How to crush your content marketing goals
As a modern content marketer, writing content is only a sliver of what your job actually entails. These days, it’s likely that SEO, blog subscriptions, and content engagement are KPIs that you’re accountable for—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In order to ensure that you’re crushing your content marketing goals this quarter (and beyond), we’ve highlighted some ways you can start making a bigger impact with your content today.
1. Increase page views by leveraging content in multiple places.
It can be discouraging to find that your content has a tendency to fade into oblivion after it’s been published—and racking up page views is tough when a post from last month becomes old news once it reaches page two of your blog.
To get more eyes on your content, the key is to shift your focus from creating net-new pieces to strategically leveraging content that already exists. Assigning your existing content multiple placements means that more people will be able to find it, no matter how they’re searching. We’ve dug into the data and found that putting content in more than one place can actually increase views by 8x on average.
The above example shows just two placements of a blog post we recently published in the Uberflip platform, but some of our core assets can end up in upwards of 50 different places during their lifespan. It sounds like a lot, but when you consider all the instances in which you can leverage content—like for nurture campaigns, event follow-up, sales outreach, and ABM—the number checks out. With this approach, you’re truly embodying the idea of doing more with less!
2. Boost engagement metrics by creating binge-worthy experiences.
A content marketer’s pursuit of a low bounce rate and increased session duration are never over. After all, those are the metrics that prove people are engaged and interested in what you have to offer.
That said, the key to keeping your visitors hooked is by creating binge-worthy experiences like Netflix or Spotify does. Grouping together a collection of similar assets immerses visitors in an experience full of content they’ll likely be interested in.
Our latest benchmark report found that 42% of marketers see good results by suggesting additional activities for a lead to take once they land on your site but, surprisingly, 20% of marketers still aren’t making any suggestions.
CollabNet VersionOne does a great job creating bingeable experiences by grouping their content by topic, by product, and by resource type. Once you click into an item (like the blog post below), a ‘Next Article’ flyout appears, allowing visitors to easily move on to the next piece of content at any time. And once someone reaches the bottom of the page, there’s a related content section where visitors can select their own next step from a collection of relevant articles, reports, and videos.
3. Improve SEO by building your reputation with search engines.
Search engine optimization should be top of mind for any digital content creator, so it’s no surprise that improving search rankings is among the most common content marketing goals. To achieve SEO nirvana (or at least work your way up to page one of Google), our friends at Propecta use what’s called the 80/20 framework. That means spending 80% of resources on engagement SEO, and 20% on technical SEO.
Because engagement SEO is very content-heavy, it typically falls to the hand of the content marketer. Some ways to quickly improve your engagement SEO include:
- Create branded experiences that centralize all of your blog posts, videos, presentations, and ebooks in one place
- Organize content by topic for a better user experience
- Encourage content bingeing to improve engagement metrics like time on page, pages per session, and bounce rate
- Design personalized web experiences that keep visitors interested and assure them you have the solutions to their unique pain points
Depending on the platform you’re using for content experience management, content marketers can also take control of technical SEO elements like page title fields, meta descriptions, URL customization, and canonical customization to help search engines understand, format, and deliver the content on your webpages.
4. Generate more leads by converting inbound web traffic.
A common content marketing challenge is converting web traffic into leads. The good news is that sometimes this goal can be achieved by simply giving your audience more opportunities to convert.
On a blog or resource center, a CTA to subscribe to your mailing list is an easy way to collect information from inbound traffic when they land on your page. But rather than an aggressive popup as soon as someone lands on your site, why not embed a blog subscribe CTA within your content experience? It’s a much softer ask, and gives people the chance to check out what you have to offer before asking them for their information.
Another way to generate more leads with content is to use overlay CTAs like Stantec has in the example below. In the case of ebooks, whitepapers, and reports, marketers often send inbound traffic to a separate landing page to fill out a form. This isn’t always a great experience (in fact, the industry standard for a B2B landing page is just 2.35%) and it takes people away from your site. Using a CTA overtop of an asset instead has been known to increase conversions by 7x.
Small improvements start today
As with most things, you’re not going to crush your content marketing goals overnight. But rethinking the way you approach content is a step in the right direction! Content marketers who win are those who challenge the way things were always done and instead think about the experience they’re creating for the people who are engaging with their content.