 🙂

This is a how-to/guide post, and it’s one of the most popular posts on our site. It gives the reader a step-by-step guide on how (and why) to create their own marketing funnel, and was written after seeing a lack of articles that went into this much detail (although there are more today): 5,400 words and tons of images, including several originals:

We published it a few years back, but keep it updated regularly (and let people know when we do an update). We also try to include different content types within our pillar content, like the above video on a closely related topic.

Dive Deeper:

Pillar Content Pays Off

So overall, while it may take significantly longer to create your pillar content posts compared to the shorter blog posts you crank out on your business blog, you should find the extra search and referral traffic to be well worth the effort. It’s worked for us, and if you do it right, it will work for you, too.

The post 5 Steps to Developing Successful Pillar Content appeared first on Single Grain.

Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About 10x Content

Joydeep Bhattacharya — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 15:00:14 +0000

Due to rising competition and an increase in demand for content writers, preparing good content is not that difficult anymore. Almost everybody is doing it. But “good” is no longer good enough.

So how do you distinguish your content from the competition and make it better? The answer lies in preparing 10X content – a term coined by Rand Fishkin of Moz – which is content that is 10 times better than anything else you can find on search:

You might think that as long as your content is better than average, you stand a chance of hitting the first page of Google. Unfortunately, that’s usually not the case.

We all know that higher rankings can be achieved primarily because of two factors: the quality of content and the links pointing to it. Besides fulfilling the first criteria for rankings, 10X content has the power to earn high authority links.

If you plan to outrank the competition, then you need to write articles and blogs that are ten times better than anything else you’ll find on Google. Here’s how to do that.

What Is 10X Content?

Suppose you want to rank for the keyword “best tools for content marketing.” The first thing you would do is check the pages that are ranking in the top three positions and study the information that they contain.

Then you need to ask yourself if you can produce something that is ten times better than what they have already written – and that means more up-to-date, more thoroughly researched, better explained, longer, and more images/videos. If the answer is yes, then you can go ahead and target that keyword, but if the answer is no, you’d better target a different keyword.

So forget average-quality content – you need to create 10X content that contains information that no other webpage offers:

Sometimes, it happens that your competitors have already created informative articles that contain all the information that users might find useful, so there is no point in creating a new piece of content if you’re simply repeating it. It won’t help!

The idea lies in finding opportunities where quality content is missing – maybe the other articles don’t fully answer the question, maybe they answer the question but are poorly written, maybe they answer the question and are well written but haven’t been updated in five years, etc. – and creating a piece that is able to easily defeat your competitors.

Factors For 10X Content

Although around 86% of marketers use content marketing as a regular part of their marketing strategy, very few of them are actually able to taste real success with it. The reason is simple: the quality of the content is subpar.

Writing is not just about putting words on paper; it’s about creating the best content that clearly explains and illustrates the target topic in a way that is easy to absorb. And high-quality content goes beyond just the words, too – elements like format, backlinks and page load time are all key to successful content.

So how can you prepare content that is 10 times better than what is present on the web? It’s simple! Just follow the below factors:

1) Offer Great UX

Google considers user experience as one of the important ranking factors. Websites that load faster, pages that are free of annoying ads that cover part of the article and navigation that is clearly laid out are all parts of a great UX.

Here are some tips that can help you optimize the overall user experience:

Have a high speed site. The ideal loading time should be between 2-3 seconds. Anything more than that and your site visitors will leave, leading to a high bounce rate.
Make subtle use of white space, which is a visual element that describes the parts of the page that are free of text or anything else, so that the important parts of your content can be seen and read easily. White space includes:
- Ample margins and short lines, with extra leading between lines
- Blocks of print indented off the left margin with headings outdented
- Short paragraphs, with space breaks between paragraphs
- Bulleted or numbered list structures where appropriate
- Headings and subheadings:

Use images and videos that are easy to load and work on any device. Images should be self-explanatory and must have alt text. Similarly, videos should be accompanied by a transcript.
Add a visible search field so that the user is able to easily find the content of their choice. You don’t want the user to leave your site after he/she has finished reading the content, do you? A visible “next post’ link at the bottom of the article will allow the user to navigate to the next piece of content easily:

There should be no broken links within your content or in the navigation as it degrades the user experience and makes your blog look unattended.
Keep the majority of your sentences and paragraphs on the short side, use larger, simple-to-read fonts, make good use of bullet points when listing three or more items, and get rid of unnecessary elements.

Dive Deeper:

2) Ensure that Your Content Is of Excellent Quality

The look of your blog post or article is one thing, but the actual quality of writing and substance of your piece should be top-notch, as low-quality content can lead to a high bounce rate and low rankings.

Neil Patel rightly suggests that the quality of your content can easily make the difference between a 35% and 60% bounce rate:

For example, the average bounce rate for, say, a services business might be around 30-50%. Keep in mind that 50-60% is above average, but not necessarily cause for concern. 70%+ would mean that something’s wrong.

Here are some tips to keep the quality of your content superb:

There should be no spelling or grammatical errors in your content. If you aren’t sure of the difference between “their,” “there” and “they’re,” hire a professional editor to proofread your piece.
Your content should be trustworthy. This means that you must always link to the source whenever you mention any statistics, facts, numbers, quotes, etc.. Linking out to authoritative sources while giving advice is a great way to make your content trustworthy.
Your content should be both interesting and useful. It must fulfill the needs of the user who, presumably, landed on your article to learn something.
This ought to go without saying, but we’ll say it anyway: Content should be original (unless you’re quoting from – and citing – another reputable piece). Plagiarism is “[t]he practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.” Don’t ever do this.
Content should not have commonly used facts because that won’t serve the purpose of producing 10X content. Your content must have facts that are uncommon, which means that you will have to take the time to conduct thorough research – or perform your own study or experiment to come up with fresh data if you can’t find it.
Your blog posts or articles shouldn’t have a lot of ads, especially when they cover the actual content. That’s the fastest way to get a site visitor to bounce! Have a look at the below image that consists of a lot of ads and little information:

Your content should not have links pointing to low-quality or spammy sites.
Content should be created keeping in mind the intent of the user.

