Find a balance for your promotional content

A recent study by Kentico Software found that continuous promotional content marketing can reduce consumer confidence by 12% to nearly 50%. 

Continuously sending out promotional material can become quite tiresome for your customers. They may also not be used to receiving high-pressured sales message. What makes content marketing successful is its ability to deliver valuable information in a helpful manner.

We would suggest putting a schedule in place of when promotional content will be sent and ensure that it's not sent too often. Review each piece of contents sales message to ensure you are not pushing a hard sell and balance out with a mix of promotional informative content.

Tailor content to your audience

Customers can tell when you actually care about them and they are looking to connect with real people who care about who they are and what they are looking for.

Make your audience your number one priority! Show that you care, that you are honest and are genuinely interested in providing a solution to their problem. 

Generic materials that are not highly relevant to a reader will not result in success. When writing content, you must make sure it will be useful to the reader, regardless of whether it supports your company message.

Develop a plan for distributing content

Develop a plan for distributing content efficiently and effectively
Make each piece of content relevant to the platform/publication on which it will appear. Consider whether the content will render well across most commonly used devices and screen sizes. Put a calendar together for specific content you would like to distribute during each month. This way you have plenty of time to put together your content.

Always make sure you have left enough time for ad hoc content marketing!

Include a relevant call-to-action: Remember your goal is to get readers to take the next step in your purchase process.

Creative

Your original content can't just be the same as you have always done. Content needs to be fresh, innovative and changed regularly to meet the needs of your customers. It must bring something new to the table. Try to make all your content engaging and useful. Work hard to make it so engaging that your audience will share it with friends and colleagues.

A great example of creative content marketing is from Nike:

The Nike “Make It Count” storyline was created by a rogue director who spent his entire budget travelling through 13 countries in 10 days. The budget was initially dedicated to making a movie promoting Nike FuelBand. Instead, the director and his movie-making friend travelled around the world filming their adventures. The tagline “make it count” was meant to inspire customers to do whatever it takes to live a life worthwhile – while wearing the Nike FuelBand. The campaign was successful because it appealed to the adventurous troublemaker in us all. Nike managed to connect and engage their audience by using a message that was empowering and inspiring.

Not everyone has the same marketing budget as Nike but the point of this example is to strive for innovation.

Timing

Not only does consistent, timely content publishing help you to land more website traffic and new customers, but it also assists you in shortening your sales processes and enables you t take advantage of seasonal and news-related timing.

Potential customers are looking for different kinds of content at different stages of their research and purchase process. Newly engaged clients need different content than those who have been your clients for a longer period of time.

Segment your customer base and storyboard what kinds of content they’ll need at each stage of their engagement with your company.

Measure

Continually monitor and analyse your content marketing results. It can be hard to measure the leads generated through your content marketing but if you monitor the click throughs and the engagement your content is creating this is a great starting point.

The next step would be to compare the users that have engaged with your content marketing to your leads in your CRM. Codeweavers recommend that your content marketing campaign tools should be integrated with your CRM to ensure you know what content your leads have seen.

Optimise content for search

Planning and writing your content is only part of the process. You also need to optimize it so people can find it in search engines.

-Your content should prominently feature targeted keywords and you should be using keywords intelligently in your headers. 

-The most important information must appear at the top of the article. 

-Make the content conversion-friendly and worth linking to.

 -Be sure to spell check and grammar check your documents.

Contact Codeweavers to find out more.