Most businesses build their websites with a specific purpose in mind. In most cases, that’s converting visitors, generating leads, or even selling directly to their visitors. However, there are two distinct problems most businesses face when their website isn’t pulling its weight:
⇥ Not getting enough traffic
⇥ Not getting enough of the right kind of traffic
You may be getting traffic on your website and on your landing pages. But if your visitors aren’t converting, you may be attracting the wrong types of people. Just because someone found your website, that doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy — it doesn’t even necessarily mean they are qualified to buy from you.
The way to fix this problem is with content marketing. The content on your website is what dictates how well it ranks in search engines and who finds it. If you’re attracting the wrong people, you must be posting the wrong kinds of content, not enough content, or no content at all.
If that’s the case, you aren’t alone. It’s estimated that 70% of content marketers don’t have a consistent content strategy. They know content is important, but they haven’t quite integrated it into the rest of their marketing strategy.
This quick guide will help you nail down the basics of your content strategy so you can find the right audience. [Great right?!]
Build Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are like content marketing 101, but a surprising number of businesses skip this step. According to one survey, only 44% of marketers said they had buyer personas — but 85% of those that did have buyer personas weren’t using them effectively.
Buyer personas form the backbone of your content marketing strategy. Without them, you have no insight into who you’re speaking to.
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your customer. You may have several buyer personas, or just one or two. Your buyer persona should be a fully fleshed out version of who your customer is, right down to their personal details. And buyer personas shouldn’t just exist conceptually, you should document them so your entire team can access them.
For example, if you’re a B2B company selling project management software to medium-sized businesses, your primary buyer persona may be a project manager, a CTO, or even CEO. In fact, you could create buyer personas for all three of these people.
The important thing to remember is that your persona goes far beyond a title and a job description. You want to know how each persona spends their days, what their personal and professional goals are, and what they like they do in their free time.
Most importantly, you want to understand how they consume content, what types of content they consume, and why.
Once you understand that, you can draft content specifically for those personas. This will increase your chances of being discovered by the right audience.
Post Content To Your Website Consistently
You know that my #1 motto is: Consistency is key!
It’s common for businesses to take a scattershot approach to content marketing, especially when they’re first getting started. According to one report, 50% of content marketers said consistency was their biggest content marketing challenge.
But if you continue to post inconsistently, your efforts won’t bring you the results you want.
When you post content on a regular basis, you accomplish three things:
⇥ Establishing authority
⇥ Keeping audiences engaged
⇥ Improving SEO
People tend to trust businesses that keep fresh content on their websites. If a visitor finds your blog and sees that you haven’t posted in a month, it doesn’t paint you in the best light. They may just assume you’ve stopped trying.
Furthermore, posting regular content gives you more opportunities to engage your audience. Content shouldn’t just stay static on your website. You can include it in your social media strategy, your email marketing strategy, and even your sales strategy. That way, you won’t keep recycling the same content over and over.
Finally, posting content regularly is great for search engine optimization (SEO). When you upload new content to your website, search engines will discover it and index it. Over time, the freshness of that article will decay, and search engines won’t prioritize it as much.
If your website hasn’t changed in six months, search engines have no reason to assume your content is relevant to someone’s search today.
That said, evergreen content [content that stays relevant forever] maybe some of your best-performing content for months, even years down the road. This type of content tends to be long, authoritative, and highly linkable and shareable.
Optimize Your Website For Relevant Search Terms
When creating content, keep search terms in mind as part of your strategy. You should have a running list of relevant search terms, or keywords, to draw from when drafting content. If you have the right tools, you can even score these keywords based on relevance, difficulty, and search frequency.
Once you know which keywords to use, include them in specific locations of your web pages and blog posts, such as your H1 tag, H2 tags, your introduction, your conclusion, and your meta description.
Here is a short list of the SEO attributes that need to be populated for each page on your website [including blog posts]:
- Title tag
- H1 tag
- Meta description
- Canonical tag
- Image alt tags
- Internal and external links
Tags should include at least one keyword used naturally. Image alt tags should contain a description of the image they represent. These are so individuals using screen-reading technology can understand your images, but search engines also check for them.
Try to link to some of your other internal pages. On your core website, you may do this with call-to-action buttons or other types of links. In blog posts, you can do this with hyperlinks in your text.
Finally, include external links where necessary. Content marketers typically use external links when they need to cite a source or if they’re linking to a partner or affiliate site.
Post To Social Media Frequently
Once you’ve built buyer personas, set yourself on a content calendar, and created an SEO strategy, you’re ready to start sharing content on social media.
As mentioned before, your content shouldn’t stay static on your website. To get the most value from it, it needs an audience.
Use that content to draw traffic from your social media and email followers. If you have the right connections, you can even get content placed in publications to get referrals.
Once again, the important part is frequency and consistency. But different platforms require different approaches. According to a study done by Inc., it’s optimal to post to Facebook once per day, Twitter 15 times per day, and Instagram 1-2 times per day. “Plann That” is a really great scheduling tool to use.
When drafting a content strategy, share a mix of original and third-party content. Stick to your calendar, keep your content optimized, and always build content for your buyer personas.
If you can do that, you’ll get more qualified traffic on your website and more leads in your funnel. Hello business growth.