3) Earn Your Backlinks

Links have been a key part of the search engine algorithm since the beginning of Google. But after many black hat SEOs found that they could boost their page rank by purchasing links and spamming the Internet, Google became more adept at distinguishing between link spam and earned links.

For example, guest blogging for the sole purpose of growing SEO is frowned upon by Google, and many sites have gotten penalized for it. Hence, creating high-quality content is key to earning the backlinks needed to boost the rankings.

Another article, called ‘The Real Truth About Google and Guest Blogging’ from Kissmetrics, clarifies Google’s penalizing policies and suggests all the dos and don’ts to keep in mind when growing your blog organically and how to avoid Google penalties.

Producing superior-quality content automatically helps you to earn backlinks instead of creating them. You are able to defeat your competitors organically when people start seeing you as a trustworthy expert on the topic and linking back to your content. The key lies in creating content that is really helpful for the user.

Dive Deeper:

4) Leverage the Power of Content Marketing

As per Ana Gotter, “Content marketing is the practice of providing free content to users in order to get them to your site and engaging with your brand. Unlike blogging, content marketing is strategic, with specific goals for everything you create.”

In order to get people to see your expert-quality article that took you hours and hours to create, you need to provide the first boost to get it out there. Once people discover your amazing article, they will help spread the love by sharing it.

Here are some ways to boost your content marketing strategy:

Share your best content across your social media, which is “one of the most popular distribution methods out there. Your brand likely already has a built-in audience that’s engaged, so sharing posts, videos, and infographics with them can help drive traffic and social shares (which gets you more traffic).” Don’t hesitate to invest in paid native ads to promote your content.

Add easily shareable social media link widgets within your content so that people are able to share the content with minimal effort:

Link back to your content from your email signatures as this will provide an additional boost for your content marketing efforts.
Use the help of influencer marketing to spread the word about your content and reach more audiences. As per Raghav Haran, “Influencer marketing involves using key brand advocates to drive your message to the larger market in an organic way. It pinpoints people with large social followings who have sway over your target audience, then focuses marketing endeavors featuring those key influencers. Rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, you instead pay influencers to get out the word for you.”

The need for high-quality content won’t be going away anytime soon. Fishkin’s concept of 10x content has helped marketers recognize the importance of improving quality to boost their rankings and earn a more loyal audience.

Dive Deeper:

Is 10X Content Really Worth the Effort?

Fishkin isn’t the only content marketing expert who has discussed the benefits of 10X content. Larry Kim, the founder and chief technology officer of WordStream, has said in a webinar with Buzzsumo that WordStream’s best articles drive substantially more traffic than the rest.

To put it in perspective, he says that nearly half of all the site’s traffic comes from the top 50 articles while the other 1,200 posts each contribute to only a sliver of the monthly traffic:

Stop and let that sink in for a moment. WordStream receives nearly a million visitors every month, and half a million of those visits are driven by the top 50 articles alone. This means that each of the company’s top articles drives an average of 10,000 visits to the site every month. How incredible is that?

Of course, you shouldn’t be focusing purely on traffic volume. The purpose of ranking in the SERPs is to generate high-quality traffic that’s likely to convert. Still, these statistics from WordStream present a compelling case for how you can use 10X content to meet your conversion goals. Assuming you’re competing for a high-converting keywords, 10X content can help you stand out:

Besides, 10X content can help you earn high-quality links and improve the overall user experience. When you work towards optimizing the user experience, then every other element automatically falls in place and you have a better chance of ranking higher on Google.

How Do You Generate 10X Content?

As everybody in the SEO community knows, Google has been consistently raising the bar for SEO over the past ten years. Before the company became the web’s dominant search engine, anyone could stuff a webpage full of keywords and expect to gain traffic. Google tried to address that problem by rolling out the PageRank algorithm, which rewarded websites that earned links from other sources and created more relevant content.

As Gary Illyes (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) says:

Google’s algorithm was a marked improvement over other search engines, but it didn’t completely eliminate the webspam problem. Some brands were still able to rank on the first page by writing low-quality content and using black hat link-building strategies. Eventually, the Google Panda updates helped remove a lot of this spammy content, forcing brands to reassess their content marketing strategy:

Fishkin argues that things have gone a step further in recent years and that content has become a critical part of the SERPs algorithms. In this new environment, the only way that brands can reasonably expect to outrank their competitors is by producing content that’s much more valuable than what’s currently being displayed on the first page.

Now that you understand the importance of creating exceptional content, you should know that actually creating it is much more difficult. 🙂 Keeping in mind the above factors for producing 10X content, here are a few ways to approach the problem:

1) Research the Content on the First Page of SERPs

Websites that rank on the first page of Google receive 89.71% of all organic search traffic, which is broken down to:

The first ranking position in the search results receives 42.25% of all click-through traffic
The second position receives 11.94%
Third position on the first page obtains 8.47%
The fourth placed position on page one receives 6.05%
The others on the first page are under 5% of click through traffic

Since there’s so much riding on getting on the first page of results, marketers invest a significant amount of time and money optimizing their sites for higher rankings. Reviewing the content that’s currently ranking well can help you determine the quality level that your content needs to exceed to get on the top position.

