Your business relies on its website to tell its story in the digital space; often your website also helps you reach a market that is yet to find you. Employing efficient online marketing strategies in a diverse and competitive space, such as Toronto, requires making the best use of your website through the content you generate and publish, and will constantly evolve to tell your brand’s story. Your business evolves and grows through the information it is able to successfully share with patrons that subscribe to your products and services. A good story will draw your market in, but has to be constantly retold in new ways to keep your audience entertained and subscribed to your offers.
With good content, you tell the story of your brand in order to influence the market in your favour. Leveraging good content in online marketing spins the story in your brand’s favor, setting the tone for the rest of the market, and dominating the conversation. To do this, your business must continuously create meaningful content that fuels your brand’s story, helping you to retain and grow your market resulting in leads, conversions, sales, and closed deals. The standards for what good content is, and how it converts viewers to customers are constantly changing, but in 2017, these are the trends to watch out for and hacks you should adopt.
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Embrace Content Diversity
Website content isn’t just composed of written text that goes into your blogs and articles. After all, your viewership isn’t entirely made up of readers who will patiently wade through blocks of text to discover your unique products and services. Successful online marketing requires embracing multimedia content creation in order to engage your audience in your brand’s narrative and capture their interest in your well-placed offers.
Recently, content such as videos, especially live ones now available in the form of webinars, podcasts and live streams on various social media platforms, are a hit among audiences. Not only does multimedia content entertain, but it’s also a good way of offering a 360 degree insight into your business. With product videos, infographics, slideshare presentations, tutorials, FAQs, and streaming from your launches and industry events, your audience connects with your brand in real time and see’s your business come to life before their eyes, as opposed to just reading about your latest offers and having to imagine and set up their own expectations.
Multimedia content creation does not have to cost much either. With the rise of the smartphone-wielding generation and taking customer experience on the go, shooting videos and streaming these live at events can be done using mobile apps or your phone’s camera. Producing multimedia content shouldn’t be time-consuming either, as you can repurpose content in other formats and use these in your other online marketing collaterals, such as using the material in video scripts for infographics and blog posts.
Real Content for Real People
In working hard to optimize a website for search engine queries, many make the mistake of creating content that’s easily found, but reads poorly for real people who are on your website trying to determine if your offerings are a good fit for their needs. In the process, you are likely to lose this viewership and potential market if your sole concern is to rank well on a Google search.
Online marketing is embracing the principle of creating real content for real people. In-depth content that is properly laid out, can be easily understood, uses clear language and utilizes high quality, inviting images to support the text is now shown to rank and convert well – even better than content that is aimed at ranking well on search, but flows poorly, is haphazardly arranged and reads awkwardly due to excessive use of common search phrases.
Creating content for the right people is a long process, but as you work on that, you can also use some quick fixes on content that’s already published on your site. These are called content upgrades. To start, you can attach snippets to existing content on your website that’s already performing well. These support content that’s already well-received by your market, you can use upgrades such as bonus tips, downloadable PDFs your audience can take on the go, kits, checklists, worksheets, training videos, and even useful templates. This saves you the trouble of having to completely change content that’s already working for your business all at once, and instead lets you implement useful changes that not only cement your authority on subjects concerning your business’ industry, but also allow you to reshape your site’s content in a more manageable timeframe. By fostering interactions with your audience like these, you can also encourage sign ups for newsletters, email marketing and leads in exchange for access to downloads and access to other content upgrades.
Add a Personal Touch
Much like the localization of search these days, micro-targeting and hyper-personalization are going a long way in building customer trust and fostering good business ties. In online marketing, all it takes is to remember who is it for and why you’re doing business. Always, the goal is to serve the needs of your local community and build trust in your products and services as a staple in their lives.
When you target a demographic in your audience and personalize online marketing efforts according to their interests and preferences, you are able to bring your business closer to them and remind them of your ability to craft unique solutions for their needs. It shows that your business has the best interests of the market at heart, and your business has ties to each set of audiences to prove that.
Remembering important holidays and sending out messages that show your audience you are one with them in commemorating these milestones only takes a little time and is worth the effort in maintaining a solid presence online. Crafting marketing messages according to your market’s location, work information, personal tastes and previous search behavior demonstrates your business’ ability to connect with an audience and prove that your business can supply the market its needs as these arise.
All these efforts can work seamlessly with your larger, general and widely-encompassing online marketing messages. These show how your products and services are needed by and adequately cater to a wide array of audiences, all of whom are drawn in by a specific point that appeals to them at the onset.
Crowd Source and Influence
Tell your market you want to hear from them – and watch the magic as it unfolds. There is nothing that defines the customer experience more than giving your audience a stake in your brand through their opinions that help to shape your business. When you engage your happy customers, they become loyal patrons who will form part of your base following. In time, they will rally your brand and their experiences will shape their peers’ interaction with your business.
This smart online marketing tactic persuades a market you are yet to connect with using what their peers have already said about your business. User-generated content is on the rise these days, and for this to work to your advantage, it should be supplied by customers with good interactions with your brand who can lend their voice to sharing your brand in a simple as a photo, post or tweet shared across their social media platforms. This now works as the new word of mouth, and poses an infinite amount of possible interactions with your brand, each starting with a loyal customer and their social circles.
Taking care of your online reputation is only one benefit of user-generated content. With a steady rise in review submissions, small competitions, use of hashtags you encourage your followers to use on social media when starting a conversation about your products and services, and the gentle prodding of influencers or brand ambassadors, you can also generate content pieces from what they have to say, and use these in review posts, news articles and online marketing campaigns. Not only do you open more communication channels with your market and act on their feedback as these come in, all working towards boosting your brand and improving business; you also gain relevant content you can repurpose and use for future marketing campaigns.
Content is your website’s heart and soul – it gives your online presence meaning, and defines your brand in the digital marketplace. Content is what your potential customers consume, and what makes or breaks every lead you generate and every sale worth closing. Good content makes telling a powerful brand story, piquing the market’s interest and capturing an audience who will follow your business as it grows – all possible.