Sometimes our customers want to base their marketing strategy on the expert positioning of employees or founders. After some time, it usually turns out to be much more difficult than it seemed at first. Someone has to create valuable content and promote it effectively, and the positioned experts usually can’t find the time for it.
It is a myth, however, that effective content marketing is reserved only for companies with large marketing budgets and resources. If you are a CEO frome SME segment and you’ve been struggling with a small amount of company content so far — I have a few tips for you on how to create converting content without investing a lot of your (or your team’s) time.
Write only for those who might buy
Don’t waste your time writing for people who will never buy from you. Creating content isn’t a form of art but one of the customer acquisition strategies. In the case of content marketing, you can create personalised messages to people who prefer to buy from you instead of creating them for everyone. If you write for everyone, you write for no one.
It would be perfect if you had buyer personas created for this purpose, which are based on interviews with your current customers. This helps a lot, but it’s usually not necessary unless you conduct large-scale business and work with customers at least 3-4 hours a day.
With tools such as CRM or Google Analytics, you can obtain some basic information about your customers with just a few clicks, like their:
– company information (sector, company size, position),
– demographic data (location, age)
– behaviour (What is important to them? What are they looking for on the website? Where can such people find your advertising message?)
– their problem (What are they struggling with? Why did they ask for your help? How have you helped them?)
If you check the information about your customers from the last few months and correlate it all, you will most likely find some common points. This gives you a clear perspective for whom you should create content, how it should look and in what way it should be promoted so as to reach the target audience. Perhaps due to narrowing down the target audience, you won’t need as much content as it might have seemed at the beginning.
Don’t guess, measure
During the cooperation with customers, it often turns out that they a lot of attention to e.g. creating extensive and time-consuming e-books, but they don’t know whether these materials work or how they influence the company’s market situation. On the other hand, the content that is interesting to a specific target audience isn’t fully used because the team has been working on something else and there hasn’t been any time for activities that draw the greatest number of new customers.
This results from insufficient measurement of traffic quality within the published content as well as not focusing on the content that has the biggest impact on customer acquisition.
In the case of any marketing activities, the basic metrics for evaluating efficiency include:
– number of conversions
– average conversion rate
– average conversion cost
– average conversion value
In the case of content, the metrics mentioned above are often very marginal and we can’t obtain much data from them until we have a lot of diverse content. Hence, it is also worth to consider all the behavioural indicators such as:
– average time spent on the site (or analogically – in case of a video, we can consider the average time of watching it)
– bounce rate
– number of pages per session
If your business starts systematically measuring all content marketing activities, you will soon realise what is the most profitable for the company and save money in the form of your and your employees time.
Create content from… content
Relatively little effort can be invested in preparing a lot of content which is based on one main material created earlier.
Example: you speak at a conference, share the video recording on your social media and nothing more, while you could create many smaller content pieces without spending much time on them, e.g. make infographics or graphics, cut out the best moments and post them regularly on company channels or, what is more, prepare a transcription and/or even a series of articles for the company’s blog.
It is much easier and faster to create something based on already available knowledge, and some of such content that doesn’t require additional expertise can even be delegated to people whose working hours are cheaper than yours, like juniors or interns.
Here is an example of a content development model that can be implemented based on every answer given on Quora or social media:
In case your customers come from different countries, the content, at least written content, can be created in two languages (English and local) or even in several ones. Simply find a translator who will regularly translate e.g. your blog posts, and then you will be able to distribute them again for a similar target audiences abroad. This way, you can increase the number of articles by up to 100% (or publish more often than before) and reach your audience more effectively thanks to eliminating the language barrier.
Don’t forget about content distribution
I often come across a situation where the customer creates a large number of different materials that are later neither promoted (or promoted as little as possible) nor distributed in the company’s media. As a consequence, the message created using a dozen of working hours or so reaches a very narrow and limited audience, very often mainly composed of family and friends or the existing customers.
To avoid this, remember about wide distribution on all available social media profiles of the company but not only that. An interesting idea is to monitor thematic groups on social media and share your content in related posts as well as to use such platforms as Medium or Quora.
When it comes to content distribution, another very helpful method is paid promotion using platforms such as: Google, Youtube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Thanks to very precise targeting based on demographics and user behaviour, you can gain valuable traffic even for a few dollars per day.
Don’t be scared of outsourcing
It could also happen that you won’t be able to find the time in your or your team’s schedules and yet employing a person assigned to such actions will be unprofitable at a given moment. In such cases, it is worth finding help outside the company which means hiring a freelancer who will do everything for you. There is a large selection of experienced copywriters on the market, and the prices are currently very competitive due to their availability.
This is an interesting course of action when:
a) you don’t have a content marketer in the company;
b) you want to test this channel, but you don’t want to employ a person assigned solely to this yet because it would involve too high costs;
c) you don’t create highly specialised content which can be written only by you or people with very narrow expertise who are difficult to find on the market.
Obtain guest posts
Your company blog doesn’t need to have articles that come only from your employees. Take a look at Casbeg blog where we have been regularly publishing guest articles written by people related to marketing and sales in the B2B segment for the last couple of months.
If you create a recognisable brand and have the right high quality content as well as the capacity of reaching the target audience, other authors will gladly publish their articles on your website because for them it means great promotion and the opportunity to increase brand awareness.
On the other hand, you too can offer to publish your texts on other known portals. Just make sure that the target audience that will read it falls under your buyer persona and there is a chance that they will benefit from your product.
Writing several articles without prior consideration of the audience we want to reach or the specific value they should bring will be a waste of time and money. So will writing a great text ,which will be viewed only by 20 regular readers of the company blog or the employees.