You can’t create content that’s ten times better than your competitors’ without knowing what they’re putting out. Take a look at all the results on the first page for your target keyword phrases and ask yourself the following questions:

What solution is the brand’s content trying to provide to the reader?
How does their content stand out from their peers?
Is the content actually helping to solve the intent of the searcher?
What does the content offers that helps to keep the viewers engaged?
What could they have done to provide more value to their readers?
What is the overall value of the content? Did these brands actually create exceptional content or are they simply the best-known brands and coasting along on minimal investment?

Your competitive analysis is an essential first step in the content development process. Aim to spend at least a few hours studying the results on the first page in order to come up with a game plan that will help you deliver better work.

Dive Deeper: Why Competitive Analysis Is the Key to Early Success

2) Provide a Unique User Experience

No matter what you think, your users are the ultimate judges of the quality of your content. They tend to view more unique content as higher quality, so you’ll want to figure out how to differentiate your content from your competitors. You can do so by using unique, high-quality and interactive visuals to make your articles and web copy more memorable and engaging.

As you can see from the following stats, incorporating compelling visual content pieces (such as images and videos) into your website is an essential part of improving the user experience:

In this article, ‘Be Bold: 4 Uncommon Types of Content That Attract Hundreds of Backlinks’, Neil Patel highlights that ‘high quality images are more valuable than ever before’. This is especially true for infographics that represent complex statistics in a compelling visual manner. As they say, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’!
Articles with compelling images get 94% more page views than the ones without.
Explainer videos on landing pages have significantly higher conversion rates.
Interactive content is great for user engagement. As Roland Pokornyik points out, “Interactive content converts buyers 70% of the time compared to just 36% for passive content.”

Visuals play a key role in the user experience, which can ultimately lift your SERPs performance as well. If you’re trying to create exceptional content, then you will need to choose high-quality images and videos, and split test them to see which perform the best:

Besides visuals, there is one more thing that can uplift the user engagement: chatbots. People like to get recommendations and chatbots fulfill this need of the customers. Chatbots help create engaging pages and reduce the bounce rate, as well as help convert people into repeat customers:

Not every competitor of yours has leveraged the power of chatbots in their content strategy, so this can be a great way to distinguish your content from others.

Dive Deeper: Why Chatbots Are a Must-Have for Businesses (and How to Build One!)

3) Use Multiple Metrics to Define Quality

What defines great content? There isn’t any single metric to determine this because there are a number of ways through which users measure content value. You’ll want to satisfy all of the following to ensure that your viewers’ high standards are met:

Does your content provide answers to the questions that your viewers are asking themselves while conducting their search?
Does your content go into the detail that your readers are looking for?
Do you have sufficient data to support your claims?
Do you use visuals effectively?

You need to hit on every one of these points if you want to live up to your promise to deliver high-quality content.

Dive Deeper: How To Measure Your Content Marketing ROI With Google Analytics

4) Integrate Your Content With the Rest of Your Site

Dwell time (the time users remain on your site) and bounce rates have become increasingly important ranking variables that you need to pay attention to. Not only must you engage your readers with your content, you also need to use it to make visitors feel connected to the rest of your site.

Source

So how do you use your 10X content to reduce your bounce rate? The best place to start is by adding valuable, internal links above the fold in your content. Placement is very important, because users are more likely to click links that are higher up on the page.

In this article, Jay Lane elaborates on which types of links you must track and the tools/plugins used to track them. These tools help you determine a pattern in user behavior when it comes to what links they click. This way you get a better picture of how well a user is engaging with your post or website. Do they click on the right links? Do they take the right actions to progress down your funnel?

If you notice that your links aren’t helping to improve your bounce rate, you may need to make them more enticing. Too many content marketers use internal links solely to improve their SEO. The real purpose of 10X content should be providing value to the reader, so your internal backlinking strategy should be secondary, making sure that every link serves a clear purpose and has a strong call to action.

As an example, one compelling way to reduce your bounce rate and increase your dwell time is to create an internal link to a high-value white paper you’ve published. Include a sentence or two describing the resource within your 10X content piece to call attention to it and increase the chance that it’ll be clicked.

5) Forget About Scalability

Before the Panda update was launched, plenty of companies focused on volume and produced a lot of low-quality content that was created for the purpose of ranking higher in the search engines but didn’t help the user. Content mills like Suite 101 and eHow employed vast teams of writers to constantly generate articles—most at the expense of quality. Clearly, that didn’t go so well for them, as Suite 101 was forced to shut down and eHow had to drastically improve its quality guidelines in order to stay afloat.

Fishkin argues that the focus that so many companies have on the scalability of their content production methods is drastically overrated. In fact, if you find a way to scale your campaign, that probably means that your content isn’t good enough to be considered 10X content.

“This is a super power,” Fishkin says. “When your competitors or other folks in the field look and say, ‘Hey, there’s no way that we can scale content quality like this. It’s just too much effort. We can’t keep producing it at this level,’ well, now you have a competitive advantage. You have something that puts you in a category by yourself and that’s very hard for competitors to catch up to. It’s a huge advantage in search, in social, on the Web as a whole.”

Quality should always be your barometer for gauging the value of your content. Focus on consistently producing quality content that reflects well on your brand, rather than pumping out mediocre content every day.

Hit The 10X Mark Every Time You Create A Piece of Content

It sounds excessive, but you have to focus on hitting the 10X mark every time you create a piece of content. This means that you need to have reliable content creators on hand and enough time and money to invest in creating it.

