How Do I Know if My Content Strategy is Successful?
How do you develop content?
Your content is an instrumental part of the online relationship you build with prospects. You want to demonstrate to them that you are the competent professional who can answer their questions and provide the products and services they need.
Successful content should educate, entice, and challenge the prospect, guiding them further down the path towards conversion. You can measure the impact of your content quantitatively as well as qualitatively. You can measure the impact by the number of conversions and the amount of time it takes for prospects to move through different phases of the buyer’s journey. You can also assess whether or not you've created successful content through the conversations you have with prospects, including the perception of your brand and solutions.
What is the purpose of content writing?
When you've created successful content, it will seamlessly lead prospects through the sales funnel. The content will establish trust and competence and then guide prospects to further explore the website. Ideally, successful content will effectively drive interest, leading the prospect to engage with your company by requesting a white paper, downloading a case study, or subscribing to the email list.
You will then be able to use this information to contact the prospect, learn more about their needs, and provide them with content designed for those getting closer to the decision and purchase stage of the process. Successful content will keep consumers returning to your site for more materials. This can help to not only develop a relationship with your loyal consumers, but it could also help to promote you and your business as a thought leader.
Why do you need a content strategy?
A content strategy guides you in the process of considering which content is most relevant and beneficial for your audience. You'll need a content strategy to determine the array of content you're going to product including written, video, images, infographics, and more. Your content success is determined by an effective content strategy. If your content is not working for your consumers, otherwise unsuccessful, then you'll need to reconsider your content strategy as it likely has a breakdown in one of the following areas:
- The audience you're targeting
- Your optimization and promotion
- The content itself
1. Your audience. If you do not understand the audience you are targeting, then you will be producing unsuccessful content that fails to engage your prospects. This can result in high bounce rates and few people moving from one stage of the sales funnel to the next.
2. Proper optimization. Similarly, if your content is not optimized for the right words or is not properly promoted, you will also fail to reach the audience that you are seeking. This can result in low traffic rates. You'll want to follow SEO best practices to maintain your optimization efforts. You'll also want to stay up-to-date with search engines and their algorithm changes. For example, Google is evolving and is now able to understand natural language. Therefore, you'll need to stop optimizing for robots and start optimizing for your consumers. Optimizing for spiders is seen as trying to trick search engines and could end in penalization of your landing pages.
3. Your content. You should also consider the quality of the content itself. Make sure that your material is engaging and has a catchy title that encourages people to open it. Your text should be easy to scan, including features such as bullet points and lists to further engagement. The reader should immediately understand the value of more fully reading the material from the moment they scan your opening paragraph.
