Content Marketing

Your business has a website, but are you putting it to good use? Is your website working on getting you new leads and helping people find your brand?

It’s not enough to just have a website; you have to optimize your website so that people can find it. With the right SEO solutions, you can get the audience you want and start making conversions. Read on to learn more about SEO and developing a content marketing plan.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It involves strategies and optimizations on your website that help your site rank higher as searches are made. If you are not showing up on the search engines, your website is not doing much for you.

Users no longer get online and enter a URL to find what they need. Instead, they turn to a search engine and ask a question. If your site is near the top of their search, consumers will visit your site and then you get the chance to convert them into customers. 

If you’re able to be noticed by people who are searching for solutions that you can offer, that means even more business for you. SEO can make that happen.

SEO involves:

• how your website is structured
• the content you create
• how you create content
• technical aspects of your site

If you want to get organic traffic to your site, you will need to attend to all elements of SEO.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the easiest ways to grow your business. It involves the creation of various types of content, such as blog posts, lead magnets, video and social media posts to build your brand and get people to your website.

Content marketing is about getting your content seen by as many people as possible. This can be done through search engines, social media platforms or both. Many companies use content marketing as their chief marketing strategy and spend very little time on traditional forms of marketing like television ads.

How Does SEO Marketing Work?

SEO marketing uses SEO best practices to optimize your website so that it shows up in search engines. Again, it’s not about users searching for your brand and finding your website. Instead, it’s about people searching for solutions and finding your brand.

SEO is all about targeting keywords or terms that users enter into a search engine and getting your website to rank for those keywords. Users will then click through to your website, discover your brand and hopefully become a customer.

There are several ways that you can optimize your site for keywords and get your site ranking at the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). You should write and organize your content so that the search engines understand the type of users who will benefit from your content. You should also optimize your site for ease of use. What would be the point of consumers finding your site if they can’t navigate easily? 

What Are the Benefits of SEO Marketing?

There are many benefits to SEO marketing. When your website and content are optimized correctly, you can attract both customers who have heard of your brand and customers who haven’t. Ultimately, you will attract many more customers than relying on your brand alone.

Not only will you attract customers, but you will also attract the right customers. You don’t just want people to view your site; you want people who need your services. For example, if you sell video editing software for Macs and a user searches for “best video editing software for Mac” and lands on your site, you have just made contact with a person who is ready to buy.

SEO improves your website and, as a result, it improves user experience. Websites with better user experiences tend to get repeat visitors.

Lastly, in many cases, SEO solutions are much cheaper than other forms of marketing. You may wind up spending much more on paid advertisements and other traditional forms of marketing.

Contributors to SEO

There are many contributing factors to SEO, including both on-page and off-page optimization.

On-Page Optimization

Before you begin your on-page optimization, you must first find your keywords. Keywords are search terms that users are likely to input into a search engine. You will want to choose keywords in your business’s niche or specific market.

We put in hours and hours of research to determine the most productive keywords for your business and its content. 

Specific keywords are easier to rank for on Google and bring in the type of users who are ready to make a purchase.

As we analyze keywords, we  look for keywords that have lower competition and a higher monthly search volume. If major websites are ranking for a particular keyword, a newer site will not be able to outrank them. Your keywords need a decent monthly search volume –  if no one is searching for a term, no one will make it to your page.

Once we have a solid set of keywords, we then build your content around them. With every update to its algorithm, Google strives to rank pages that provide true value to the reader, so the primary goal should be creating quality content. 

Many content creators use the skyscraper method to develop content. Basically, you see what content is already ranking on Google and then create content that is even better and even more informative. To optimize your content, we make sure to include your target keyword throughout the body of the content.

In addition to your keywords, we’ll also use synonyms to further reinforce your page’s topic to search engines. Content will include short paragraphs, bulleted lists and videos (when applicable). We always aim  to make your content long and full of value. When users stay on your page for a long time, it sends a signal to Google that the page contains quality information.

Since linking plays a big role in SEO, it is important to include a few relevant internal links to other posts on your site and several external links to high-authority websites.

Off-Page Optimization

The other half of your SEO solution concerns off-page optimization, also known as SEO. Off-page optimization concerns everything outside of the content itself.

One of the biggest factors concerns user experience. You want your website to be easy for users to read and navigate in every respect. While search engines do not necessarily rank for user experience, it does pay attention to a user’s time on the page. If a user quickly leaves your site, it sends a signal to Google that something is wrong.

You should regularly check to make sure both your internal and external links are working. Google may penalize you if your site has a lot of broken links. If their bots cannot get to your page, there isn’t a way to rank it.

Now that over half of the users are on a mobile phone, you want your site to be optimized for mobile. Google gives preference to sites that work on mobile as well as desktop.