The below figure states that companies have already started to focus their priority on creating quality content and the ones who haven’t must start doing so ASAP:

Outsourcing your content writing to contractors on Fiverr may have helped you rank in 2012, but you probably already know that the quality of the work you generated in this way was never very good. The articles weren’t engaging, so the conversions were likely dismal. Using these kinds of articles today will probably hurt you more than help you.

Developing content that can rank on the front page will be an investment. You can’t expect a writer on Fiverr or one of your interns to produce the content that can compete with the pages at the top of the SERPs written by experts in their field. In addition, creating articles of this caliber can take days, or even weeks, so you can’t guarantee to your followers that you’re going to put out such valuable content every day. Fortunately, you won’t need to.

Writing 10X content gives you the chance to rank on the first page of Google—an opportunity that might not otherwise be available to you.
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And if this higher ranking helps increase your website traffic and on-site conversions, you’ll see far better results overall from a handful of 10X content pieces than you will by writing dozens of low-value articles just to meet an arbitrary publishing calendar.

So if Fiverr and other low-quality freelance sites are out, who do you turn to in order to create 10x content? Your best bet is to develop it on your own. You understand your brand more than anyone else, so you’ll be able to better engage with your followers than someone who doesn’t know your company.

You can also consider outsourcing your content to a professional writer or hiring someone in-house, but you’ll need to make 100% certain that they have a track record for producing quality material and can do so successfully within your industry.

Dive Deeper: The Best Places to Find Freelancers For Your Business

Some Great Examples of 10X Content

It’s easy to conceptualize the need to create content that’s ten times better than your best-ranking competitors, but knowing what to write is quite different.

How long should your blog post be? How many visuals does it need? How much data is necessary to stand out? All of these are important barometers of content quality, but it’s not always clear how much detail you need to be ten times better than any result on Google’s front page.

Let’s study some content based on the principles we discussed in this article. To get you inspired, here is a wide variety of 10X content that has worked well for their creators.

1) What Is Code? A Guide From Bloomberg

Computer coding is a very broad and complicated topic, so it would, understandably, take a very long and detailed post to do it justice.

This article from Bloomberg is one of the longest and most informative pieces of content I’ve ever come across. It also has a unique background and many static and animated images to illustrate its points. For instance, when I skimmed through it and reached the end, a chatbot jumped onto the page and said:

You’ll also want to check out section 6.5 called “And Now for Something Beautiful,” in which some of the words fly off the page and new text takes its place (seen in green in the image below):

All told, the post is over 38,000 words long (contrary to what the bot above said) which, realistically, is probably necessary to sufficiently give an overview of the history and current state of computer code.

2) Beginner’s Guide to Website Speed Optimization

This guide from Kinsta is more than 10,000 words long and contains almost every bit of information needed to improve your site speed. In short, this content deserves to be on the number one page of Google for searches related to site speed optimization.

It includes all the elements we’ve discussed in this article, from white space to legible font to images to bullet points. Because of its length, it is broken into chapters which you can click on to jump directly to that section.

3) Grocery Delivery Page From Mercato

10X content does not always need to be super long or contain tutorials and incredibly detailed instructions. You can prepare 10X content for keywords that are competitive and directly related to your commercial niche.

Mercato does a great job of creating 10X content pages that have high buying intent. This Los Angeles grocery delivery page fulfills everything that the user is looking for: a complete list of products, an easily visible search button, nice use of images (particularly important for a food site), and the overall perfect presentation of content.

4) Burma – An Enchanted Spirit

If you are a travel enthusiast, then this resource will surely mesmerize you. This page presents a complete guide on Burma with large, clear and exceptional quality images.

This is clearly written by a travel writer who knows what he is talking about, and comes across as an expert on this topic. This is no average travel article – it is a piece of genuine literary prose. The author makes good use of white space (which allow the photos to really stand out), headings, and image descriptions.

If anyone is searching for a photo album on Burma then this page surely deserves the top spot in the search results.

5) The Advanced Content Marketing Guide

There is no doubt that this Quicksprout page, written by Neil Patel and Kathryn Aragon, ranks on the top of Google for searches related to content marketing.

At 40,000 words, it’s the length of a novella and it is broken down into chapters. The first page is essentially an image-based table of contents, includes prominent social share buttons, is easy to navigate, and the downloadable PDF version of this article makes the brand stand out.

And, finally, the actual content is well-researched, well-organized, well-written – and its actionable information provides an enormous amount of value to the reader.

Dive Deeper: How to Think Like an Investor to Win at Content Marketing in 2023

What’s Next?

Content marketing still remains one of the most ROI-friendly ways to generate leads and creating 10X content is more important than ever.

If you want to stand a chance of ranking and engaging your visitors, then you need to create content that’s much better than anything found on the first page. Study the SERPs carefully and use them as inspiration to drive content that delivers ten times more value than anything your targeted customers have ever seen before.

The game of content marketing is certainly going to get harder and only the best in the business will succeed. You need to make your content stand out from the rest and produce something epic that makes people fall in love with it!

The post Absolutely Everything You Need to Know About 10x Content appeared first on Single Grain.

Do You Really Need to Write 1,890-Word Blog Posts to Rank on Page 1?

Eric Siu — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 15:00:03 +0000

Several years ago, Brian Dean, owner of the popular Backlinko blog, analyzed the results of 1 million Google search results in partnership with Eric Van Buskirk and several data partners, trying to understand what it took to rank a piece of content in the organic SERPs.

One of the team’s findings was that longer content tends to rank higher in Google’s search results – in particular, that “the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.”

