High-quality content marketing is required to succeed in today's competitive business world. Whether you are a large corporation, a small or big business, an educational institution or a non-profit organization, your website visitors crave captivating, information-rich, high-impact and insightful content. We are in the midst of the information age, and your prospects do a significant amount of online research comparing you to your competition. How can you stand out and get ahead? You need to deliver highly relevant and valuable information in a way that strikes a chord with your target audience. Would you like to publish content that delivers results-seriously increasing the ROI of your content marketing? Of course, you would, and you know that content marketing can do amazing things for your company. However, the operative word is "can." Not all content is created equal.
Strategic content marketing starts with a top-notch blog-one with a great deal of content that really hits the mark. An excellent business blog can deliver dramatically increased reach, lead generation and new business development. According to HubSpot, companies that publish a blog attract 55% more website visitors and generate 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed web pages than companies that do not. The more frequently you publish blog content, the more website traffic and leads you are likely to produce. Companies that publish blog content at least 20 times per month attract over five times more website traffic than those that publish content less than four times a month. In addition, companies that post blog content 20 times per month generate four times more leads than companies that do not maintain blogs.
While all this sounds great, there is a catch; these statistics are based on averages. Some companies attain phenomenal results with content marketing, and others do not despite their best efforts. Now, let us address how you can match or exceed these statistics-gaining an edge over your strongest industry competitors and winning the content marketing game.
How to Ensure Relevance and Deliver Value with Your Content
Your blog is a space for you to address industry topics and trends in depth, highlight your company's thought leadership, provide best practices with ample data to back up your assertions and-above all-offer significant value and relevance to your target audience. Achieving this requires always being in the know about industry happenings and trends, so analyze the blogs of your top competitorsn-noting the most popular topics, publishing frequency, who the content creators are, and how the content is shared in order to determine what works best for your specific industry. Subscribe to top industry blogs via RSS to monitor and track the latest trending content topics. Employ social listening to locate individuals on social media, who are asking questions related to one of your recent topics, and share your content with them. Ask your sales team or consultants about the most frequently asked questions and common concerns, and then address them in your published content. The more your clients and prospects value you as a trusted informational resource, the more your content marketing ROI will rise.
Overall, your published content should be comprehensive and broad, while also providing deep industry insight and analysis. Take care that your website and blog is not so jam-packed with ads and CTAs that they detract focus from your content. Your website and blog must be neatly organized and visually appealing. Ensure that all text is free of spelling errors, typos, and grammatical and editing oversights. Content should be original; avoid redundant content on the same topics with only slightly altered keyword variations. Although content should be created with SEO in mind, the style and substance of content must appeal to your website visitors and blog subscribers. If your goal is to increase lead generation; avoid being overly salesy; it will not get you there. Your content should be information-rich, cover relevant industry trends and not merely push your own products or services.
If you want higher than average content marketing results, then your content better provide more value than other content in relevant SERPs as well as capture and maintain the attention of your target audience. If you want extraordinary content marketing results, be extraordinary, and publish the best industry content. If you do not have the resources in-house, hire an inbound marketing agency or a talented content writer to help you raise your content marketing game.