Research shows that companies that increase their marketing budgets during a recession, increase sales much faster—both during and after the downturn—than companies that cut back.
It makes sense too, as the consumer is captive and glued to all mediums, especially digital. Also, since sales and accessibility are down, this is a wonderful opportunity for Brands to say and show things that matter to consumers beyond just ‘Product Sell’ & ‘Discount noise’.
But if your leadership isn’t buying into the idea because of their viewpoint, you likely can’t do much to change their mind.
So here are three ideas to stay ahead come what may –
1. Keep your content marketing going
Content marketing is today the cheapest and most effective way to get targeted visitors coming to your website regularly and to help your business stay front and center in your customers’ minds.
Research shows that organizations that use captive content marketing get 6x higher conversion rates compared with those that don’t.
Seth Godin, treated as the Godfather of Modern marketing once said that “Content marketing is the only marketing left” accentuating the fact that purposeful and targeted content and not just re-purposed advertising greatly increases consumer trust and brand affinity, which deepens over time.
The results of a study by Conductor also shows that:
- Consumers who read a brand’s educational content were 131% more likely to purchase from that brand.
And according to Hubspot, marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more like to see a positive ROI.
Some other pertinent benefits of content marketing would be that:
- It helps your website improve search ranking and bring in additional traffic.
- It is one of the best ways to showcase your knowledge and thus, differentiate yourself from the competition.
- And you can start a discussion with your audience by sharing the content on your social media channels.
So, to start content marketing you need to define your goals as to what is your niche & what are you going to do with your content? You need to research your audience and understand their Persona.
And think about as to – How can you provide value to them? What question is your audience asking? What problem people have which you can help them solve?
In a nutshell, keep creating purposeful content, knowing about the priorities of your audiences. Focus on what THEY want to know, not what you want to tell them.
2. Invest time in customer relationship-building
There’s no time like the present to pick up the phone and get to know your Best customers even better. Experts agree that brands need to stay sensitive to consumers’ needs and wants at this point in time.
Make people feel that, Hey! this brand is with me even in these testing times too.
Here are a few of the things you can look forward to get out of your conversations:
- Insight into what interests your customers as individuals
- Feedback on your products or services. For instance, if your customer gave you some valuable product feedback, pass that information on to your product team.
- New opportunities to help your customers.
- Understanding of their biggest challenges during this pandemic
3. Optimize your content
To make the content work for you, you need to start implementing strategies that make your content more effective.
According to Neil Patel, optimizing content is more an issue of trust, intent, quality, and authority than just a matter of keyword presence and metadata.
Here, I will explain a four-step process that you can use to create perfectly optimized content every time.
Step 1: Find a topic which matches the interest of your audience
The first and most important part of writing content to drive sales is choosing the right topic.
Even the best article won’t sell a single product if the topic is mismatched with the interests of your audience.
In a technique popularized by Derek Halpern of Social Triggers, you can send your clients an email asking what their biggest struggle is.
If you approach people as a human being, and ask them the right questions, they’ll tell you exactly what they’ll buy. Because the Secret to Discovering What People Buy is ‘Conversation’.
Bonus tip: Few proven tools you can try for foolproof topic ideas personally liked by me are Quora, Alexa & Buzzsumo.
Step 2: Create a Compelling Content
If you’re in the process of creating content to sell, you can’t just write something mediocre. You need to create a piece of content so compelling, people can’t help but share it.
To do that effectively, you need to write a compelling blog post so epic in its scope and detail that it drives more sales than you even thought of.
Step 3: Implement SEO best practices
According to Outbrain there is a big difference between Content and Optimization. While content, is targeted to readers, optimization on the other hand, is meant for the machines, or search engine bots, to improve your SEO ranking.
7 Tips with which even a beginner can improve the search engine ranking:
- Write Purposeful Content: When writing content, make sure it’s relatable to the reader, is original, and it describes your product, your purpose, is trustworthy and is in-depth. For best results, make sure every article contains 1,500 words or more.
- Keep Posting Regularly: Keep posting new content constantly.
- Use Headings: Use keywords within the heading. According to Express Writers, content with images earns 70 percent more views than content without images.
- Optimize the Text: Use Title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and URLs to get your content noticed by search engines. (Bonus tip: Focus on long tail keywords.)
- Optimize Images: Add alt tags on images, which serve as alternate text; use image tags, which are the words that show up when a user scrolls over an image; and keep a check on image size for it load quickly.
- Optimize Videos: If you don’t have your own videos to upload, you can use websites such as YouTube to find great clips that can be embedded into your site. As always, use good keywords in your videos’ title, descriptions, and tags; share videos on social media sites;
- Use Social Media: Post your content on social media, build relationships with relevant users, share other users’ content, and provide feedback.
Step 4: End with a Calls-To-Action
The first purpose of your content is to influence how the reader perceives your brand.
Since content marketing is all about building relationships and developing a positive image of your brand, so content doesn’t always lead to a direct sale.
But the ultimate goal of all content is to take the user further down the funnel to conversion.
One of the most important conversions in the path from the reader to the customer is getting the contact information from someone reading your content.
So, to do this effectively, you should make a pitch for the email address at the bottom of your article with a solid calls-to-action.
And one of the easiest ways you can boost your conversion rates is by optimizing your calls-to-actions (CTAs).
Final Thoughts
Any business, small or big is well aware of the importance of marketing the brand because successful marketing leads to new customer acquisition, customer retention resulting in more sales and profits.
And probably you also know that content on your website or blog is an extremely important aspect of marketing.
To write high-converting copy, you need to start with the needs of your audience. What do they care about? What are their struggles and frustrations?
There’s no time like the present to pick up the phone and get to know your Best customers even better.
With this in mind, you need to create a staggering piece of excellent content. Your goal is to make content that drives shares, traffic, and increased sales.