Dean’s recent research backs up the value of longer content. Just last month, he released the results of his analysis of more than 912 million blog posts. Again, he found that long-form content performs better, with longer articles capturing more backlinks and social shares on average than shorter pieces (interestingly, the “sweet spot” for social shares was a length of 1,000-2,000 words):

Taken together, you’d assume that this means every piece of content you write should hit that magical mark around 1,890 words, right? Not so fast. In my work with Single Grain clients, I’m seeing evidence that a more nuanced approach to content standards makes more sense.

The Case for Industry-Specific Content Standards

It’s true that great content is important for every business, no matter what niche or industry it’s in. But what actually constitutes “great” varies by industry.

Take the travel niche as an example. If you’re in this space, Google doesn’t want you to create 5,000-word articles, because those customers don’t want long articles describing different places. They want videos and pictures. They want to see reviews from other people. If you look at TripAdvisor, you’ll see that they rank extremely well, even though they don’t have tons of text on every page.

E-commerce is another vertical where context matters. Say you’re searching for “men’s tennis rackets.” You probably don’t want to read a 2,000-word review of each racket’s features – but I’d bet you care that the content you’re reading is up to date. Interestingly enough, in some industries, the quality and length of your content aren’t the only factors that affect its rankings. How current it is plays a role as well.

Ross Hudgens of Siege Media calls this “freshness distance.” On August 9, 2018, his team searched Google for “best headphones.” To their surprise, they found that every post in the top 10 had been published before June 20, 2018 – a span of just over a month, despite the huge amount of content relating to the keyword online.

Hudgens’ team then repeated the experiment with the search query “What is good running form?” This time, the oldest search result that appeared came from the year 2000 – a span of more than 18 years.

This led Hudgens to conclude that freshness distance “can tell us a lot about what that search result requires in terms of frequency of update in order to be competitive on that result.” If you’re purchasing a product, you can see why timeliness matters (since chances are you aren’t looking for an 18-year-old tennis racket). But in the case of running form, it’s possible that best practices haven’t changed much over that same span, making current information much less necessary.

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A Contextual Content Game Plan

So, let’s stay you’re starting out from ground zero when it comes to content. How do you put all of this information together? It’d be easy to say “go out and write 1,890-word articles to see results,” but as we’ve seen from the industry-specific guidance above, ranking with content isn’t that simple.

Instead of writing long articles for the sake of hitting some arbitrary metric, change the way you think about content.
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When you’re first starting out, think of your efforts as contributing towards the creation of a solid foundation that will help you build backlinks to your website. As you build links and your domain authority goes up, you’re going to have an easier time ranking at the top of the search results whenever you publish new content.

HubSpot is a great example of this phenomenon in action. The marketing automation platform was recently able to rank a product page (for a product that didn’t even exist yet) for a competitive keyword phrase in just three months:

According to Growth Marketing Manager Alex Birkitt, “Good SEO is rarely the result of sporadic hacks and luck. It’s the result of a solid process and playbook.” He continues, “a smaller authority site may have to put a lot more effort into content creation and link building than a large site like HubSpot or Shopify. It all depends on where your competitive advantage lies.”

You may not be able to compete with a content giant like HubSpot overnight, but here’s how you can start build your own solid foundation.

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Analyze Your Industry’s Results

Take your target keywords and look at the top 10 results that appear in Google’s search results. Look at their word count. Use a tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs to see the number of domains that each result has linking to it. Dig in deeper to see different trends. If everyone else is averaging 300 words per post, you may only need to write slightly more to rank.

If you’re in Ahrefs, use the keyword difficulty tool to figure out the approximate number of links you’ll need to build to get into the top 10:

If you see that some of your target search queries are more competitive than others, that’ll help you decide which content pieces to create first to produce the fastest results.

These tools might not be completely accurate, but they can give you a starting point. Once you know what the current standards are, you can go out and use Brian Dean’s Skyscraper Technique to create something you can be confident is going to stand out.

Think Qualitatively, Not Just Quantitatively

Don’t just look at word count and backlink requirement numbers. As you’re evaluating each of the top 10 results, look at their comments. Look at what people love from that site. If you can, ask your audience what they want from you. Survey them. Use tools like UserTesting:

Once you get this feedback, use it to improve your understanding of the type of content you need to create and how long it should be.

Do this kind of analysis enough, and you’ll start to see some trends. If you’re in a B2B business, for example, longer content is typically better. That doesn’t mean you need to be at 1,890 words exactly – it might take 10,000 words to stand out, or you might need just 500. It’s all about what is standard in your vertical.

The same goes for health and nutrition businesses. These niches typically like longer content, but you have to get specific. A food blogger might need to hit different standards than a powerlifting supplements business – you won’t know until you start Googling and researching the terms you want to rank for.

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Think About Searcher Intent

As you’re researching the content that’s currently ranking for the keyword phrases you want to target, pay special attention to searcher intent.

In an earlier article here, Daniel Bishop describes searcher intent as “the reason behind a specific search. Why are people searching for something in the first place? Do they have a simple question that needs answering? Are they looking for a website to learn something? Do they want to buy or sell something?”

But here’s why it’s important to think about searcher intent when you’re planning for content creation. Say you go through the whole process I described above, looking at the current top 10 results for your target keyword and defining the length you might need to hit to rank your own content. If you’ve built all that effort around search queries that don’t have the right intent behind them, all that effort is going to be for nothing. You might get traffic, and you might even get ranked. But you aren’t going to get the conversions you need to actually produce positive content ROI.

