Content Marketing and Return on Investment

It can be difficult to calculate how much return on investment (ROI) your business is getting from your content marketing strategy. If done well, content marketing has a higher-than-average marketing ROI. This Forbes article contains an interview with Julie Fleischer, former Director of Content Strategy and Integration at Kraft Foods. Fleischer claims that Kraft’s content marketing gives the company a ROI that is, “among the highest of all of our marketing efforts.” So where do you start to improve your business’s content marketing strategy?

The first step is to determine your current content marketing ROI with these 3 components:

Cost

First you need to determine how much money is being spent on your current content marketing strategy. Depending on the size of your company and the amount of content it produces, you will either need a full audit or a smaller sample of the total content. Use average costs to get a rough estimate of content spending.

Utilization

You also need to figure out how much of the content that’s made is actually being used. Any created content that goes unused is a complete waste. Calculated a rough percentage of content utilization.

Performance

For the content that is created and used, you also need to determine how well it is performing. There are many factors to check, such as page views, likes, social shares, etc. But you also have to link these results back to the business’s content history. See which types of content marketing worked best for your company and review how the strategy developed over time as groundwork for moving forward. It’s important to continue checking performance regularly as you change your strategy.

Make sure your business holds marketing accountable for their ROI. Often a company will send out employees to produce content without fully keeping track of the investment. Request verified results that are measured and reported. Don’t let your content marketing go unsupervised.

How to Improve Your Content Marketing

Now that you know more about how your content marketing has worked up until now, it’s time to start improving it.

Reach Out to Early-Stage Buyers

Much of the marketing we see around us is overly promotional. For buyers who are not yet familiar with your brand, pushy advertisements tend to get tuned out. You need to find a way to make your brand noticeable, likable, and trusted enough that people will want to buy your product or use your services. Here are some things to take into account when setting up your online marketing:

Branded Conversations

Search the online conversations about your product category. What percentage of them mentions a specific brand? What percentage mentions your brand? If that percentage is much different than your market share in your category, it means your competitors are taking away potential prospects right from the beginning.

Unbranded Search Traffic

How many people are searching for your product category online? What percentage of these prospects end up at your website rather than a competitor’s? You can’t only promote your brand within your own website. You must branch out to other sources in order to draw people in.

Website Traffic

Be aware of the quality and quantity of traffic that flows through the websites you use for advertising and the cost of using them. High-traffic sites are great for spreading your brand quickly, but may come with a hefty price. Smaller sites with less traffic can be much cheaper for advertisement fees. Keep track of these costs as you determine where to show your ads.

Organic vs. Paid Traffic

Many companies pay for fake traffic in order to make their sites look more trustworthy and popular. Organic content marketing allows you to reach out to potential and existing customers, start conversations, spread the word about your brand, and gain additional reach without paying for fake viewers. In the long run, it’s always better to earn your customer’s trust and attention rather than buying it.

Unused Content

Again, any content that is created for your company that goes unused is a complete waste of resources. Keep a close eye on the percentage of content that goes unused and reduce that number as much as possible.

Banner Advertisements

You see banner advertisements everywhere you go online, but how effective are they really? Banner ads are actually shown to underperform when compared to almost any other kind of content marketing. Make sure that they are part of a broader marketing strategy. Think carefully about where you place them in order to get the most out of the investment.

Engaging Your Customers

There are several ways that you can monitor how well you are engaging your customers online. Resources such as Google Analytics allow you to easily keep track of various aspects of website viewership.

Bounce Rate

How many people who visit your site stay there for an extended period of time and click on several different pages within the site? The percentage of viewers who leave your site after viewing only one page is known as the bounce rate. As you alter your content marketing strategy, pay close attention to how each change affects the bounce rate, so you can focus on the changes that are beneficial.

Repeat Visits

Pay attention to repeat visits and extended time spent with your brand. By looking at repeat visits, you can measure the value of brand awareness and track how your content marketing affects loyal customers.

Subscribers

Calculate the value per subscriber. Determine the cost and payoff of bringing customers into the brand fold, and learn how to market towards these customers.

