Content Marketing for Sales:
Content is so much more than
just sales material. Treating it like it’s a brochure or a flyer meant to draw
in a customer and convert them is a mistake. Content is richer and deeper than
sales material. When you’re doing content marketing, you’re trying to attract
the customer, yes. The end result, however, isn't solely for a conversion.
Although conversion can be an end result, the true goal of your content is to
bring value to your readers’ lives. Good content enriches the consumer and that
should be how you should treat your content when marketing it. Don’t just see
it as a quick, hard sell.
1. Not Having Any Goals
2. Forgetting Who Your Audience Is
3. Tracking the Amount of Likes Your Content Gets on Facebook
4. Counting Your Ad Impressions
5. Blog Comments
6. Reports That Analyze the Entire User Database
Get Down to Business With Content Promotion:
We all know that content marketing does have a
plateau, and in order to get past it, content audits and new approaches to your
content is needed. Unless you start setting goals from the start about where
you want your content marketing to take you, you’re not going to know how well
your marketing has done and if it can or should be improved. Setting goals and
meeting them is one of the most important things for a content marketer.
This goes hand in hand with
treating your content like its sales material. Your audience is the motor that
drives your earnings, and your content is supposed to attract and interest
them. This means that you need to engage your audience on a level
that is comfortable for them.Emotional response is one of
the most effective ways to get people interested in your product, but it’s not
exactly the same for your content. You have to treat the reader with respect
and not talk down to them. This includes making false claims in your
content marketing, because when you do that, you assume your audience just
won’t check your references and calls you out on it.
Yes, analytic are a good way
to gauge how your content is performing, but the amount of likes you get on Facebook is a
useless metric to follow. Facebook allows a user to click “like” on a post
without ever actually visiting the site it links to.
Ad impressions counters are
fickle creatures. Their code can be done in a number of ways which makes this
metric pretty misleading for a content marketer to use. Some ad impression
counters add one to the count every time the page loads, whether or not the ad
was actually visible to the user. You can see where this can be a problem,
since if the ad isn't visible, it’s really not making much of an impression.
Looking at the number of
impressions can give you a false sense of how many people are actually seeing
your ad and in turn can make you think that you need to change the ad copy,
when all you really need to do is change the location of the ad (or the ad
counter software).
As an avid blogger myself, I
know the kind of joy that comes from getting a comment on my blog. It’s
a feeling that’s far better than seeing a like on my Facebook content because
it is actual interaction! .
One
thing you come to learn pretty quickly is that the number of blog comments is
another one of those misleading metrics since the actual amount of comments on
a single post doesn't necessarily correlate with the amount of visits or leads
you get from the post.
Although the amount of comments is a metric that some advertisers
use as a go-to, it really is not a very accurate descriptor of a blog’s performance
business-wise.
Many content marketers spend
hour after hour poring through their database and the reports generated from
them. The sad thing is that although these reports are no doubt useful, they
are only useful when limited to a particular subset of the overall user
database. The problem is one that many beginner statistics students face early
into their first semester: a misrepresentation sample.
Your entire database comprises users across all the demographics
that you may or may not directly target. Any report generated from this mass of
information will most likely be unusable in a targeted marketing campaign
because it does not actually target a demographic. It is a much better idea to
do reports on each sub-grouping of users by demographic (age, gender,
profession etc.) as these results will be more indicative of that particular
sub-group.
Pointless marketing sucks up time that should be spent doing
the real work of getting your analytic sorted out and improving your amount of
visits and amount of conversions. Sadly, far too many of our content marketers
spend too much time caught up in reading metrics that are misleading or not
having a clearly defined direction for their marketing strategy.
The time you are wasting could be put to use improving your
marketing strategy and streamlining your campaign. Content marketing is a
competitive field and as the saying goes, “If you snooze, you lose. Google+
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