WordStream has a great filter for making sure you’re targeting high-intent keywords. Their model breaks keywords into three different groups – navigational, informational and transactional:

There might be value in targeting informational queries, if by producing content around these phrases you’re reaching future buyers at the earliest, awareness-oriented stages of their buying process. But you’re almost always going to get the most bang for your content buck by going after those keywords that fall into the transactional category and indicate high levels of conversion intent.

What transactional keywords look like for your company will vary; activity-driven words look different if you’re an e-commerce seller versus a SaaS platform or some other type of business. Spend some time brainstorming options that apply to your company, then cross-check them in your favorite keyword research tool to make sure they have sufficient search volume relative to their competitiveness.

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Expanding Your Content Creation Efforts

Once you’ve built a solid content foundation, whatever that looks like within your industry, you may find that you’re able to shift your focus. Since you’ll have an easier time ranking with whatever content you create, you might instead focus on:

Upgrading your existing content by finding shorter or underperforming posts you can strengthen (and improve their odds of ranking) by adding to their length.
Updating past content – especially if you find you’re in an industry where freshness distance matters.
Creating pillar content or content clusters, like Neil Patel has done with his 14-chapter “Beginner’s Guide to Online Marketing”

You might even decide to change from prioritizing content creation to working more on backlink building and other types of promotion. Derek Halpern famously suggested that content marketers should put 80% of their efforts into content promotion, versus spending just 20% of their time on creation. That may not be realistic if you’re just starting out, but it can become an option once you’ve built your content foundation.

You can find my basic content promotion checklist here:

Or if you’re thinking about paid promotion, you can learn more about the different platforms that are out there in this article by Pawel Grabowski. You can even start thinking about building future promotion into your content before you begin creating it.

The expert round-up, for example, is a content creation strategy getting a lot of mileage right now that makes post-publishing promotion easy. The process is simple:

Choose a topic that you know will interest your audience.
Email experts in your industry or contacts in your CRM to ask for their comments on the topic.
Compile the responses into a single post and publish.

Once your post is live, reach back out to the experts who participated, asking them to share the content with their audiences. You’re effectively killing two birds with one stone – not only are you reducing the amount of effort needed as a content creator, you are also leveraging the audiences of your participants once you’ve published.

In a case study for the SmartBlogger website, contributor Brian Lang shares how using this exact strategy to create a round-up on blog promotion tips drove over 4,000 social shares of a single article.

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Setting Your Own Content Standards

The key takeaway here is that there’s no single approach that’s appropriate for all content campaigns – but there’s also no need to reinvent the wheel.

You don’t have to write 1,890-word articles to rank in Google. Content is still king, but that doesn’t mean following arbitrary standards. It means figuring out what’s needed in your industry and building a content and SEO strategy that’ll help you meet those standards without wasting time or energy on content creation.

The post Do You Really Need to Write 1,890-Word Blog Posts to Rank on Page 1? appeared first on Single Grain.

How AI Is Shaping the Future of Content Marketing and Personalization

Dheeraj Kapoor — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 15:00:02 +0000

The practice of collecting basic demographic information from customers to create a successful business marketing strategy is one of the past.

In recent times, there has been a major shift in the way that businesses interact with their customers. The digital space has spread so far and wide that it has had a lasting influence on virtually everything we do. As a result, the conventional approaches to marketing that were prevalent even as early as a few years ago are considered severely ineffective today.

The rapidly growing popularity of Big Data means that marketers need to embrace sophisticated approaches to processes and perform in-depth analysis of customer data, preferably in real-time.

Being able to craft highly personalized, innovative marketing messages is a key skill in this digital age.
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To stay ahead of the game and remain relevant in an extremely dynamic corporate space, marketers are adopting Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies. These not-so-futuristic (anymore) technologies are paving the way for next-generation marketing and advertising that puts the customer front and center: an integral part of the messaging.

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In delivering personalized content experiences, marketers have successfully implemented AI capabilities, including Machine Learning, into previously manual operations such as search engines. Google Now and Apple’s voice assistant Siri are only two famous examples of this advanced technology.

As the technology gradually becomes more mainstream, Artificial Intelligence is also making inroads into fields such as finance and retail. The banking sector for one, has openly embraced AI, making it part of its customer-facing processes, and using it to design unique machine-based intelligent assistants to address customers’ frequently asked questions and banking needs. AI has also impacted retail since customers are now looking for more personalized online and offline shopping experiences.

Free Bonus Download: Get our free marketing guide to learn tactics that have actually generated millions of dollars for our clients! Click here to download it for free right now!

Content Marketing Is Actively Embracing Artificial Intelligence

In this competitive corporate scenario, content marketing is a pivotal part of a business or brand’s messaging and to achieve success it must adapt dynamically. It is evident that the content marketing industry has embraced Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning as new, vital technologies.

To appreciate how AI has impacted content marketing, let us understand the difference between Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Artificial Intelligence is simply a term that describes the way a computer program or machine can imitate various types of human behavior and thinking, such as movement and speech, and being able to implement acquired intelligence to perform different actions with minimal human intervention.

Machine Learning allows a computer application or program to recognize and learn from patterns in data. The ML-integrated program or application is then able to improve its capabilities without human assistance.

An Artificial Intelligence-based platform that is more sophisticated is better able to detect and predict how patterns will form in data. By being able to continuously access relevant insights from rapidly increasing volumes of data, a business’ marketing strategies and initiatives are drastically improved.

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Now let us assess how Artificial Intelligence is redefining the content marketing landscape.

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Personalization Is of Paramount Importance

According to recent studies, 60% of content marketers struggle with personalization. This is a serious problem at a time when consumers are seeking highly unique, interactive experiences with retail brands.

