After spending approximately 6 months in hibernation with your web developer, your much awaited start-up is finally online and ready to take on some leads – or so you thought. However, with the impending doom of outbound marketing, the ROI of your company is pretty down and sale conversions look pretty bleak. Your e-commerce website has stopped attracting web crawlers as well, and you’ve started to think whether entrepreneurship is the right path for you or not.
Well, before your negativity takes you on a toll and invades your capacity to establish your career as a successful entrepreneur, there are some facts that you need to look into.
Why Content Marketing
Inbound marketing is like fire, boosting sales ever since social media started acting out as gasoline. Content marketing – a typical example of inbound marketing – has managed to generate approximately 3 times as many leads as your day-to-day pencil pushers, and that too for a much lower price.
Content marketing is all the rage today – it is more like an indoctrinated marketing program that helps to convert your readers into leads and therefore, boost your sales like no other. In order to understand how content marketing works, you have to work on your content which can’t be done without the help of a content strategist team. In addition, you’d need to hire an SEO Consultant to guide you through the process of content marketing.
Good content marketing helps you to drive sales by promoting and creating your brand’s awareness. It helps you to reach your target audience by giving them something they’re interested to see, read and visualize in the first place.
How Content Marketing Improves Company Sales
Before we get ahead of our main goal, let’s discuss 7 ways that content marketing can help boost sales in an organic way.
1. Website Optimisation
Millennials and Generation Z consumers can’t stay away from social media – we mean this in a good way – and that’s excellent for business. Everybody requires a website that is mobile-friendly and doesn’t take up three whole seconds to load when clicked on. A start-up has more chances of attracting customers to their websites on smart devices than large enterprises, and therefore, helps to generate approximately 30% more sales.
Alex Shipillo of Pressly pointed out that approximately 40% of the traffic generated on a website is due to mobile visitors. He also deduced that websites usually lose out on traffic and subsequently, lead generation, because their content is either not optimized properly or isn’t readable or interesting to consume the reader’s interest.
It is better to hook your readers by incorporating responsive design into your website so that Google can rank it better and attract leads to boost your start-up’s sales.
2. Understand and go with your audience
Catering to the whims of your audience is very important to boost sales of your start-up – you have to understand what your audience wants and cater to their needs specifically.
A major way to understand what your audience wants is to trail after them and reach out when they’re in need. For this, you’d need to use various social media platforms and post about your brand concurrently so that everyone knows what you’re offering.
Sponsoring your content on different social media sites will help you to reach out to a larger audience – the only aim is to personalize your content for each group you’re targeting. With personalized content, your audience will be putty in your hands and will tend to deliver information so that you can cater to their needs avidly.
Construct buyer personas
Buyer Personas help you to look deeper into the traits of your audience and provide them with products that they would prefer to buy from your website. By creating different buyer personas, you’re not only delving into the minds of your customers, but also enabling yourself to curate audience-targeted content and gimmicks to keep them interested.
Buyer personas are more personalized and allow you to listen to what your potential customers are saying about your brand behind your back as well. As a start-up, you might not have relevant customer data or even a few leads to begin with, so go on to your competitor’s website and check how they’re handling buyer personas for inspiration.
3. Look into different content formats
Nobody wants to come to a boring website that doesn’t help to repurpose or give a reader his time’s worth. You personally won’t go to a website that doesn’t look impressive in the first place – let alone the motive to scrimmage through the site for content or products.
For this purpose, you can look into several content formats in order to reach a broader spectrum. Some people prefer audio-visualization while most are okay with just reading content off their Kindles. Some people prefer to see an artsy display of content through infographics while most people will pay to attend webinars if you bring their leaders on board.
4. Offer product tutorials
Infomercials were practically the most boring inventions back then. Infuse them with a playful and more interactive mindset today, and there you have an audience that is all ready to stick by. How do YouTube DIY tutorials work? It’s 90% fun and interactive talking and 10% hitting the what’s-on-the-agenda-for-today button to make the content seem less boring.
Similarly, incorporate the same technique and curate interactive product tutorials for your audience. If your audience is intrigued by an online guide, they’ll probably look into the video tutorial and opt for buying your product after checking its authenticity eventually.
5. Guest blogging and CTAs
There are two specific content marketing techniques targeted here. Call-to-Action messages are important, and they’re not only used when you’re posting infomercial on your website. They should be posted wherever you’re publishing content relevant to your website so that it can help redirect potential leads towards your products.
Blogging and sharing content via guest posting is an incredible content marketing strategy, and helps you to target customers to your website with relevant call-to-action messages. For instance, when posting on an influencer’s blog or collaborating with a series of leaders of the same industry, use ‘Click here to see more information regarding the product’ or ‘Learn how you can get your own’ or anything similar to redirect leads to your website.
6. Use customer testimonials
Customer testimonials act as support and garner attention from potential leads by serving as an optimum content marketing strategy. Liking a product online involves a lot of struggle before finally deciding to make the purchase. In order to convert your leads into customers, post real customer testimonials on your website so that past experiences can help them take the leap of faith as well.
Dedicate a specific page to customer testimonials on your website and add a CTA below each one, or do it as Amazon does and post them beneath the relevant product. Ask your customers to send you images of them using your products. This will act as social proof for leads and will consequently enable you to drum up higher sale rates.
At the end of the piece, we would want you to take home a message: Everything is content and content is everything.
