Managing Expectations When Creating Content

Success at Content Marketing is a long game, meaning that the results (and ROI) don't occur overnight. So how can you tell if your strategy is working?

Yes, if you build it, they will come. 

But what they do next is entirely up to your Content Marketing Strategy.

A customer-centric and value-led Content Marketing Strategy can:

• drive positive brand perceptions

• be a cost-effective strategy to boost organic reach and engagement

• lead to more customer acquisition

• yield better ROI than advertising

• boost pipeline revenue

• drive brand awareness and sales

• influence purchasing decisions

• get more customer renewals and up-sells

• improve customer loyalty

• reduce content development costs

You know now that building content is essential for gaining your customer’s trust, building your credibility, and creating customer loyalty. But how this directly generates sales may be getting lost in the numbers. 

This doesn’t have to be difficult. You won’t even need a compass. You’ll just need to remember a few key points before, and during, the development of your Content Marketing Strategy:

• Define Your Goals

• Build Strategies for Your KPIs

• Promote Your Work

• Activate Your Audience

Unlike traditional forms of advertising, results from your Content Marketing Strategy (CMS) can be confusing, at first. You won’t likely see immediate results, and when you do begin to gather the data, it will probably require more nuanced analysis than you’re used to. 

But don’t worry, this isn’t to say that your CMS isn’t working, or that it isn’t worth the effort. 

ROI on Content Marketing is a long term investment with long term results. It's a waiting game that, with consistency and patience, will eventually pay off.

• According to the Marketing Insider Group, Content Marketing typically generates 3x as many leads as traditional marketing, and costs 62% less! 

• B2C and B2B marketing agencies spend at least a third of their budget developing content.

But you want to make sure you’re getting the ROI you’re expecting, and unfortunately, 42% of marketers claim that measuring their content effectiveness is one of their biggest challenges. (Content Marketing Report by the Technology Marketing Community, via LinkedIn).

Like any challenge, however, it is still possible to create the outcome you hope for. Maximize your opportunity for success by following these easy steps!

Define Your Goals

Before you begin building content, you need to remember your Why. As defined in The Questions You Should Be Asking When Forming Your Brand Identity, your Why will help you understand who your Ideal Client is, and who your potential clients could be. Your Why will help you understand how best to reach your clients, and the overall value that you can provide.

 So how can you measure your value?

• Is it through clicks to your website?

• Shares of your blog or video?

• Comments on your social media?

• Subscribers to your email?

• Sales of your product?

Ideally, you’d like to be achieving all of this, so receiving feedback (i.e.: data) of any kind on your content is where you should be examining your analytics to evaluate what you are doing right.

If you’re not achieving any of these things, or only some of them, it is time to evaluate why you might not be impacting your audience the way that you had hoped.

Rather than using your budget to inform your content marketing strategy, using your metrics is going to provide you the insight you need to build and develop an even better strategy to reach your business goals.

• Bounce rate: anything below 70 percent is respectable, below 40 percent is ideal

• Time-on-site: 30 to 45 seconds is the minimum benchmark, otherwise, your content probably isn’t hitting the mark with your visitors

Build Strategies for Your KPIs

As your business goals evolve, so too will your performance metrics. It is important, however, to focus your attention on your Key Performance Indicators, and not all metrics at once (although they all deserve a glance!). 

For reference, a bounce rate below 70% is pretty good, but below 40% would be ideal. 

Similarly, you want your visitors to be spending at least 30-45 seconds on your website. Otherwise, you aren’t making the impact you need to with your audience.

Let’s look at some examples of other metrics to consider:

• Maybe, in the beginning, you were focused on building your email list, so your website visitors were prompted with a successful Call to Action to do so. But your email list hasn’t generated any further sales or engagement. Perhaps you haven’t been consistent, haven’t had attractive subject lines, and haven’t been offering any real value to your subscribers. How can you improve your strategy from here?

or,

• You’ve got a couple of blog posts that are performing really well, but they are missing backlinks to your other related posts, and they aren’t converting your readers into buying customers, thereby causing a higher bounce rate. How can you further engage your audience, and encourage them to remain longer on your website? 

or,

• Users are browsing your website, adding products to their cart, but then abandoning it. How can you remind and convince your customers to make the purchase?

There are plenty of reasons why your goals will change, causing your metrics to change alongside them. It will amaze you how fine-tuning your strategy and tweaking a few words here and there will create the results you were looking for! But you will only know where and how best to adjust your strategy by analyzing your metrics.

Promote Your Work

You’d be surprised how often companies fail to promote their work. So many believe that sending out a single press release to their industry magazine is all they need to do to promote their latest product or service.

Similarly, posting their latest blog post to their company Facebook page, their LinkedIn, or to their Instagram bio is falling short of sufficient content promotion. 

No wonder why Content Marketing isn't living up to expectations for so many companies!

The 80/20 rule gets applied again and again when it comes to promoting your work. For every piece of content you are going to produce, 20% of your time should be spent creating it, and 80% of your time should be spent promoting it.

The beautiful thing is, you can cross-promote your content withinyour other content, costing you zero extra dollars and increasing your brand’s visibility to your already-captive audience, i.e.: linking to a blog post, or embedding a video, within your blog posts. 

You can create new content for specific platforms just to promote your original content, i.e.:

• post (in full) your blog as a newsfeed post in either Facebook or LinkedIn (this increases its visibility on both platforms).

• verbalize your post into the camera on Facebook Live. 

• or verbalize your post into the camera as either a TikTok, an Instagram Story or Reel, or for YouTube.

• Write your blog on your website, and on Medium, and share both to your Pinterest (with optimized images, of course). 

• Send your post as the text within the body of an email.

Of course, continue to encourage your subscribers to consume your content through your email blasts, as well. Guiding your audience to consume as much content as possible, coaxing them to return to your website and stay for a while, is in fact, an effective strategy for your Content Marketing efforts.

But also, if your aim is to reach a broader audience, you can promote your content through paid advertising. You won’t necessarily want to advertise all of your brand’s content, but focus instead on your highest performing, and converting, pieces.

Which pieces of your content are getting the most lead generation? 

Those are the ones you should promote through paid advertising.

Activate Your Audience

Bueller?

Like talking to an empty room, talking to a still and silent crowd online is not going to convert leads.

In order to optimize the performance of your Content Marketing Strategy, you need to be able to activate your audience at every chance possible. By encouraging your audience to click that mouse againin your favor, you are that much more likely to convert that visitor into a paying customer.

A Call to Action is a term used for activating your audience to do something for you, whether that’s to consume more content, buy your product, or share your brand with a friend or follower.

60% of marketers feel that effective content triggers a response from their audience, alongside engaging and compelling storytelling. 

Of course, you don’t want to overwhelm your audience with Calls to Action, but there’s a good rule of thumb that you should prompt them at the beginning, middle, and end of their session with your content… and maybe some in between!

Whether it’s through a pop-up window, the introductory slide of your index page, or in the closing of your content posts, you should prompt your audience with a Call to Action based on your brand’s CMS goals.

• Is it to build out your email subscriber list?

• To read another blog or watch another video?

• To share your content with followers?

• To buy your product?

• To inquire about a service?

When analyzing your KPIs, take notice of where your audience is dropping off. It could be that either your content isn’t engaging enough, or your audience isn't being prompted with a Call to Action.

Don’t miss the opportunity to activate your audience to interact more with your brand!