Today’s digitally savvy customers actively want to forge deeper connections with the businesses they patronize. Marketers have taken note of this dynamic trend. Several marketing automation software organizations are stepping up to this challenge by creating tools and solutions that enable marketers to focus on personalized engagement with customers.

Marketers have realized that AI-powered tools and solutions can effortlessly automate the timing, communication channels, and type of content, allowing them to effectively streamline marketing strategies to align with the dynamic needs of every customer. This is achieved with ML integration that allows marketers to collect, analyze and store huge volumes of data. By performing in-depth analyses of various patterns in data, marketers create customized experiences for customers.

The pivotal importance of personalization is highlighted in the findings of a Gartner study which concluded that companies that have made strategic investments in various types of personalization will easily outsell those organizations that haven’t by 20% in 2018.

Two Ways to Personalize Content Marketing

Offer audiences omni-channel marketing campaigns so they can engage with your content on devices of their preference.

Leverage users’ demographic data to provide relevant content. This can be achieved by collecting information from users, such as their zip code, to deliver location-relevant content on their preferred topics so that they get access to material that they find interesting.

Data Analysis Is More Advanced

Methods of analyzing data from various sources have gradually become more advanced. This means that content marketers are using more in-depth analytics tools and solutions to analyze the relevance and impact of their content. As the field of Artificial Intelligence progresses, AI-based algorithms will be able to create strategies by sifting through large volumes of data by recognizing and analyzing patterns.

Forrester predicts that business organizations that primarily focus on insights will steal $1.2 trillion per year from their competitors that don’t.

Content Is Rapidly Being Automated

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is an important branch of Artificial Intelligence that is set to impact content marketing in the future.

Natural Language Generation essentially uses specifically created algorithms to translate data into human-like language. This will result in the automation of news reporting and headline generation, among other tasks.

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A recent study by Gartner revealed that almost 20% of business-focused content will be generated solely by machines in 2018.

However, this does not spell doom for content marketing. It only means that content marketers will have access to superior, advanced tools and technologies, enabling them to better analyze the content they create. Deeper insights will allow content marketers to effectively predict content performance and patterns in audience engagement.

Free Bonus Download: Get our free marketing guide to learn tactics that have actually generated millions of dollars for our clients! Click here to download it for free right now!

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Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Content Marketing

Let’s highlight four primary benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Content Marketing.

While Artificial Intelligence is gradually redefining Content Marketing, marketers who harness Artificial Intelligence technology in their marketing strategies and campaigns are well equipped to contribute to the success of business organizations.

1) AI Enables Personalized Customer Interactions

Mass message campaigns are now a thing of the past. Irrelevant content is a big source of consumer disengagement. Thus, it is only natural that many consumers will lose interest in a brand if their expectations are not met.

52% of consumers are likely to switch to a different brand or product if they do not receive personalized communication from the company.
65% of business buyers would switch brands if their vendors don’t personalize communication.
72% of businesses reveal that enhancing the customer experience is their top priority.

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It is difficult to achieve the scale of personalization that is required to effectively deliver successful multi-channel marketing campaigns. While manual tuning of campaigns does not work, several marketers find they are falling behind in meeting customer expectations despite working harder and spending more.

The biggest challenge for marketers lies in finding the right tools to support personalized marketing efforts.

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80% of marketers reveal that personalized content is more effective than generic content. Personalization helps promote transparency in marketing campaigns and gives marketers control of their strategies.

2) AI Enhances Marketing Campaigns

When marketers harness the potential of Artificial Intelligence, their marketing campaigns and strategies are vastly improved. This is because they use everything they know about their customers to customize the individual experience.

79% of marketing executives believe that AI will make their tasks easier and more efficient — but they must be prepared and able to translate data into meaningful interactions, to positively impact business performance.
75% of marketers say that they will actively attempt to implement Artificial Intelligence in their businesses within the next 3 years.

Source

3) AI Helps Push Relevant Content to the Right Audiences

Artificial Intelligence enables marketers to accurately predict relevant content for the right audiences. 61% of companies with innovation strategies are implementing AI to identify critical opportunities in data, and without this technology, it is likely that these business opportunities would be overlooked.

This technology helps marketers realize the full potential of their audience data, automate and optimize customer experience extremely precisely. That means that by analyzing almost infinite amounts of data like age and income brackets, personal interests, geo-location, device used to shop, day/time preference for going online, etc., marketers are infinitely better equipped to make highly meaningful connections by delivering the right content at the right time.

For example, rather than just targeting all women between 30 and 40 years of age “enjoy exercising,” you can further target those who prefer pilates versus running marathons.

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The Future of Content Marketing

Today, the major part of a typical content marketing campaign process is manual. From keyword research and planning blog article topics, to content curation and sending emails, almost all lead generation tasks require human intervention.

However, Artificial Intelligence integration in the process will give marketers access to deeper, actionable insights and enable them to accurately predict outcomes. The introduction of AI in the field of content marketing will essentially allow marketers to focus on tasks of higher value that impact business performance and leave the mundane and repetitive tasks to the machines.

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The marketing automation that content marketers utilize today is still primarily manual. These platforms help to save time, increase efficiency and productivity, and drive performance. However, they do not provide deep insights into data, make recommendations on actions to take, predict outcomes or create content.

Artificial Intelligence will change all this for content marketers.

Let’s take a real-world example from the burgeoning entertainment industry that has seen revolutionary change with the advent of streaming video platforms.