Many people worry about their safety while online, so search engines tend to prioritize sites that have a security certificate. These URLs begin with https://. You can check with your web host about getting a security certificate. Or if you use a host like Nexcess it comes with your hosting plan and you don’t have to take any extra steps to get it connected.

Site load speed is also a big rank factor. Today’s internet users want websites to load immediately. If your site takes too long to load, users will hit the back button. Google will think your site doesn’t have valuable information and will lower your SERP position.

There are several tools that will check your page speed. Some tools will even give you tips for what may be slowing your site down so that you can fix any problems.

Getting backlinks, or getting other websites to link to you, increases your domain authority, and tells Google that you may be a good source. The Google bots figure that if other sites are linking to you, you must have valuable information.

Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

In the world of content marketing, there are a couple of ways to go about SEO: black hat and white hat.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO goes against search engine guidelines in order to get visitors to a site. Black Hat SEO is strongly discouraged. Search engines will penalize your site for using Black Hat SEO. We never ever ever use these tactics at Content Journey.

Black Hat SEO involves a set of methods that usually “trick” the user or the search engine in some way. Paid backlinks are one of the biggest indiscretions. Google often bases rank on backlinks, so Black Hat SEOs often get involved in PBNs or Private Blog Networks. You can actually purchase backlinks, but Google works to find these PBNs and will penalize you if found on your site.

Many Black Hat SEOs will create content by copying or spinning other sites’ information. This is plagiarism. Search engines value unique content.

Since websites are trying to rank for keywords, some Black Hat SEOs try to trick the search engines by keyword stuffing. This process involves using a keyword as many times as possible to try to rank for that keyword. It can often make the text unreadable and, therefore, not useful. Some site owners would even try to hide keywords as white text on a white background. Search engines can now detect all of these methods and will not rank these sites.

Cloaking involves showing one URL to the search engine bots while taking a user to another site. Or, a user may be taken to a keyword-optimized site, only to then be taken to another site that is unrelated. Both of these techniques are heavily penalized.

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO involves the best practices we have listed here. You are not doing anything underhanded, but instead writing quality content and developing a website that is easy for users to navigate. You are also structuring your content and site so search engines can get a good idea of the users you are trying to serve.

Choosing a Content Provider

While you can handle all of the content and optimization for your website yourself, it is a long and difficult process. It can be an even more arduous process if you’re not familiar with SEO best practices. Furthermore, content creation can be quite time-consuming.

As a business owner, you know how much time and effort is involved in the running of your business. There is always something to do – optimizing and maintaining a website for SEO is a job in itself. By choosing Content Journey to handle your content marketing needs, you can focus on other aspects of your business. 

By integrating SEO and content creation, you can be assured that your content is both of the highest quality and is perfectly optimized. We also help you track data on your website to get the most out of your content marketing campaign.

Key Takeaways

SEO for your business’s website is no longer an option. It is a necessary part of running a website if you want users to find you. SEO is a complicated process, but essentially it comes down to creating an optimal user experience.

You create a good user experience by developing quality content that is centered around solving problems for your potential customers. This content should be thorough and easy to understand. It should also be optimized around a particular keyword so that Google knows which users to point to your site.

You also enhance the user experience by developing a website that loads quickly, is easily viewable on a range of devices, and is easy to navigate. It is important to use sanctioned practices to rank your site to avoid being penalized by search engines.

Hiring a content marketing agency is a big decision – one that will have a positive impact on your brand. Ensuring you hire an agency that is experienced is crucial. It is just as important, however, to feel supported in your relationship with a firm. 

Not only do we pride ourselves on our research and development, we strive to create long-lasting and supportive relationships with all of our clients. 

If you are ready to join us and take your content to the next level, book a call with us today.

Setting digital marketing goals is essential to the sustainability of any business with an online presence. Without a detailed plan, you might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack in the dark. As a business owner, you need to keep in mind that a poorly set digital marketing goal is just as bad as not having any at all.

What Makes a Good Digital Marketing Goal?

The best digital marketing goals are those that are achievable and relevant to your business’s overall health. It leverages your resources to produce a tangible way of generating leads and reinforcing your branding. The best way to define a laser-sharp, result-driven goal is to follow the SMART method.

The best way to define a laser-sharp, result-driven goal is to follow the SMART method.

How to Set SMART Goals

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely. When these aspects guide your goal setting, you are more likely to see results follow – right to your business’s bottom line.

Specific

You should be able to clearly define your digital marketing goal down to the smallest details. Any participant or outside consultant should be able to comprehend your goal just by reading it.

For instance, “I want to increase my social media traffic” differs from “I want to increase my organic Facebook traffic by 20% over the next quarter.” The specificity of the second statement gives your goal implementation structure and direction.