In summary, keep track of your content marketing strategy. Pay attention to where the money is going. Pay close attention to the cost of your content, and make sure that the content actually being used. Check on the performance of each type of content and constantly try to improve. Use a resource such as Google Analytics to help see what’s going on with your website traffic as you make changes.

Try to draw in organic traffic by starting conversations, spreading your brand name, and instilling loyalty in your customers. When trying to develop your business’s content marketing strategy, keep these factors in mind, and make improvements wherever possible for a greater ROI.

If you want more suggestions for developing your website, check out VMA’s other blogs. This one goes over how to keep your content fresh and up-to-date, or “evergreen.”

What is Good Copywriting?

We’ve all seen spammy, boring advertisements that make us just want to hit “next” and get on with what we're doing. But there are also advertisements out there that will draw you in and make you interested in learning more about the product. What’s the difference? Often, it comes down to the Copy!

What is Copy?

Copywriting is when someone comes up with text content for the purposes of advertisement and marketing. Copy is the content that the copywriter creates. Glance at a billboard next time you go down a highway, or flip through a magazine at your next doctor’s appointment. All of those words were written by a copywriter. Open up any website page and the text you see is also copy.

Good Copywriting

So what distinguishes good copywriting from bad? The majority of advertisements fly past us, day after day, without making us stop to think about them. Good copywriting stops people from passing by, draws them in, and makes them care about the product or service being sold.

As a copywriter, you don’t have to come up with constant brilliant advertising, like the “Budweiser Frogs” or Apple’s “1984.” You just need to learn how to engage with your targeted audience. Here are three major tenets of good copywriting:

1. Get your audience to want to engage with you. Don’t spam your viewers.
2. Offer something valuable to your audience. Don’t just ask for their money.
3. Make your customers want to buy from you because they like your content.

Unfortunately there’s no one single trick to achieving these objectives. Everything depends on your business, your product, your target audience, and the goals you are trying to attain.

Pay close attention to number 2 on the list. It’s easier to draw people in if you have something to offer to them. This doesn’t just mean using coupons, though that’s a place to start. If you want more ideas about how to use pricing strategies to draw in more customers, check out VMA’s blog on the subject here. It goes over more details on ways to draw in new customers and bring back old ones with offers from your company.

Modern Age Copywriting

One result of the Internet is that there are new kinds of copywriting specifically geared towards that medium. What works in a magazine, newspaper, or billboard won’t necessarily work for a website. How you set up the back end of your website is crucial to ensure that your pages are seen in the first place.

SEO Copywriting

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” You use SEO to make it so that when people search for topics related to your business on a search engine such as Google, your pages are included in the top results. There are 3 major parts to setting up SEO copywriting:

1. Finding the right keywords. The ones that other people are using the most to search for your product.
2. Writing articles on subjects that people want to learn more about to draw them in.
3. Use the important keywords and the content you create around them to try to rank in the top results for those keywords.

The simplest way to see what people are searching for when it comes to your product is to see what Google automatically fills in when you perform a search yourself. Although this can give you a basic idea of keyword searches, it’s much better to use another resource. Programs such as Google Analytics allow you to look in-depth at your audience and what they are searching for. This is an incredibly useful tool to have on your belt for keeping track of how your website is performing. It can also help with determining what to do to make it better.

When Internet search engines first began, getting your site to the top of the search was a simpler process. You could get away with spamming the audience and throwing a ton of junk articles on the page. These days, search engines are getting incredibly smart. They do their best to weed out spammy, junk sites for ones that people want to see.

When you write an article now, it’s important to make it as interesting as possible to draw in more people and keep them on your site for longer. How many people can find your site through searches, how many different people click on your site, how long viewers stay on your pages, and many other factors determine how well your website is performing. Again, tools such as Google Analytics can help you keep track of this kind of information. You can then use that to see which articles are working and which are not, to help improve your future copy.

Also keep in mind that search engine optimization is changing all the time. Google and other companies are constantly working to improve their algorithms. Sometimes they make small tweaks and other times they completely overhaul the system. Staying up-to-date is crucial.