The video streaming platform Netflix recommends and creates video content and entertainment shows based on in-depth analysis of viewer data and individual preferences. This is possible because of a strategic integration of Machine Learning systems on Netflix’s platform.

Source

75% of what is viewed by audiences on Netflix is generated from algorithm-based recommendations.

Similarly, AI-powered algorithms also power self-driving vehicles by Tesla, voice recommendation engines like Microsoft’s Cortana and e-commerce giant Amazon’s product recommendations. And we’re only going to see more of this in the very near future.

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Content Marketing Is on the Brink of an AI Revolution

It is highly evident, based on recent trends in the market, that data science will effectively change how businesses are managed because computer systems are going to be our primary aids in redefining the way businesses interact with their customers.

If you want a credible example to highlight the changing face of content marketing, you need look no further than the social media network Facebook. After just a little over a decade in existence, Facebook is already harnessing Deep Learning capabilities with Deep Text, their AI language processing engine that has “near-human accuracy” in the way it understands and talks to real humans. Deep Text is used with their Messenger chatbot, to filter users’ News Feeds and perform facial recognition on photographs that are uploaded.
Media company NBCUniversal uses AI to create intelligent content, customized clip generators, and computer vision, which “automatically discovers the content and context of video, including data on who is in a scene, what is happening, what is being said, and even the underlying sentiment.”
Next Insurance uses Artificial Intelligence for its claims process that is “99.9% accurate” which allows the company to process their customers’ claims a lot faster.
Spotify uses AI to offer personal music recommendations for its users, Apple uses AI for its virtual personal assistant Siri, and many retailer stores use AI for the perfect cross-channel experience for their customers.

Source

Free Bonus Download: Get our free marketing guide to learn tactics that have actually generated millions of dollars for our clients! Click here to download it for free right now!

How to Survive and Grow in the Artificial Intelligence Age

AI is already revolutionizing the marketing industry and will continue to transform jobs, disrupt content marketing much more rapidly than we can possibly imagine, and create immense opportunities for businesses that can effectively leverage this technology.

However, there are dedicated attempts being made to make Artificial Intelligence technology more cost effective, affordable and easily accessible, which should propel the development and wider adoption of AI across various industries. The challenge, then, will lie in employing technical talent that is capable of building and executing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions.

The post How AI Is Shaping the Future of Content Marketing and Personalization appeared first on Single Grain.

Content Marketing Archives - Single Grain

How to Create a Powerful Marketing Funnel Step-by-Step

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

What Is a Marketing Funnel?

What Is an Example of a Marketing Funnel?

How Does a Marketing Funnel Work? (Stages of the Funnel)

Stage 1 – Problem/Need Recognition (TOFU)

Stage 2 – Information Search (MOFU)

Stage 3 – Evaluation of Alternatives (MOFU)

Stage 4 – Purchase Decision (BOFU)

Stage 5 – Post-Purchase Behavior

AIDA: Another Way to Remember Content Creation Stages

How to Build a Marketing Funnel for Your Content

Stage 1 Channels – Problem/Need Recognition (TOFU)

Examples of Marketing Campaigns at This Stage

Stage 2 Channels – Information Search (MOFU)

Look for ‘Striking Distance’ Keywords

Examples of Content at This Stage

Stage 3 Channels – Evaluation of Alternatives (MOFU)

Examples of Content at This Stage

Stage 4 Channels – Purchase Decision (BOFU)

Qualifying Leads in Your Sales Funnel: MQLs and SQLs

What Is a Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)?

What Is a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?

Which Marketing Funnel Metrics Should I Track?

Final Word on Marketing Funnels

The Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Audit

What Is a Content Audit?

Before Beginning Your Content Audit

Why Am I Conducting a Content Audit?

What Resources Do I Have Available for My Content Audit?

What Do I Hope to Get Out of My Content Audit?

Meet John, Our Hypothetical Business Owner

The Content Audit Process

How to Do a Content Audit: The Quick Version

Step #1 – Create a Spreadsheet of All Your Content Assets

Step #2 – Gather Asset Data

Step #3 – Analyze Your Data

Taking Your Audit Further

Look at Your Competitor’s Websites

Track Offsite Content Performance

Expand the Audit Process to Other Marketing Channels

In Summary

Startup Content Marketing That’ll Help Your Company Grow📈

The Importance of a Content Marketing Strategy

5 Reasons Why a Content Marketing Strategy Is Important for Your Startup

1) Content Marketing Is Affordable

2) Content Marketing Boosts Your Brand’s Presence

3) Content Marketing Helps You Establish Your Expertise and Authority

4) Content Marketing Increases Brand Trust and Loyalty

5) Content Marketing Helps Your Startup Grow

Understanding What Content Actually Means

Any piece of content you create should have the following important characteristics:

Marketing on a Startup Budget

Here are some of the questions you need to answer:

Here are some of the most familiar roles in content development:

When It Comes to Content, Less Can Sometimes Be More

Understanding Your Audience Before You Start

Here are some of the most important characteristics to help you identify your relevant audience:

Analyze Your Competition

Here are some things you can look for during your competitor analysis:

Creating Content Better than Your Competition

Content Marketing Tips for Startups to Keep in Mind

Nurturing Content Success with Other Platforms

Social Media

Email Marketing

Video Marketing

Analytics

Final Thoughts on Content Marketing

12 Types of Interactive Content to Drive Better Engagement

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ↓

What Is Interactive Content?

The Benefits of Using Interactive Content

Generate Higher Engagement Rates

Capture More Data

Increase Brand Loyalty

Top 12 Best Types of Interactive Content

1) Interactive Infographics

2) Interactive Video

3) Polls and Surveys