If you are reading this blog post then first of all thank you and second, our content marketing effort has delivered on our effort to attract targeted traffic such as you to our site. In that vein we would like to pay it forward by sharing great content that we came across in the Search Engine Journal on how Content Marketing need not be an overwhelming task and how you may undertake this task in a step by step manner.
In a forty five minute video presentation by Arron Goodin of Adlift, you will receive a step-by-step-instruction set on how you may come up with a Content Marketing Strategy and equally importantly, Arron shares the specific tactics that you need to do to execute on that strategy.
I am sharing below some of the takeaways that I learned from Arron Goodin’s online seminar:
56% of Marketers state that Producing Engaging Content is one of their challenges. So, if you have struggled with creating content then you are not alone.
So how do you do Content Marketing?
- Create Share Worthy Content
- Analyze the effectiveness of the Content that has been created.
- Disseminate the Content via Social Media Platforms
To learn what kind of content to produce you will need to research and identify gaps in information available to your targeted audience. You may need to burn the midnight oil in doing your research to figure out the content that is missing from the landscape.
The tools recommended by Arron Goodin that you should use to do Keyword research are: Adwords Keyword Planner, Grepwords and SEM Rush (to understand the keywords being used by your competition.) After you have come up with your targeted keywords based on your target audience and the content that you want to create and what is relevant to your site, you have to map the keywords that you would like to use on your web pages and the keywords that remain (after the page mapping is completed) form the basis for new content opportunities for you.
Getting to a large section of a target audience requires you to bring your brand/solution at the top of the funnel when a potential client is still in the researching phase of the purchase cycle. Match your content to the short search query that a person typically types into a Search Engine to make the person aware of your brand via your content.
Think hard on the type of content you need to create to address the search query. Create a checklist of the answers that you could provide on the topic and then hone it down to a few specific answers that you wish to provide. Use credible resources to support your answer.
Once you have created the Content you will need to analyze the impact of the content. To measure the impact use analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Impact is measured via Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that comprise of:
- Organic Visits
- Pages visited per Session
- Average Session Duration
- Bounce Rate
- New Visitor
Organic Visits allows you to determine how people are finding your content. Pages visited per session is a measure of engagement. If people are drilling through and going to inner site links then it is a measure of engagement. Session duration is also a marker for audience engagement. Bounce rates are indicative of page content that is not aligned with the query. Getting New Visitors is great because it allows you to engage with a potential client who is at the awareness stage.
If you post your content to Social Media sites you may analyze the effectiveness of the content that you have created using the response rates from Social sites. Based upon the size of your Social follower base if you receive between 0.1% to 1% Interaction from your Social audience then that is a Good response rate.
Once you have created content that is yielding a healthy conversion (contact forms and phone calls) rate, disseminate that content further using Paid Platforms such as Taboola and Outbrain. Outbrain allows you to tag your content and also perform A/B Testing with Page titles to see which page title renders more clicks.
Optimizing your Content Delivery using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The AMP program has been initiated by Google to deliver content faster to individuals using mobile devices. AMP uses 3 types of coding items. Your web developers should code your content in a way that will allow Google to globally cache your content pages and surface the content faster to mobile device users.
Implementing AMP on your web page can serve as a competitive advantage as currently only 23% of web pages are using AMP. Improving your site load speed using AMP could help you get better visibility from Google as the search engine company places emphasis on site load speeds. Additionally, the graphs on the right in the picture below indicate that conversion rates go down the longer your page takes to load. You may get up an increase in conversion rates of one full percentage point simply by reducing page load times by one second. Additionally bounce rates increase with slow page load times. So bottom line: Implement AMP to increase conversions and lower bounce rates.
