Content is the lifeblood of your online business. It is the glue that keeps your audience coming back for more. Without an effective content strategy, your business will struggle to reach its full potential.
Content production is the key to digital marketing success. Content helps brands connect with their target audiences, enhances customer experiences, and drives clicks and traffic through paid and organic channels.
Content can be a powerful tool if used correctly. However, if not created strategically, it can fall flat. How do you make sure that the content you create has the highest Return on Investment (ROI) and drives real revenue for you?
Content creation takes time, lots of resources, and a large investment from content marketing teams To create a content strategy that is profitable and scalable, consider using these tactics.
This article will provide you with five actionable ways to build a profitable content strategy for your online business.
1. Create clear audience personas
Before you create any content, you need to understand who your target audience is, where they’re located, and what problems they face that your product or service solves.
Some information you might need to include in your personae includes:
- Demographics
- Interests
- Pain points
- Goals and Motivations
- Company Size or Budget
- And more!
Why spend so much time crafting an audience or marketing persona? They help you better identify your audience’s wants and needs and craft more targeted messages.
If you want your blog posts to do more than just generate traffic and push your readers further down the conversion funnel then you need to understand your audience better.
2. Prioritize high-quality content
Quantity vs. Quality is an age-old argument among marketers, but in my experience, taking the extra time to ensure the content you create brings value to your audience is always, always worth it.
The type of content your team can create – whether blogs, ebooks, videos, or infographics – will most likely depend on the size and resources of your in-house team.
However, you can always outsource content creation, and one piece of high-quality content can often be reused for other channels like social media and native advertising.
So what makes content “high-quality”?
- Includes original reporting or analysis
- Answers your target audience’s questions
- Has a detailed exploration of the topic
- Provides valuable, relevant insights
- Incorporates engaging design elements or rich media
- Has expert authorship and sourcing
If the content meets all of these quality criteria, it’s more likely to rank well organically, convert users, and establish expertise and brand authority in time.
3. Master SEO
Foundational knowledge of SEO best practices is an essential building block to any successful content strategy.
Why? Because of its affordability, SEO has more room for error than paid advertising. This means the opportunity to test out your content and messaging without paying a high cost per click.
Ranking organically for keywords can help drive traffic to your website forever, as long as you continue to update your content and build links to your resources. Unlike paid channels, which typically stop once your campaign budget has been exhausted, organic clicks can continue to come even after your campaign budget has been spent. Therefore, supplementing your paid channels with an organic strategy can help lower customer acquisition costs in the long run.
Content marketing fundamentals that content marketers should know to include:
- Keyword Research: Understanding the questions and phrases users are asking about products and services like yours
- On-Page Optimization: The processes of optimizing your content for specific keyword targets
- Link Building: Earning backlinks to your website through PR and manual outreach efforts and thus elevating SEO performance
You should always have permanent content assets on your website. They can bring a lot of value beyond just keyword rankings. You should keep users on your website for as long as possible, drive them back to your site through email campaigns, and build your topical authority in your industry overall.
4. Leverage native content
With a solid SEO plan, your content will likely get lots of visits from organic searches, helping you understand which pieces of content are driving traffic and conversions.
So, why not use the content pieces on your site that have the strongest track record of converting site visitors into customers and turn them into ads?
In native advertising, the ads resemble the publisher’s content and format — whether a news article, video or blog post – and appear somewhere on the publisher’s website as if an organic post.
If the content has already proven to generate conversions in your organic SEO strategy, it’s a strong signal for republishing in native ads. Through platforms like My Blog Poster, you can widen the reach of your content, exposing it to millions of people on the open web and even retarget visitors to your website, making your content assets even more relevant and impactful.
Native advertising has a higher click-through rate than display ads (0.20% compared to 0.06%). So they outperform regularly paid ad campaigns. And although native ads usually cost more per click than display ads do, they generate more traffic and target relevant audiences, so they’re a key part of a content strategy that’s both profitable and ROI-friendly.
5. Set Performance-Based Goals
To know if your content is driving revenue for your business, you need to set performance-based goals.
Awareness-based marketing can seem very effective, but it is much harder to measure than other forms of marketing. To be profitable with your content delivery strategy, you need to know how much money each piece of content generates for your business.
Depending on which analytics platform you choose, your content strategy will guide you. If you invest in cheaper channels like SEO, keyword tracking tools can help you track the conversions that result from specific pieces and your strategic messaging. Use these insights to improve your content strategy so you can drive more traffic to your site and increase your conversion rates.
A sale or purchase isn’t the only action that indicates users moving through the sales funnel.
Other conversion actions to track include things like:
- Video views
- Submission forms
- Demo bookings
- Live chats
- Adding items to shopping carts
- And more!
Tracking various conversion actions can also help us better understand our content and where we can improve our content strategy. You should also assign a conversion value to each of these actions so that you can more easily quantify the return on investment (ROI) of your content marketing efforts.
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