There’s a good reason that everyone is talking about content marketing—it works! But only if you do it correctly. If you are about to kick off a lead generation program using content marketing, or have been doing content marketing for a while without seeing the results that you want, there is one important question you need to ask.
Is content marketing part of your money-generating machine?
In business, there are only 3 ways to increase profits and revenue. These are:
- Increase the number of customers
- Increase the average transaction value per customer
- Increase the frequency of customers’ purchases
What does this have to do with your content marketing? EVERYTHING.
For decades, the fundamental goals of business were these: getting more customers, selling them more stuff and getting them to buy more often. This may have meant hiring salespeople, buying advertising space and making deals with other businesses. But now that business is online, it seems we have forgotten these basics!
The point is this: content marketing MUST be part of a larger strategy to turn leads into customers and customers into repeat customers. If your content marketing doesn't accomplish this, you may be wasting your time.
Content marketing is much more than just publishing a blog post every now and then with a few links to your service pages. Content marketing is a strategy. Content marketing is like a game of chess—you have to plan every move. Random moves and careless mistakes can cost you.
Conversions are King
If you have made the decision to combine content marketing with a larger and well thought out strategy for generating revenue, then let’s back it up with action. This action comes from putting your focus on the most important aspect of business: conversions.
If you were about to spend $5,000 on a direct mail campaign, you would know exactly how many sales are needed to get this money back. You would also know how many upsells you need, refunds to account for and every other detail of the finances and conversion process.
Here’s an interesting thought from Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media:
“In the marketing context, especially digital, we’re really measuring just two numbers. The first number is the total number of visitors to our website, and the second number is the percentage of visitors who act. It’s traffic and the conversion rate.”
Crestodina is saying two things:
1. You must know how many visitors you are getting.
2. You must know how many of those visitors you are able to convert.
Each business has a different system and lead funnel. Some businesses collect email addresses and then send a mixture of interesting content to build relationships followed by making offers to those who read and enjoy the content. Other businesses stop at collecting phone numbers and then will call those leads to try and sell. No matter what your lead generation funnel looks like, you must know how content marketing fits into your overall marketing strategy. Don’t do content marketing because everybody else is doing it. Do it because you know that each piece of content creates new customers and you have the data to back it up.
Interested in a discussion about how to use content marketing correctly and increase your profits? Talk to us at MintCopy. Call 888-646-8003 or send us an email.