Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. If you are not among the 90% of companies marketing with online content, then it’s time to make a strategic plan to do it. It’s not enough to ask an intern to gussy up a few product descriptions and call it a blog. To be effective, content must be credible, engaging, and must funnel your audience towards purchase and brand loyalty.
How can you ensure potential customers not only find your content but read, value, and interact with it? Here are four things you can do to make your posts stand out from the clutter.
Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
1. Use Numbers and Citations
In an unsure world, statistics and citations are reassuring. People trust numbers and credible sources – top magazines, newspapers, or an expert in a field. Originality stands out, personality engages, but numbers and citations build trust. Integrate this into your content marketing strategy to stand out from the crowd.
2. Display Visuals
Colored visuals increase consumption of content by 80%. On the other hand, poor visuals, such as use of obvious clip art will cause 30% of your readers to leave your site immediately. Use original charts, graphs, infographics, and photos created specifically for your content. Don’t forget Pinterest. Make sure you have at least one pinnable image in every piece of content even if you do not believe you are a visual brand.
3. Choose the Right Format
Choose the right format for your market. Young consumers want listicles, actionable information, visuals, and optimization for sharing. Seasoned professionals may prefer an academic style with an authoritative tone. Regardless of your target market, use white space, headers, readable fonts, and scalable CSS. Mobile SEO is more important than ever with 94% of US residents using smartphones to browse.
4. Create a Sales Funnel
Last but not least, trigger a response. All this work is for nothing if you do not have an effective way to funnel your audience to action. Convert hard won leads to customers by offering eBooks, white papers, case studies, and webinars for the price of an email address. This is where your inbound marketing efforts translate to revenue.
With well over 3,000,000 blog posts and online articles published daily, dry information will not get you noticed. Build a strong brand and become an authority in your market with engaging writing, credible sources, easy to read formatting, storytelling visuals, and at least one call to action in every piece of content you produce.