Measurable

Measurable goals follow directly from specific ones. In the previous example, achieving an increase in organic Facebook traffic requires being able to measure it. The goal should be attainable but also offer a reliable way of measuring its progress.

Judging the success of any goal hinges on the ability to compare data. In our example, you have the ability to use analytics tools to measure your traffic. Similarly, any goal you set should yield data you can record and use for benchmarking and decision making.

Actionable

It’s important that business owners are solution-oriented regarding their digital marketing goals. Defining an actionable goal comes from being able to find solutions that are within your reach. If the path to a goal breaks the budget or requires skills your team doesn’t currently possess, you need to consider alternatives.

Relevant

The goals you set should be relevant to accomplishing your business goals. Don’t let your competition drag you into a meaningless marketing pursuit. For instance, if your analysis shows that organic Facebook traffic drives your revenue, stick with that goal. Your competitors may run costly Facebook ad campaigns that may not deliver results for your brand.

Alternatively, if you run a test ad campaign and notice good results, you can always scale up. The point is not to devote time and money to pursuits that do not serve your brand.

Timely

Your goal-setting should include a time element. The length of time that’s necessary to acquire all knowledge and resources for the achievement of the goal should be included. Again, let’s go back to our example goal. When trying to achieve a 20% increase in organic Facebook traffic in 6 months, you need to account for the additional time needed to gain knowledge and take preliminary actions.

5 Essential Digital Marketing Goals

With the tools for goal-setting in hand, the next step is to define the basic categories to focus on. You can modify the following essential marketing goals accordingly for your business needs.

1. Establish Effective Content Marketing Strategy

More than ever, search engines are rewarding websites with content that is highly relevant to users. Your efforts need to center around providing helpful information that your prospects find useful in solving their pain-points. The days of throwing a bunch of keywords into your posts are behind us – and that’s a good thing.

Content marketing helps you achieve your goals by bringing in qualified leads and boosting your SEO. Make it a point to use language that is clear and direct. By keeping your sentences short and breaking your text up into paragraphs, readers will stick around longer. Be sure to monitor your analytics for bounce rate, time on site, pages viewed per user, and other important metrics. 

Content marketing helps you achieve your goals by bringing in qualified leads and boosting your SEO.

2. Create Influential Social Media Presence

The most effective businesses are those that create loyal communities around their brands. Brand engagement skyrockets in a robust group environment. The best way for small businesses to build such communities is through social media.

By using story-telling, special offers, and product launches that create suspense, your business can build loyal followings. Taking a page out of the marketing playbook of companies like Apple and Nike, your small business can thrive.

Creating an influential social media presence happens when you set goals. When you support your goals with a concrete strategy, your numbers will increase month by month. Think about the emotions you want your brand to evoke in your audience. Plan how you intend to communicate your message and set your path to success with measurable steps.

3. Apply SEO Best Practices

A lot of what you’ll be doing with your digital marketing will be creative work. There is, however, a degree of work you need to do that is not as exciting. For many small business owners, SEO falls into this category.

The more you fine-tune your SEO, the better your website will perform in the search engine rankings. Examining everything from your web hosting provider service to your blog post tags is instrumental in attaining the top spots. Your SEO goals can include reducing site loading speed, getting more backlinks, reviewing your internal links, and achieving higher rankings for older pieces of content.

4. Conduct Regular Digital Marketing Evaluations

Setting a goal and checking back in a year later is a recipe for disaster. A lot can transpire when you leave your online presence unattended and without evaluation. Checking your progress regularly will help keep you on track and allow you to make necessary adjustments.

A monthly digital marketing evaluation is a good start for broader goals. For instance, monthly evaluations can give you sufficient time to gather data and make changes for things like online sales and SEO. Paid ad campaigns and content metrics may require more frequent revisiting.

The key to getting the maximum benefits from your evaluation is proper record-keeping. Every once in a while, lightning will strike with your digital marketing. You may create a video that goes viral or write a post that generates more leads than ever before. With diligent record-keeping, you can reverse engineer your success, identify key elements, and reproduce it in the future.

5. Activate and Monetize Existing Leads

Small business owners know that the key to growth is the generation of new leads. However, the lifeblood of your business lies primarily in your existing customer list. Leads currently in your funnel need to be encouraged to move from the online shopping cart to the checkout. That’s why it is important to have a grasp on the volume of qualified leads your business is producing.

For a better understanding of how to do this, you can create experiments. Divide your clientele into segments and apply an A/B test. Create two different ads that you can serve to different customers. The goal is to determine what works and what doesn’t in activating dormant, existing leads.

