In this series of posts on good content marketing, we’ve gone over ways to put your brand on the map and how to involve your customers, but what about conversion? The third stage in the content marketing structure is where you make sales, right?
Actually, the secret to the third stage is that there is no third stage. Once you’ve built up awareness and started putting together irresistible lead magnets that allow your customers to experience the product and decide for themselves, sales are simply a consequence of how much effort you’ve put in.
What’s really important after you start making sales is how you keep the sales coming. Content marketing isn’t just about building an audience, it’s about ensuring that your audience will stick with you. How do you manage that?
Be Flexible
It’s important to recognize the nature of technology nowadays. Desktop computers are practically technological relics and laptops are being swallowed up in the deluge of tablets and smartphones. Stats showing the rise in internet usage on smartphones and tablets means that much of the advertising done by companies needs to fit the layout of a hand held device. Google’s mobile-centric algorithm also proves this.
To keep up with these changes, provide content suitable for all the popular devices. Ensure that your customers can make purchases when they aren’t at home, equip your website and landing page with a mobile-friendly interface, develop apps relevant to your business—in short, don’t confine your content to one format.
Keep up with the content
Where technology is concerned, nothing is stagnant. Updates are always being released, new features are tested, added, reviewed and then removed or improved upon, all in a matter of months. The same goes for advertising and content marketing. If you reel in customers with attractive and entertaining content, including exciting social media campaigns and informative blogs, don’t stop once you start making sales. Customers can disappear as quickly as they came.
The way the videogame industry keeps its demographic engaged and paying money is through Downloadable Content or DLC. An industry overcrowded with competition, videogame franchises release quality content at regular intervals to keep people returning to the same game for a different experience. Apply the same approach to content marketing: is your mailing list receiving interesting content and irresistible deals? Are your Twitter followers increasing or dropping like flies because you never tweet anything?
Encourage Feedback
Almost every article has a comment section. Messageboards are still frequented, software updates usually spark conversation and social media seamlessly connects companies to their customers. People using the internet expect to be able to voice their opinions on what’s going on with the things they read and the products they purchase.
This post over at Kissmetrics lays out some of the different ways you can encourage feedback from your customers online, including surveys, feedback boxes and responses to usability tests. If you provide your customers with quality content, they will tell you when something is wrong and may even provide suggestions for how to fix it, or what might work better. Take note of the customers who provide consistent feedback, save their responses and use them to better your company, and ultimately improve your customers’ experience.
