Now you have a better indication of where your marketing activities
and assets stand in the grand scheme, now you need to look at
driving more traffic and push your content out there.
You should have an idea of what content performs or not on your site;
what kind of social updates generate good engagement rates; what you
need to do to compete with your competitors; and, any improvements that
you need to make to your assets, that will guide your content strategy.
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?
Content Marketing is the practice of creating and sharing high quality,
engaging and relevant content in order to attract, engage and convert
visitors.
It is the conversation between your brand and your customers through
stories. It’s about building long-lasting relationships to current and
potential customers, by providing valuable content with the aim to build
trust, awareness and engagement through various channels in the digital
marketing mix.
PAID, EARNED AND OWNED MODEL
In the previous section we introduced the Paid, Earned and Owned model,
which can be very useful in defining your content marketing strategy. For example, a content strategy that overly depends on Adwords PPC
and Display Ads to drive traffic would most likely see poorer performance
onsite in terms of bounce rate or time spent on site. Organic traffic can
balance this, i.e. site visitors who naturally made their way to your site
through a relevant search query or interest. But to generate this organic
traffic channel, SEO tactics are required.
Similarly, an over reliance on free-to-post social channels like Facebook
and Twitter might get good interactions with a portion of your target
audience, but this interaction might be constantly with the same
segment, which does not push your communications out to wider
audiences, as such the % of new visitors on the site could be very low, an
problem if you have a one-time only product for example
REACH, ACT, CONVERT AND ENGAGE WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS
This guide to digital strategy aims to get you thinking about how to
improve your marketing strategy by considering further activity, channels
and platforms to push your strategy into a more advanced stage.
The number of options available to you might seem a bit overwhelming,
and often there is an element of clarity or simplification required. The
RACE Planning Framework by Smart Insights is a useful, simplified outline
that helps you to focus on some of the applicable marketing activities
at various stages of the traditional marketing funnel that will make your
digital marketing strategy a success and achieve your goals:
REACH Acquisition strategy to build awareness
● Relevant tactics/approaches in your marketing strategy:
SEO
PPC
Affiliates and partnerships
Online/display ads
PR
Social media marketing
ACT & CONVERT Persuade visitors to interact and meet one of your conversion
goals by connecting them with useful, engaging and relevant content
● Relevant tactics/approaches in your marketing strategy:
Content strategy
Conversion rate optimisation
Lead generation
Homepage/landing page optimisation
A/B testing
ENGAGE Retention and growth strategy to build customer relationships into
repeat visits and sales and brand loyalty
● Relevant tactics/approaches in your marketing strategy:
Content strategy
Email strategy – newsletters, promotional emails
Mobile strategy