Taking Action to Boost Your Digital Marketing

Small businesses are a labor of love. Most entrepreneurs are actively involved in the daily tasks required to keep it running. That’s why keeping up with a robust content marketing strategy is not always possible.

With Google assigning a high value to businesses that regularly post valuable content, it may seem impossible to keep up with a high-output schedule. The best alternative to redirecting your precious time to content creation is finding a knowledgeable consultant that can do it for you.

Content Journey is a service that helps businesses reach their digital marketing goals. Armed with the knowledge to boost your online presence, the company offers strategic planning with all packages. You also get monthly analytics reports and all the research necessary for reaching your goals. Check out our packages today and book a call with your guide.

A lead magnet is something that you give away for free to draw potential customers or clients into your sales funnel. There are some marketing techniques that are old and played out. But creating content that is helpful, educational or entertaining will never get old. A lead magnet is an example of a timeless marketing strategy that works. They are driven by psychology. 

What is a lead magnet and how do you use it to make your business more profitable? The answer is a bit more complicated than you might think. Let’s take a look and see how this marketing strategy can help you take your business to the next level.

What is a Lead Magnet?

If you just typed “what is a lead magnet” into Google, you might get a variety of answers. This is because a lead magnet can take many different forms. Simplified, lead magnets are incentives that inspire customers to engage with your brand, potentially being transformed into paying customers. 

A real life example of this would be a restaurant giving away free bread sticks. This would generate interest and get more customers in the door. While they may initially lose money on the bread sticks, they’ll more than make up for it with increased sales. This is why lead magnets are sometimes called “loss leaders.”

Lead Magnets offered by Content Journey:

• eBooks
• Checklists
• Infographics
• Customer Success Stories
• Ultimate Guides
• Workbooks
• Gated Video Content
• Webinars
• Cheatsheets

What is a Loss Leader?

Lead magnets might seem kind of risky. You sometimes have to take a loss before you can start making a profit. While this may be true offline, things are a little different online. You see, once you create a lead magnet such as an ebook, checklist, or video series, you can give it away as many times as you want without any additional expenses. This makes the Internet the perfect platform for using lead magnets to gain more visitors and potential clients.

Why Do Lead Magnets Work So Well? 

Simple – it’s because of human psychology. People are wired to want to get something for nothing. Most would jump at the chance to get a freebie – no matter what it is. You can then leverage this hard wired human urge to get people to submit their email address in exchange for the freebie, allowing you to continue this valuable relationship.

When someone trusts you enough to give you their email address make sure you have earned it. Continue to provide valuable and helpful information. They will keep coming back to you as their source of truth.

Now that you know “what is a lead magnet,” let’s go over how to use them. There are many different types of lead magnets but the role they play in your marketing strategy is generally the same. Once you’ve mastered how to utilize lead magnets, your business will almost always see a dramatic increase in revenue flow.

What Role Does a Lead Magnet Play in Marketing Strategy?

Marketing is essentially just applied psychology. People are hard wired to behave in certain ways and once you understand how this works you can create surefire marketing strategies. That said, lead magnets are typically a part of a much larger marketing strategy, eventually resulting in some sort of sell.

Increase Sales and Drive Traffic 

Sales on the “back end” are sales that occur after your business has an initial interaction with a customer. In real life this tends to be after a customer makes an actual purchase and the business collects their contact information. Online it’s a little different. The lead magnet serves as the initial interaction and email marketing then becomes the back end.

The most popular way of doing this is to build a landing page of some sort. As traffic comes along, you offer a lead magnet in exchange for their email address. Once you have a person’s email address you can then pitch offers to them as often as you want. This is a tried and true method of generating sales for many online businesses. Since these people have already expressed an interest in your services or products, reengaging them through email marketing reminds them to come back. 

Ultimately a lead magnet’s role in marketing strategy is exactly what its name implies: a magnet that draws in leads. This being the case, you want to make sure that your lead magnet is attracting the right demographic. For example, if your business is all about selling dog products you’d create a lead magnet that has to do specifically with dogs, not pets in general. 

As long as your lead magnet is targeted to your demographic, you should have no problems using it to bring hot leads into your sales funnel.

Why Should You Use a Lead Magnet on Your Website?

Whether you’re a freelancer performing a service of some kind, a brick-and-morter business, or in the business of selling products online, you want to have a lead magnet on your website. Why? The answer is simple: If you don’t have a lead magnet on your website you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

Think about it this way, if you have a business website set up and ready to make sales there will always be more visitors who leave the site rather than take action. Those potential leads will be gone for good. However, if you have a lead magnet, a certain percentage of those who intend to leave will get your lead magnet first, allowing you to collect their contact info and market to them again.

Basically a lead magnet allows you to capture a larger percentage of the traffic to your website and monetize it. And let’s face it, monetizing your traffic is the entire point of having a business website in the first place. The more leads you get, the more money you make, simple as that.

