Maybe you know the basic fundamentals of content marketing and maybe you have even made some changes in your website. But if you are not seeing a return on your time investment, your content marketing strategy may only be deemed as good. So, how do you take your content marketing strategy from good to great? This can be accomplished with five simplified steps.

1. Find your target audience and work with it. 

Every business has a target audience and this elite group of consumers is who you should be thinking about through every marketing endeavor you ever attempt, including content marketing. You have to know who you are selling something to before you can actually get their attention and tell them why they want what you have available. If you have not used this thought process in your content development, make it happen by:

  • gearing imagery on your site toward your audience
  • showing your preferred audience what they want to see in your content
  • focusing SEO efforts on your chosen audience
  • providing your audience with the language they can relate to in your written content

2. Add an on-site blog to your website.

It seems like a little thing that is purely for informational purposes, but having an on-site blog can work wonders for your content marketing strategy. Just by adding a blog, you can achieve three incredibly important things:

  1. Make your website easier to find through search engines.
  2. Build a better reputation with consumers in general.
  3. Nurture a healthy social media following.

3. Bring in some professional help for your content marketing strategy. 

Building the basic concepts of concept marketing on a website is fairly easy if you have some prior experience, but when you are trying to go from good to great, it is always best to find some professional guidance. Therefore, hiring an online marketing firm can be one of the best investments you ever make and is bound to garner you a healthy ROI. There are a lot of things these professionals can do for you that you may not quite know how to do on your own, such as:

  • integrating local SEO
  • effectively managing your social media profiles
  • providing you with value-driven content that connects with site visitors
  • helping you choose the best possible imagery for your audience
  • beefing up your offsite marketing efforts
  • giving you detailed SEO analytic reports

4. Marry your content marketing strategy and your social media marketing efforts. 

Did you know that 80 percent of marketers see an elevation of website traffic thanks to social media marketing? Are you aware that just improving your content marketing strategy can completely change how customers perceive your business brand? Now imagine what happens when you marry the two marketing concepts to build an amazingly powerful entity.

If you can make your social media and content marketing efforts more of a collaboration instead of two separate marketing efforts, you have yourself a powerhouse of an effective strategy. This can be accomplished by using your social media pages to mirror what's happening with your content. For example, if you integrate an on-site blog, use your social media profiles to share the new blog posts with followers.

5. Put more time into lead generation. 

If you are like most e-commerce business owners you know lead generation is important, but also if you are like most, your lead-gen efforts tend to fall by the wayside so you can focus on other things. However, if you want your content marketing strategy to stay at the top of its game, lead generation is incredibly important. This is what tells you where to focus the most of your attention so you can continue to draw in the right audience and market in the right ways and places. You and your employees should never stop using content to bring new consumers to the virtual table, which means you must consistently spend time ramping up the content you have, whether it is on your website or in your related marketing ad campaigns.

What you really want is a content marketing strategy that works hard for your business so you don't have to spend so much time on other forms of marketing. However, if your content strategy is only blah when it should be va-va-voom, you will never see this happen. If you need help taking your content marketing strategy from good to great, get in touch with us at Brandgy.