In the end, making good copywriting comes down to the same things that almost any skill requires. Practice and a willingness to constantly learn new techniques will get you far. Being able to keep up with the newest trends is what the Internet is all about. If you get out there and engage with your customers, you will quickly learn what they are interested in and what kind of information will appeal to them. Use their questions as article topics, and start a discussion. One of the best (and sometimes worst!) aspects of modern marketing is the ability to get instant feedback and conversations with your viewers.

If you want more information about SEO, marketing, and other topics, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs!

Online Business Pricing Strategies

For most businesses that sell a product, a significant portion of sales come from repeat customers. After you put in the effort to get customers to visit your website and make an online purchase, it’s time to start working towards bringing them back. One major way you can accomplish this is by using smart online business pricing strategies for your products.

The Benefits of Repeat Customers

In 2015, RJMetrics posted a study on eCommerce buying behavior. They found that 32% of customers who make an online purchase are likely to come back and make another purchase within a year. Although this doesn’t seem like much, repeat customers tend to also come back again. If someone makes a second purchase, they jump to a 50% chance of making a third purchase. This continues incrementally, leading to a statistic that shows that return customers can be very loyal. If you make an effort to develop customer loyalty, you can increase your sales greatly and make everyone happy!

Use Smart Online Business Pricing Strategies

Smart online business pricing strategies can be a powerful tool in helping you bring back repeat customers. These methods reward customers for choosing your store again and again. There’s more to it than simply passing out coupons. Here are some simple pricing strategies to try for your online business:

Delayed Rewards

People love rewards and will go out of their way to obtain them. Although you may draw in many first customers by simply distributing coupons and offering a reduced price on a first purchase, this method doesn’t necessarily bring people back for a second buy. In fact, the customer might feel upset when they realize that they now have to pay more for the same thing they purchased before.

Instead, give a reward for a purchase by offering a discount on the next purchase. Rather than handing out $5 coupons for a first purchase, offer a $10 discount on a second purchase. This has two major benefits. First, it brings more people back for a second purchase, which can snowball into customer loyalty. Second, the offer doesn’t have to be limited to first-time customers only. This makes your business look really good to repeat customers, and may even bring back buyers who weren’t originally planning to make another purchase.

Instant gratification is great, but delaying the reward can be even better for your business by drawing in repeat customers.

Reward Certain Actions

You can make customers feel more involved and recognized by giving out rewards for doing certain things that benefit your business. You can reward many types of actions, such as:

• Coming back to make a set number of different purchases.
• Purchasing the same product repeatedly.
• Purchasing several different items at once.
• Spending specific amounts of money.
• Joining a monthly subscription.

A good example of this method is Target’s Cartwheel app. When you are checking out at Target, you can use the app on your phone to scan the items you’re buying to earn extra savings. It also includes a badge system, letting the customer feel like they are progressing towards extra rewards on top of saving money.

This kind of reward system makes the customer feel good while shopping at your store. The rewards don’t even have to always give discounted prices. Many people will return to a store that makes them feel good and have fun while shopping.

Membership Pricing

Other common and beneficial pricing strategies include memberships. Having a key ring full of membership cards is a hassle, but these days you can easily handle memberships online. Grocery stores often use memberships to bring in repeat customers, and the system works well. If a person can buy a product in one place cheaper than another with a simple membership, they are much more likely to return there.

Keep your members feeling special by setting up great exclusive rewards. If you regularly change which items are discounted to members, they will keep coming back to see if the items they want are currently on sale. This will also entice new customers into membership if they see something they want at a cheaper price. You can also set up different membership tiers that offer greater discounts at higher levels. Another great option that combines the previous two methods is to have members unlock higher tiers of savings by making repeat purchases.

Not all of these methods will work for every business. Consider which pricing strategies would work best for your online business before setting up a lot of discounts. If in doubt, you can try several methods over a period of time and see which work best for you. If you want to learn more about improving your online business, check out VMA’s other blogs such as this one that goes over different ways to use content marketing to boost online sales.