How Do You Get Your Own Lead Magnet?

How you go about creating a lead magnet depends on the type of lead magnet you want to create. In some cases it can be as easy as writing a short guide that shows readers how to do something both relevant to their interests and your business. Chopping up a video course or interview you’ve created is an alternative option.

You May Already Have A Lead Magnet

Before you create a lead magnet from scratch you should think about whether or not you already have something that can be repurposed. Getting creative with this can help you save the time and money that would be spent creating a lead magnet from scratch. 

Creating a Lead Magnet

Probably the easiest way to create a lead magnet is to get someone else to do it for you. Here at Content Journey we offer lead magnets with all of our content plans. We know how important lead magnets are to drive engagement. Combined with our strategic content planning and research, our lead magnets have consistently gotten great results for our clients.

Alternately, you could just make the lead magnet yourself if you feel you have the skills to do so. Writing a short ebook or report is relatively simple. If you are familiar with the topic that you’re writing about and have decent writing skills, that’s really all you need to get started. If you are uncomfortable writing, you could record a video series or create a presentation.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure that your lead magnet offers value to your demographic. The more perceived value your lead magnet has, the more people will take the time to actually sign up to get it. I used to worry about offering information that was too helpful. My thinking was that if I told someone else how to do X then they wouldn’t hire me.

That type of thinking was wrong and I am glad I learned my lesson. By teaching and showcasing my expertise I am showing my audience that they can trust me to build it for them. AND if some choose to do it on their own I hope my guidance helps them be successful.

And remember, stand out from the crowd by offering your potential leads something that will truly make a difference in their lives. Don’t hold back and give them the GOLD.

By teaching and showcasing my expertise I am showing my audience that they can trust me to build it for them.

Lead Magnet Examples

Now that you have a good idea of what a lead magnet is, how to make one, and how they can make your business more profitable, let’s take a look at some examples. Remember that you can always put your own unique twist on these examples. You could even combine different types into one unique offering. A lead magnet should never overshadow what you’re selling, however. Let’s take a look at some lead magnet examples.

eBooks

The most common type of lead magnet online is the ebook. An ebook is simply a publication that has been made available for digital download.This option is super easy to create and distribute. They’re also a great choice because an ebook presents information in an easy to consume manner for your leads. This is why ebooks in the form of guides and tutorials are so popular.

It is important to ensure your ebook looks professional. Formatting, grammar, and spelling are crucial to creating a polished look. If your ebook looks unfinished, it will reflect poorly on your business and you’ll lose credibility.

It should also be mentioned that ebooks are oftentimes viewed as “cheap.” This is because they are so prevalent online as lead magnets. One way to overcome this is to name your ebook something else. Many ebooks are published in the form of cheat sheets or step-by-step tutorials. 

Ebooks have an important strength – the ebook itself as a marketing device. By putting your contact info in the header or footer if you’re a service based business, and/or having a section at the end of the book that makes a pitch and prompts the reader to take action. If you’re selling physical products you can have an ad at the end of the book as well. Ebooks are extremely versatile so there are tons of ways to use them to make sales.

Video Packages

Videos can be more complicated to make than an eBook in some ways. However, they carry a few very notable advantages. The first is the fact that a video automatically has a higher perceived value than an eBook for some type of visitors. This can lead to higher conversions.

At Content Journey, we encourage providing multiple types of lead magnets to target different types of learners.

Another great thing about video packages is the fact that you can offer the first video in a series for free to get people hooked. Once you’ve engaged them this way, you can then offer access to the rest for a fee. You could also offer the entire series for free over the course of several weeks. This strategy allows you to engage with the viewer during the duration of the series.

The type of video that you make is up to you. If you want to have a “face” for your brand, then you can be the star of the video, have an employee do it, or hire an actor to play the role. In any case this is really good for branding.

Another option is whiteboard video. These are great for instructional content or slide shows. Both are extremely simple and cost effective to produce. The video format that you choose should be based on both the needs of your business and of your demographic. You want a video that makes your business look professional while performing its function to deliver information in an easy to understand manner.

If you’re wondering how you can make it so that only people who sign up to your email list can see your video, the answer is simple: use an email gate. Some video hosting services, such as Vimeo, have this built in and make it so that a person must enter their email before watching the video. Other services, like Optinmonster offer a variety of additional options such as the ability to segment leads, link directly to your autoresponder, and make it so that leads who have already filled out the form won’t have to do so again.

Checklist

Even more simplistic than an eBook is a checklist. This lead magnet is basically just a way to help leads get organized or complete a series of steps to perform a task. While this may seem cheap or low effort, the key here is to make the checklist genuinely valuable to your leads.

