Does your content engage audiences, generate leads, and helps you sell more?
Content can make or break a brand. Eighty-four percent of consumers now expect brands to produce content around their offerings and services. Bestselling author and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker Andrew Davis says “Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.” So the success of every brand lies in the valuable and authentic content that connects the brand with the audience. Is it possible to produce engaging content that can be used to boost your marketing efforts? You can do it with creating, curating and distributing quality content.
Content Creation
While Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and bots can be used to write blogs or even create videos, the role of human intelligence in content creation cannot be denied. Heliograf, the Washington Post’s in-house bot that has written hundreds of articles covering everything from sports to politics. But technology cannot produce in-depth, insightful content that can engage customers, not as yet!
Also Read: Time to Make It Personal: Content Personalisation Tips for Better Marketing
How to enhance content creation?
Content creation can be enhanced through ideation, interest monitoring, and lead nurturing.
- Ideation – the biggest challenge: The content you create should be authentic and resonate with your audiences. Does your team struggle to find topics to write about? Content marketing automation can make things simpler, by using tools that help with ideas and topics. BuzzSumo can identify keywords that have previously done well and can be used to ideate new topics.
- Interest Monitoring: Apart from engaging content, it is important to have interesting headlines that will bring the audience to the website. Tools like Headline Analyzer provide a score and analysis of a headline and recommend tips for enhancing them.
- Lead Nurturing: is another aspect where good content can help in automating the marketing process effectively. A visitor signing up for a newsletter is just the first step to the lead nurturing process. Appropriate and personalised emails sent to newsletter subscribers at the right time can enhance email click-through rates (CTR). 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales and lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance.
Also Read: Interactive Content Also Works for B2B Marketing
Analytics Suites like Google Analytics offer insightful information on the buyer’s journey through metrics like traffic, engagement, geographic data, content performance metrics and behavioural conversations. Dell’s lead nurturing campaign utilised unique content to personalise the experience for each lead. As a result, the campaign achieved a 300 percent engagement rate improvement.
Content Curation
A process where existing content is mined through numerous web pages and presented in an organised way around a specific theme. Content curation is a cost-effective way to maintain an on-going publishing schedule of quality content. However, it can be a time-consuming task, when done manually. DrumUp, an automated content curation tool uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to find relevant content for users. However, it’s important to remember that although tools like these save time, they are not meant to remove the human facet.
Also Read: How to Put the Experience Back Into B2B Customer Experience
Content Distribution
Tools help in gauging if relevant content is sent to the right audiences and at the right time. Without a good distribution strategy, good content will not enhance the marketing efforts of any business. A content distribution strategy must involve active channels like emails, newsletters, social media, ads, and subscriptions. These can be used to intensify content through email marketing tools like MailChimp. Delivering content through automated and personalised emails to target audiences saves time. It also offers customizable templates that can be sent out to a different set of audiences who are at various levels in the sales funnel.
Ninety-one percent of B2B marketers use a channel like LinkedIn to distribute content. By creating and contributing to LinkedIn groups that are industry-relevant, marketers can reach out to millions of potential audiences that understand and respond to the brand’s content.
Lastly, marketing can never be an automated process. The primary goal here is to engage customers with relevant content. Good content enhances a brand’s marketing automation strategy and gives marketers the time to concentrate on constructive areas of business.
