3 Necessary Tools For Your Content Marketing Strategy

A lot of businesses are in the same boat when it comes to their content marketing strategy. They understand the general points of inbound marketing and how it functions, but in practice, it often feels as if they’re just blindly casting their fishing line into dark water and hoping for bites.

Inbound marketing is actually a lot like fishing – but it doesn’t have to be a blind process left in the hands of fate. Successful fishermen start with a plan. They’re able to predict where fish will be based on feeding patterns, water temperatures, the current season and other determining factors. They know that different lures attract different types of fish. Similarly, companies who are successful in content marketing know where their target customers congregate and how to lure them in.

By exploring the symbiotic relationship between your tools – keywords, blog posts and free offers – you’ll have a better understanding of your inbound marketing strategy. Read on to learn how these individual components connect to one another, and ultimately, help you land the big one.

Keywords are the language of search engines. When figuring out how to drive customers to your site, it’s essential to start with keyword research. When compiling a list of keywords, consider how your target customers actually speak. Which words would they use when talking about the types of services or products that your company offers?

An analytics tool, like Google Adwords, will show you exactly how many searches are being performed for that keyword and how competitive it is. Once you’ve found a relevant term that’s being searched for often but ranks low on competitiveness, it’s time to weave it into your website, so it can start hooking prospective buyers.

The only problem? Your website’s landing pages probably rank well for business-specific queries, but most likely won’t rank at all for queries revolving around consumer problems and desires. For instance, if someone types in “custom blinds in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania”, your blind design store in Harrisburg, PA might pop up. But if someone types in “what’s the difference between Roman blinds and roller shades?”, unless your store has an answer to that question on the FAQs page, your brand will be buried deep within the SERP.

So how can you mobilize your keywords and target a larger school of potential customers? You need to attach your hook (the targeted keyword) to a line.

Consistently posted blog entries provide vehicles for your hand-selected keywords, just like fishing lines allow hooks to be cast far from shore. A blog is almost mandatory to rank for long-tail search queries, such as the Roman blind question above. In fact, according to HubSpot marketing statistics from 2017, companies that published 16 or more blog posts a month received almost 3.5x more traffic and about 4.5x more leads than companies that published only 0 to 4 blog posts a month.

When it comes to Google’s algorithms, sites that are updated regularly, stay focused on a singular topic and have amassed an impressive amount of high-quality content far outperform sites that remain untouched for months, are packed with disparate keywords and only have a handful of indexed pages. The bottom line? The more content you add to your site, the better your organic search visibility will be.

By centering each blog post around one of your researched keywords, and then regularly producing quality blog posts, you’re improving your chances of something biting, since you’re increasing the number of lines you have in the water. It doesn’t matter which blog post attracts a new reader who was searching for your keyword – it just matters that they get to your site. But once they’ve made it to your site, then what?

To increase casting distance and anchoring ability, fishermen will use sinkers. If you want to go deeper with visitors to your site, you’ll need to utilize free offers. From e-books to whitepapers to webinars, free offers take many forms. When a site visitor clicks on a free offer, they’ll be asked to input their contact information before being given access to the offer’s content.

Now, you’ve passively acquired a prospective customer’s name and e-mail address. At this point, your sales team can reach out and try to initiate a conversation. Lead-generating CTAs (calls to action) are the final tool in your fishing handbag and help you convert site visitors to loyal customers.

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About Virtucom Group

Consistent business blogging yields results – more clicks, more subscribers and – ultimately – more conversions. Whether you’re writing an automotive blog, an accounting blog, a healthcare blog or a home renovation blog, blogging for business and content development are useful for any industry. Follow the content writers at the Virtucom Group blog as they share digital marketing tips and discuss website content writing services that can optimize your business blog.