You’ve established a strategy to guide your content marketing efforts and you know which types of content to produce, so what’s next? Once your content marketing is off the ground, you should strive to optimize how prospects are interacting with it. Prospects are running the show when it comes to the types of content for which they’re searching and willing to consume. If it’s not entertaining, compelling or educational, chances are nobody’s engaging with it. Step one should always be to look at analytics and benchmark. Are people finding your content? Are they clicking through to it? Are they sticking around long enough to consume all of it? Data-driven content marketing should always start with analytics and build out a plan from there. That said, there are several sure-fire ways to increase engagement with your content and improve customer experience.
Tips for Optimizing Customer Experience
- Make it social-friendly and shareable. Post links to your white papers, ebooks, videos and all other content to social channels like LinkedIn and ensure that blogs and other self-hosted web content have social sharing buttons. People will share things they find interesting, opening your content up to an even wider audience and leveraging peer promotion to boot.
- Incentivize sign-ups. If you want people to subscribe to your newsletter, offer a reward for doing so. Quick-hitting items like checklists, calculators or cheat sheets can be great tools to offer up as an incentive for collecting an email address.
- Optimize usability. Running regular website performance audits, creating content inventories (that include checking for broken or expired links) and testing forms are all part of optimizing customer experience. Accessibility is key and nothing is a bigger turnoff to prospects than starting down a path only to find they can’t access what they were promised.
- Make it sexy. Content marketing doesn’t just have to be written content and should include visually appealing elements, too. Infographics are great as standalone pieces or as a way to augment text-heavy ebooks and white papers. Interactive tools like quizzes or calculators can keep things interesting for users while still educating prospects and positioning you as a thought leader.
- Be relatable. Prospects are in charge of what content they choose to consume and they’re more likely to engage with content that appeals to them personally, even in B2B. Look at the decision-maker you’re targeting and put yourself in her shoes: What issues does she face in day-to-day responsibilities? What tools is she lacking that could help streamline the path to her objectives and goals? What are the major pain points someone in her position faces on a monthly or annual basis? Building a persona and identifying the answers to questions like these can and should drive your content creation to have maximum impact on the people you’re targeting.
The goal of content marketing is to cut through the clutter and position your brand and thought leadership as the most informational and valuable resource out there. This requires not only content production but effective distribution and amplification and implementing SEO tactics that make all your great content findable to your target audience.
Once your content is in front of your target audience, you want to be sure they’re compelled to engage with and interact with it. Optimizing customer experience is what makes your content really shine. Constant analysis, testing, tweaking and updating can ensure your content marketing is optimized per real metrics to meet your customers expressed expectations and desires.
Not sure where to start? Are your marketing resources limited? Want to chat about augmenting your current digital marketing with content that generates leads? Send us a note.