A content marketing plans you can sell to your clients PART 1

 2018-02-01

Content marketing is of huge importance for every business for many reasons. It is therefore vital to budget for it. To drive a successful content marketing plan – one which can be sold on – is to ensure that every piece of content you create brings traffic to your site and ultimately generates sales.

Some marketers firmly believe that up to 50% of a company’s overall marketing budget should be spent on content marketing. How much you spend depends on you. You can always start off smaller and build up to 50%. If you know how to take advantage of content marketing, then you will soon make your money back. Not only will it boost your brand’s awareness, it will also help to generate leads and sales.

Before you start on your content marketing strategy, it’s important to measure where you currently stand. What are the figures telling you? You might see that previous content isn’t working to the best of its ability and therefore needs to be changed. This isn’t as dramatic as it sounds. In fact, rewriting old content is always a good idea as the bulk of the copy is taken care of already.

Don’t be put off by the analysis. It can be daunting when you first see the results, but it’s a great source of knowledge and provides you with the perfect base from which to work with. To get the most out of your analysis, it’s important to firstly work out how your content ranks in Google and whether it attracts traffic and whether once in, visitors convert to sales.

To find this data, you will need to use Google Analytics. The reports in this tool will clearly show you how your pages are performing with regards to the number of impressions and clicks, the number of conversions and the average position of every page in the search results. To view the report, you need to connect your Google search with your Google Analytics account. It can be viewed directly by the ‘search traffic’ --- ‘search Analytics’ report.

While Google Analytics is the best tool for general information, it won’t give you an exact page ranking. For this, there are other tools available that can be downloaded free of charge.

Once you have your results, you will be able to find copy that needs reworking. The most efficient way to do this is by finding content that can easily be improved. There is a lot of potential for these pages that seem to be flagging.

The quickest way to bring them back up to working effectively is to check if they are supported by internal links. The best pages to link with are those that are ranked higher in the search results. Your article also needs to be easy to find – is it featured anywhere else? Do these pages/articles have any external links? If not, you could mention in it you write a guest post for a blog or ask others to share it for you. Another way to ensure it receives a higher ranking is to give the article a well thought out title and meta descriptions. Sometimes, this is all that’s affecting your click-through rate.

The next must-do is to try and get people to stay on you pages for longer. What could you add to your content to make it more appealing to the reader? GIFs are always a good option so are videos and slide presentations.

Read our blog next week for the second and final part of this blog where we will discuss conversions, interactions, social media and SEO.