If your business is all about teaching people how to shoot videos, creating a checklist that walks them step-by-step through the essentials of creating a video series is an option. This would be useful to readers even though the information would be minimal.

Once again, formatting is important when creating a checklist. Offering aesthetically pleasing content is crucial. By ensuring that the lead magnet is useful, on brand, and beautiful your business ensures that clients are impressed by your services.

Infographics

Infographics are one of the easiest lead magnets to create. The downside is that it can be challenging to present them in a way that showcases their value.

You’re going to have to get creative with how you present an infographic. Successful infographic lead magnets contain information that is important to your readers. This simplistic version of a lead magnet is not your best option. However, if you’re uncomfortable with the above options, this is a good way to get started. 

How to Present Your Lead Magnet

How you choose to present your lead magnet on your website matters. There are many different options: 

• Sign up form in the sidebar 
• Appear as a pop up
• Dedicated site page 
• Content upgrade in a post

All of these are excellent strategies to offer your lead magnet to site visitors. Deciding which way to offer your lead magnet is a strategic decision. You need to know how your customers consume your content as well as which is most likely to get their attention.

There are several WordPress examples of implementing lead magnets. Two we use at Content Journey are Popup Ally and OptinMonster. Depending on the goals of your lead magnet we might use either of these or both on your site. Our goal is for you to get the most of of your lead magnet, so if these tools don’t work for you we will work until we find the right solution for your site.

Following Up a Successful Lead Magnet

Getting leads with a targeted lead magnet is just the first step. What you do after you get those leads is just as important. Instead of bombarding your email list with endless offers, a better strategy is to take your subscribers on a content journey. This will increase their loyalty to your brand, and make them more likely to pull out their wallets when the time comes.

Here at Content Journey, we specialize in helping people like you to grow your business through organic traffic conversions. 

We do this by providing ultra-targeted lead magnets to build your mailing list, creating well-researched and engaging content that keeps your subscribers interested and ready to do business. If you need a helping hand with content marketing, check out our plans and then book a call! 

Online content, which includes any online material, such as articles, videos, guides, blog posts, and more, is designed to stimulate interest in your brand, product, or services.

However, your content is only as effective as it relates to your audience, which content marketing plans, such as the quality content plans built by ContentJourney.com, can help you do.

In fact, when done right, great content helps serve many purposes, from bringing visitors to your site to turning visitors into quality leads and those leads into customers, and more.

But to build the most effective campaign, you must understand the world of content marketing, including just what it is, how it works, and why you need it, which the following information can help you do.

How Content Marketing Works

In order for your website to rank high in online search results, you need to create content that your potential audience will find useful. It sounds easy, but it is harder than you think.

In reality, our job is to make Google’s customers happy.

The idea is to find people who are unaware of your business or brand, and they may not even know much about your offerings, but you are able to offer content they need. When they find your content useful, then they want to learn more about this industry leader who helped them.

The goal of content marketing is to create high-quality, in-depth marketing content that relates to your business and industry in an effort to capture your audience’s attention. When done right this will increase awareness of your brand, company, product, or service.

In other words, content marketing helps bring people closer to your products by creating free, useful content that educates them and makes them want what you have to offer, which helps boost conversions.

What are the Different Parts of How Content Marketing Works?

Content marketing has four basic objectives or parts that work together to help bring you more conversions, which include:

Educating Your Audience

Every second thousands of Google searches are made by people searching for relevant information.

When you provide this valuable content for your audience, it helps your business stand out to them because the information, article, or video, etc. you supplied helped provide a solution to their inquiries. This makes a searcher feel as if they are walking away having learned what they were looking for.

Providing an answer to your audience’s questions also makes them more likely to return to your site. As well as recommend your brand, product, or service to others, which also helps produce more quality leads and conversions.

Boosts Brand Awareness

Getting new people to find your business helps increase the possibility of new sales, which is the goal of content marketing.

In fact, research shows that many buyers conduct a search for more information about an industry or product before actually purchasing it. For instance, as more people become aware of a product and it becomes popular, they often turn to the internet to learn more details or read reviews before making a purchase.

Hence, if you sell this product, in generating your content, you would be sure to include all aspects of the product, including what benefits it offers, its available varieties, instructions for use, and more.

When you make this easy for searchers who are in the initial stage of buying your product then you shorten your sales cycle.

Providing such useful information about the product helps your information appear higher in search engines. Bringing new leads into the top of your funnel where you control the message and their buying journey.

Establishes You as an Authoritative Source in Your Business or Field

Supplying your audience with relevant information surrounding your business, product, or services also demonstrates your insight, which helps establish you as an expert in your field.

