Best Ways to Boost ROI on Your Content Marketing Efforts

Content marketing emphasizes producing, publishing, and distributing meaningful and relevant content to a target audience. Content marketing is different from other kinds of marketing because it focuses on generating trust and support from the audience.

Since content marketing doesn’t lead directly towards sales, it can be a tricky business to determine if our content marketing efforts are paying off.

Here are some of the best ways to boost the ROI (Return on Investment) on your content marketing efforts:

Focus on a target audience.

Content marketing can only produce results when you know who your target audience is.

Traditional marketing is different from content marketing because it focuses on appealing to a broader audience. Content marketing, on the other hand, appeals only to a very particular individual.

The easiest way to increase the results from your content marketing efforts is to focus on marketing to your ideal customer. It would not be too hard to convert a person who is already interested in your business.

By creating content that is helpful for your ideal customer, you’ll be able to increase your brand awareness and build trust. By continually helping this type of audience, your company would have a much more appealing brand image.

After you’ve had loads of conversions from your ideal customer, you should identify other segments of people who could be compelled by your content.

If you’ve designed a content marketing campaign for an audience once, that doesn’t mean that your job is finished. You’ll need to keep updating your strategy and keep up with your customers if you want your campaigns to be productive and generate the most ROI.

If you want to increase the ROI (Return on Investment) on your content marketing efforts, you will put in a significant amount of time into identifying your target audience.

Create multiple buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a fictional depiction of a customer.

Buyer personas give you insights about your customers. You can build a buyer’s persona based on the data you have acquired. Having relevant data will allow you to make a better persona and ultimately make a better marketing campaign.

If you don’t have data about a particular kind of customer, the next best thing you can do is to come up with an estimation. Use the trial and error methodology to find what works for a particular persona.

Why are buyer personas important for content marketing strategies?

Without having an in-depth understanding of your customers, you won’t be able to build marketing campaigns that would appeal to them at a much deeper level. Without appealing to customers, a content marketing strategy is bound to fail.

“Make Your Persona” is a free tool from Hubspot that you can use to create detailed buyer personas. If you don’t have experience in coming up with a buyer’s persona, you’ll want to check “Make Your Persona” out. The tool helps you make detailed personas by asking a lot of questions about your customers.

Another thing that you should keep in mind after you’ve built a buyer’s persona is that you’ll need to update them afterward. Without updating a persona, it’s going to give an inaccurate depiction of your customer, which will lead to ineffective marketing campaigns.

Produce content that is relevant and helpful.

One of the most essential parts of a content marketing strategy is the content.

Without relevant and meaningful content, a content marketing strategy won’t be able to generate trust and support from an audience.

To produce content that will help your target audience, you’ll need to identify their pain points. What are your customers struggling the most with? If you can create content that addresses these pain points and helps customers, you’ll be much more effective in your content marketing campaigns.

For your content marketing campaigns to be effective, you’ll need to make your target audience your first priority. If you start your content marketing efforts to create helpful content for your customers, you’ll get more brand awareness in the form of likes and shares from your followers.

Analyze your customer’s journey.

Your content marketing strategy should be focused on your customers.

As a content marketing strategist, you should be focusing on every step your customer takes before making a purchase.

If you know every detail about your customers, you’ll be in a position to make better decisions.

If your customers need a little push in a particular part of their buyer’s journey, you can step in with helpful content that would wow your customers. Since you’ve helped out your customers, you can now expect them to be aware if not interested in your business.

Small but consistent persuasions ultimately lead to conversions.

Use long-tail keywords that your audience would be inclined to use.

When a person needs to find something online and is desperate about it, they’ll type in a long-phrase instead of a small keyword.

Smaller keywords generally have a lot of competition. Big companies and organizations are competing for the number one position on the search results page.

These more prominent companies don’t invest as much effort into long-tail keywords in their content. A perfect opportunity for your business to wiggle its way into the hearts of your audience.

Why should you incorporate long-tail keywords in your content?

Long-tail keywords provide you with user intent that shorter keywords just can’t.

If you have a user’s intent, you can produce content that would appeal to that particular user.

To boost your content marketing strategy to the next level, you should focus on including long-tail keywords in your content. Including keywords doesn’t mean stuffing keywords. No one likes to read the same phrase multiple times if they don’t need to. Avoid stuffing keywords into your content if you want to keep your readers and search engines happy.

Remember that your first priority should be the person you are creating content for.

Measure content cost.

If your content costs more than the value it creates for your business; your ROI is negative. Not good.

Make sure that the content you create has value for your customers and your business at the same time.

If your content marketing strategy is not generating the intended results, you should immediately analyze what’s wrong. It could be a multitude of factors, one of them being that your content costs a lot more than it should.

If this is the case then you should do the following steps:

• Identify why your target audience isn’t giving you the response you expected?
• Determine if this particular audience causes problems for your opponents as well.
• If there is no way to appeal to this audience, move on to a new one.

Focus on the metrics that matter.

There are several metrics that content strategists focus on.

People new to the content marketing game focus on metrics like followers, total users, and number of views.

Experts, on the other hand, focus on metrics like the total number of active users, engagement on a piece of content, cost per acquisition, shares, and lifetime value of a customer.

Using a data-centric approach, keeping data at the center of your strategy gives you increased chances of having successful campaigns.

By focusing on customer behavior, customer journey, and making use of data obtained, metrics that provide the most value to a campaign can be identified and improved.

Test different strategies.

Test out different strategies.

Identify what works for your competitors. How are they providing value from their content marketing strategy?

Learn from people in your industry and outside of your industry. Never stop learning. Keep up with the latest trends in content marketing strategies as well as customer behavior through continuously taking feedback from live chat app for formulating effective strategies that power successful marketing campaigns.

Use multiple A/B tests to determine what appeals more to your target audience.

Repurpose your content multiple times.

If you want to make the most of your content, you’ll need to repurpose it.

If a blog post goes viral, you might want to make multiple pieces of content from that successful content.

With so much content continually flooding people’s screens, content strategists must create content that can be repurposed.

Gary Vaynerchuck came up with a content strategy in early 2019 that focuses on creating a piece of content that would act as the pillar. Using a reverse pyramid model, that pillar content is divided and repurposed into several different pieces of content and then distributed on multiple channels and platforms. People get the content they need wherever they choose to spend their time most on.

While not everyone can generate as much content as Gary Vaynerchuck, this strategy can be adopted to increase the effectiveness of a content marketing strategy significantly.

Conclusion:

Like other marketing types, you need to stay up to date with your target audience. A small shift in customer behavior can have massive effects on your content marketing campaigns.

Content marketing is the future. As more and more businesses are embracing personalization, if a company wants to stay competitive, it will need to pay increased attention to customer satisfaction and how people perceive the company.