Marketing content doesn’t have to lead directly to sales every time someone consumes it to be valuable to your organization. But content does need to achieve two goals: it must serve your target market and it must move leads further through the sales funnel. We hate to say it, but if your content isn’t doing both of these things, it’s a waste of time.
It’s time to take a hard look at your content. If you’re not sure if it’s achieving these goals, read on for our take on how to make sure your content is optimized for success.
As a marketer, you need to be able to assess whether your content is adding value for your audience. This process begins with a smart analysis of content performance data. First, check to see how many people are downloading your piece of content, and compare that number with the number of visits you get to the landing page where the content is housed to get a sense of your content conversion rate. If plenty of people are encountering your gated content but very few are downloading it, it’s clear that your content is either not what your audience is looking for or that you are doing a poor job of conveying its value.
Similarly, tracking time spent on a page or how far the average audience member gets in a piece of video content can tell you about the value your audience finds in your content. If the time spent consuming your content is very short, or viewers are only consuming a small percentage of your content, you can safely assume your audience has determined that your content is not valuable to them.
If you find data about the time your audience spends engaged with your content to be valuable, make sure to monitor this metric for all types of content, not just video. Try replacing your downloadable PDF white papers and similar offerings with gated landing pages. This way, you can collect information on time spent engaging with your content via Google Analytics, which would not be possible if you simply offered a downloadable PDF.
And don’t forget: social sharing is one of the best indications of whether your audience values your content enough to tell others about it. So practice social listening to keep track.
In addition to serving your targets’ needs, each piece of marketing content should drive members of your audience to continue down the funnel to higher-level materials. That means that every piece of content should compel leads to explore more of your offerings, interact with email campaigns and download more gated content, leading them to learn more about your product or service and eventually become a customer.
This is where marketing automation software enters the picture. Content rarely drives a sale directly, but it is often an integral part of the journey that leads to that sale. So in order to turn your marketing qualified lead (MQL) into a sales qualified lead (SQL), you have to usher each person who interacts with your content through progressively in-depth forms of marketing content, from awareness-focused content to conversion-focused content, and on to the sales team.
By automating your marketing, you can ensure that your organization connects with leads at the times when they are most receptive to your messages: that is, right after they’ve interacted with relevant pieces of content. Marketing automation allows your company to better tailor messages for individual leads based on the content they favor. So why wouldn’t you take advantage of the opportunity?
With what seems like an endless stream of content available to your audience from both professional and amateur creators, have you ever wondered how to cut through the noise? Read our white paper, Amateur hour or the end of professionalism? for our thoughts.
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