As an insightful expert or authority in your field, potential customers, as well as your current customers, will see you as knowledgeable. This boosts their confidence in your business, products or services, ultimately increasing the likelihood of repeat business, not just a one-time sale.

Customers want to trust companies they work with.

Investing in a content marketing strategy, like the carefully and individually developed ones offered by Content Journey, helps you build the most effective content designed with the main goal of providing valuable information that helps establish you as an authority in your genre. Our plans get your business noticed and one step closer to meeting your business goals.

Broadens Your Audience

Besides simply improving your SEO for your company’s website, quality content also has the ability to attract more qualified leads.

When you create content that gets people interested in your services or products, it helps more people discover your business. This broadens your market, as well as your site’s traffic potential.

When search engines believe you are showing the most relevant answers to searchers questions, your site will rank higher in search engine results.

However, when creating your content, it is important to note that each of your visitors will be interested in your offerings for their own reasons. It is important to create a content marketing strategy that enables you to reach various people based on their interests.

If you do not have a clear idea of who your customer segments are then Content Journey can help do the research to align your content with your customers.

8 Steps to Explain How Content Marketing Works

Good content marketing entails incorporating the right strategies cohesively to reach your business goals.

There are 8 main steps of how content marketing works, which include:

The First Step: Create Useful Content

Since the focus of this marketing strategy is all about the content, the first thing you need to do is create quality content.

And though the content is meant to increase sales, it still needs to be beneficial to visitors rather than salesy, in order to keep them on your page. And interested in what you have to say.

In other words, it needs to engage, educate or inform your visitors. By providing answers to their questions. The last thing you want is to get a new visitor to your site and they see your content as lacking, dispassionate or superficial, which decrease the chances of them engaging with you further.

On the other hand, when you create content that provides solutions to your visitors’ issues or that teaches them what they want to know, it creates value for your audience. This value means there is an increase in opportunity that they will sign up for your email or newsletter, or purchase your service or product.

People also tend to pass on good information, so it also helps increase the likelihood that your content will be shared with many others, which also helps increase your leads.

The Second Step: Share Your Content With Your Target Audience

Once your content has been created to provide the utmost value to your audience, the next step is to get it in front of them, which can be done in various ways.

For instance, you can upload your content to your social media page and then share it with your audience. This is one of the many reasons Content Journey offers social posts with two of our plans.

You don’t want to build up your audience on Facebook or Instagram, you want visitors coming to your website, where you control the message.

You can also reach out to social media influencers in your industry or field to promote your content, which will also help get your information in front of interested parties. One more way to increase the chance of it being read and, in turn, generate more quality leads to your site.

Investing in quality search engine optimization tactics designed to help increase your ranking in search engines can also help increase the likelihood of your content being clicked on and read. Every plan we do at Content Journey utilizes research and strategy to optimize your content.

The Third Step: Make Sure Your Topic and Content Appears Relevant in Search Engines

When people conduct a search for the information they need, they typically do it by topic and then skim through the search results for a page that may provide what they are looking for.

The more relevant your topic or content appears in search engines, the more likely people searching for what you have to offer are to click on your link to view your article or website.

When creating your content, you want to create a relevant headline, as well as also include a relevant description in the meta data. You want searchers to clearly see what they can expect to learn from your article if they click on your page.

This way, when people come across your page in search engine results, they are more likely to click on it as well as spend time on your page getting to know your brand or product. The more people that find your topic relevant also means, the more clicks your page will gain, which helps increase traffic.

The increased traffic to your site will also cause your page to rank higher in search engine results, which also increases the chance that it will be seen by many other quality leads.

The Fourth Step: Make Sure Visitors Also Find Your Content Enjoyable

The sole goal of content marketing is not just to make your content useful, but it is to also make it enjoyable.

In other words, your content should serve two purposes. It should provide useful information that makes your readers walk away more empowered than when they first visited your page, and it should be entertaining, so they also walk away feeling like it was fun.

Creating content that is enjoyable also makes visitors want to stick around and explore your content, which makes them stay on your page longer. Thus, it also helps improve your SEO.

The Fifth Step: Build Brand Awareness and Trust

The more intriguing the content, the more people will want to become familiar with your brand.

This means, not only will they remain on your site longer and explore more of your site’s pages, which helps increase SEO for your site. But they are also more likely to return to your site or sign up for your emails or newsletters to remain in the know about your product or business…generating quality leads.

The more familiar people become with your brand, the more it also helps build trust
because they feel like they know your company. Once you have built this trust relationship they are more likely to follow through on a purchase.

The Sixth Step: Generate More Sales and Conversions

Once visitors have enjoyed your content and have become familiar with your brand, they are ready to take action.

Always include a call to action in your content.

