Let’s be honest.
You’re not spending hours on the laptop because you like your work. Clients are expecting sales, leads, and tangible results. And whatever you’re doing MUST pay off in future; otherwise, you’re doomed.
What if it doesn’t go as planned? What if it never gives you results as expected?
It may be because you had a wrong perception of the entire content marketing process. The time you invested in creating content is wasted.
Well, that’s a tragedy, but ironically, it’s been happening to a large number of internet marketers, content creators, and entrepreneurs.
On the contrary, there are winners too, if:
- If you execute the right strategy
- At the right time
- In the right market
And the outcomes are amazing
But these occasions are quite rare and there are plenty of reasons for that. Most fundamental reasons of failure is, content marketers misunderstand the entire thing and this is why you’re here to learn.
It Isn’t About Traffic
If you’re one of those successful content creators whose post generated over 100 million page views, you’d agree that the larger share of online traffic to those pages was worthless. People come for a minute or two and leave.
That makes metrics, like “unique visitors” and “page views” completely meaningless.
If you’re new to the content marketing industry, you’d be over the moon seeing a high amount of traffic on your site. Only after spending years, you’d come to realize that traffic wasn’t everything you should care about.
If you examine closely, you’ll be amazed to know that only a few out of thousands of articles you wrote, had actually influenced your customers to make purchases. That’s what exactly happened to Jon Morrow.
Core Element That Matters
Software world has a concept of The One Metric and every business has it. It’s a single number is a key to the entire business cycle. It depends upon the business type, and can be anything, like –
- Time on site,
- Monthly revenue,
- Subscriptions,
- Friends referred, etc.
The purpose of the discussion is, you need to sort out that core element that matters the most. Once you figured it out, focus on it.
What’s that “One Number that Matters” for content marketers? No! it’s not Revenue, Buddy!
Well, why not? If your content does not bring any revenue, it’s worthless.
Hang On!
Here’s a reason why revenue is not the core element in content marketing
Your newly posted article doesn’t start getting revenue from the first day. And you’re also not sure how much it can yield and how long it’s going to survive. In fact, when you decide to measure it after months, it has lost its effectiveness.
So, what else can you track and improve on, in order to increase your revenue?
The real answer might surprise you. And by the time you reach the end of the following, you’d realize that it’s not a metric either.
Money-Making Recipe for Content Marketers
Imagine, Google ranked you No.1 for the keyword, “Minnesota plumbing company” and you’re getting lots of prospects each day. Can you say, at this stage, you’re going to make tons of money? You’d say, “Yes, I can if…” and this is where you explain all the ingredients of success. For example:
- Your website shouldn’t look like it was run by a moron.
- Gathering contact information of the prospects is necessary.
- Follow-up calls should be made so that prospects remember your business.
- Prospects should be informed, why you’re better than your competitors
- Authority and persuasiveness should be there so that customers trust in you.
You can lose the prospects if any of these points is missing. Same is true for the content.
With properly placed content, you can:
- Build trust with your visitors
- Entice them with incentives so that they can share their contact information. For example, you may ask them to enter their contact details, to find premium content.
- Keep reminding them that you’re there to help, while they’re making up their minds
- Provide them with references and examples of success stories of former clients
- Build authority and trust even before you approach them because they already know so much about you.
In short, you have to take care of each and every stage of the sales process.
You See! There is no secret ingredient.
Moving on to the next level, which is…
How Can You Measure Effectiveness of Your Content?
Here are some simple questions that will help you out:
- Are you getting the traffic? The basic step is to get the traffic to your website. You can write a blog post people find worthwhile and share it on Facebook. The entire content, not just the title, should be interactive and helpful for the audience.
- Do your visitors find you trustworthy and authoritative? With the help of “Free E-Book” you can get them to provide their email addresses and other contact information.
Suppose, many of them signed up and gave you their email addresses. What’s next?
- How good are the Subject Line and the body of your Introduction Email? This is where your research and creativity counts.
- Catchy subject lines boost email open rate
- Interactive email body encourages the visitor to click on the given link. As a result, your email click-through increases.
Similarly, you can ask a dozen of questions until “purchase” stage.
At every step, you’re measuring your content’s ability to get your visitors to the next step. In doing so, you’re validating your content on the given metric.
The takeaway is, metrics merely indicate whether your visitors move through the sales funnel. Only you can determine where the blockage is and how to solve it.
So, publishing tons of content and getting thousands of visitors every day can only pay off when your readers happily proceed further and purchase from you. Even if you’re publishing less, but most of your prospects convert, you’re actually using your content to good effect.
Conclusion
Content creates influence and Marketing converts influence into action. And you need both of them to guide your prospect to make a purchase decision. Only a few businesses exercise both, and they have millions of visitors and subscribers worldwide. Imagine how much revenue they’re making.
So, stop getting intimidated by metrics and focus more on making your content more influential. Remember, you cannot demand anyone to take action, unless you have some kind of influence on them.
- To create influence, you need to consistently publish content that solves customers’ problems.
- You need to create a stream of content that shows you’ve got authority.