Always include a call to action in your content. This could be as simple as a link to read more about a relevant topic. Like for someone reading this post it might be relevant to link to an article titled: What is Inbound Marketing? Your call to action could be more straightforward with a button to schedule a call or a link to your contact page.

If you are an eCommerce business, be sure to include an easy to navigate checkout process that includes a way to assist customers who wish to make an online purchase.

Even if you have generated leads, but they have not yet converted, they are still more likely to consider you when making future purchases because quality content helps you remain in their minds. Over 50% of shoppers do research before purchasing online or offline, so make it easy for your customers to learn about your products.

By simply continuing to create free and useful content that gives your visitors more opportunities or reasons to fall in love with your brand, and in time, they’ll convert.

The Seventh Step: Adapt to Your Customers Needs

As your current customers’ needs grow and you continue to generate new customers, you will need to continually adjust your content marketing strategy to meet their needs in order to continue to generate new leads and sales.

Once your marketing strategy is in place, be sure to monitor it often to track its progress in relation to your customer’s needs. An analytic’s tool such as Google Analytics can help you do. Each of Content Journey’s plans includes a full analytics report with an explanation of trends or rooms for growth.

Using an analytic tool like Google Analytics helps you view and track many important details concerning your visitors’ habits. These details include how long a visitor remained on a page, which pages they visited, where their traffic is coming from, and more. You can then use this data to make the adjustments needed to help you grow.

This way, you are never in the dark about what your customers need or simply wasting time and effort trying to guess why your strategy isn’t working. You are free to focus on more important things, such as improving your product, service, or brand.

The Eighth Step: Receive Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is also a valuable tool. It can be done both before and after your campaign or conversion to help you better reach your target audience to maintain quality leads.

Customer surveys are a great way to receive feedback from your customers, and they can even be incorporated into your page, such as a pop-up survey, or you can use follow-up emails to gain feedback from customers. Or, if you’re feeling extra friendly, you can also contact your customers directly to receive feedback.

The information obtained can then also be used to help create the most effective content for your site. And all of these approaches are how content marketing works. By utilizing emails, newsletters, social ads, blog posts and social media marketing you can create a successful path. And when they all work together they can inspire more leads and generate more sales.

When You Can Learn How to do it or When You Should Hire a Professional to Reach Your Business Goals?

Content creation isn’t rocket science. You can learn the steps if you are willing to put the time into learning. The Digital Marketing Kitchen is one place that offers education and open office hours to answer questions. I used many services over the years to learn aspects of content creation and how content marketing works. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it yourself, because you can.

When you start using site’s like Digital Marketing Kitchen, you can learn various important inbound marketing tactics. They go over what to focus on to grow your digital marketing, including email marketing, Search Engine Optimization, social media marketing and more. There are resources that can help you get started creating a successful marketing campaign for your business.

In the meantime, content marketing itself involves various steps that make it such a valuable tool. Each step needs to be perfected in detail on each level in order to make it effective as a whole. Sometimes this can be time consuming to do on your own; however, you can enlist a professional digital marketer to do it for you.

Having a digital marketer on hand to walk you through the process of how content marketing works enables you to get the answers to any questions you may have about the process. This sets the stage for you to focus on what you do best and outsource your help.

When you work with a professional digital marketer, you will benefit from thorough keyword research, which will enable you to tailor your texts to match your visitors inquiries word from word. This increases the chance they will click on your page over your competitors when it appears in search engine results.

A professional digital marketer can also incorporate intriguing videos and infographics into your content to help make it even more interesting. These lead magnets are a valuable part of every digital marketing plan we provide at Content Journey. We feel like this sets us apart from other content creators as we want to help set a full operating system up for you. Investing in your success.

Hiring a professional allows you to utilize other marketing tactics you may not have otherwise had time to do. For instance, many businesses also benefit from various pay per click campaigns to help generate additional income, while also generating quality leads.

Once your marketing strategies are in place, they can also monitor their progress for you and then make any adjustments when needed to ensure they remain impactful.

They can also develop and then send out your newsletter and email communications, and in timely intervals, to help keep your current customers, as well any potential customers, in the know regarding your business, products, and latest endeavors, so they think of you when they are ready to buy.

When your partner with us at Content Journey for your digital marketing needs, we not only provide all the superior benefits listed, but we also go the extra mile to help ensure our service is effective.

For instance, at the beginning of each content plan, the Content Journey team spends 14-21 days performing research and planning to create an 11-month content strategy built around blog posts and other intelligent tactics to create cornerstone content and lead magnets.

These are just a few ways that we stand apart from our competitors. To find out more information on how we can build an individualized content marketing campaign or any other marketing campaign that helps you gain more leads and sales and stand apart from your competitors, contact us or set up a call, so we can help you start realizing your dream today.