Only 9% of B2B businesses say that they’ve been “very successful” with online content marketing.
And only 41% of B2C businesses can say they’ve had any success.
With odds like that, online content marketing may cause some to shy away. But not you.
You understand that this figure represents a great opportunity for businesses who know the secret.
When you learn how to optimize your online content marketing for a greater ROI, it’s easy to understand why so many fail and how you’ll succeed.
This secret isn’t difficult to apply. It doesn’t cost a lot of money.
But it does require you to get serious about your content marketing strategy and implementation.
Do that and you’ll grow your business faster than seems possible today.
Are you ready to learn our secret? We’ll lay it out for you in 5 easy steps. Read on to find out!
5 Steps On How To Optimize Your Online Content Marketing
1. Get Clear on Your Target Audience
Have you ever played darts with friends? You know that you can’t just toss the dart and hope to win.
You have to aim. You have to know where the dart’s going to go.
It’s the same with almost any sport. Sports take precision. So does online content marketing.
But if you ask some small businesses who are dabbling in content marketing: who’s your target audience?
You’ll often get some basic answers. I’m selling to home-owners. It’s millennials. I sell to people who need X.
Or they can rattle off some traits off the top of their head. It’s not written down anywhere.
Worse, their employees think their customers are someone else.
These kinds of disorganized ideas about who the target customer is not only impacting content marketing ROI.
They lead to misguided planning and spending throughout your organization.
No one’s on the same page. Everyone thinks they’re targeting someone different.
If you hit the bulls-eye, it’s just luck.
You can’t get a decent ROI through online content marketing on luck.
Millennials and homeowners aren’t a target audience. These are very broad groups of people who will have very little in common beyond surface traits.
You need to dig deeper to find out who your customers really are.
Collect data about your existing customers. Use this data to create detailed, written buyer personas that not only tell you who your target is.
They help you understand how to connect with them and persuade them to buy.
And you shouldn’t stop with just creating buyer personas.
You have to check and revisit them often to update your strategy with the latest strategies and platforms.
For instance, is your market always on the go? Quick videos might work better for them.
If that’s the case then-popular video-sharing platforms today like TikTok, Instagram stories and SnapChat could be of great use for you.
After making those presumptions, you can confirm them by asking your audience directly either using your social media accounts or website.
You can do quick surveys or online polls to gauge interest before you devote time to create these contents.
Where to Get Data
With Facebook’s recent bad publicity and Europe’s crackdown on data collection, it’s easy to think that “data” might be a bad word now.
It definitely isn’t. Not when it’s used to improve the customer experience.
That’s the kind of data we’re talking about here.
Most people want you to collect data if they trust your brand.
In fact, 52% say that will happily give you more data if you use it to create a more personalized experience.
Get your data through:
- Analytics Software (Google Analytics, Segmentation, Customer relationship management, etc.)
- Surveys
- Quizzes
- Your Sales Team
- Your Customer Care Team
Create Buyer Personas
Begin analyzing the data. Look for commonalities among your existing customers.
This commonality is likely a clue to why they chose you over another brand.
When you build marketing strategies around this commonality, you’ll more deliberately attract more customers like them.
You’re focused on targets who’ve proven they want what you have to offer.
It will take less time to acquire new customers and it’s easier to engage the ones you already have.
Start fleshing your target customers out into groups based upon the major traits they share. Each group will become a Buyer Persona.
These traits may be:
- Job role
- Industry
- Interests
- Challenges
- Goals
- How they make decisions
- Trusted information sources
- Where they are in the Buyer’s Journey
- Social media practices
- Age
- Location
As you begin to analyze real customer data, you’ll find that they have more in common than you think.
A small business should have 5-10 well-thought-out personas.
Give each persona a name and a face. Write their profile in 1st person.
Think of this composite as a real person telling you what they want from your brand.
When you create content, have 1 of these personas in hand. Create the content as if it’s speaking specifically to this person.
Now, you’re not broadly addressing 100 possible customer challenges or goals.
You’re connecting by making the content seem like it was made for this person.
That leads us to our next secret: custom content.
2. Create Custom Content
There are many kinds of content. But not all of them are “custom content”.
It’s probably one of the most misunderstood concepts in online content marketing.
This misunderstanding is among the top reasons businesses can’t seem to get a decent ROI from their online content marketing efforts.
Digital Media Influencer Andrew Boar defines it this way. “Creation of content {is} meant to build an affinity with your existing audience.
This content would reinforce the brand, communicate the value of the product and create new opportunities.
Custom Content is the creation of ”branded content” for a customer.
And, for the most part, custom content is created for the client to communicate with their own existing customers.”
Content Marketing and Customer Experience Guru Neil Patel adds to this definition.
“Although you might use custom content to convert new prospects, it’s really about developing content that…
…helps you maintain a strong relationship with existing customers who are more likely to buy than new prospects.”
In other words, content is created specifically with your existing customer in mind in the most customized way possible.
How Custom Content Impacts Your Online Content Marketing ROI
Custom content has 5 huge impacts on your ROI.
- Increased CLV (customer lifetime value). You’re engaging existing customers again and again. They buy more and more often.
- Existing customers more readily share your brand with others on social media and review sites.
- Marketing costs significantly decrease as revenues increase. Customers are doing a great deal of the promotion work for you.
- You attract more new customers who are similar to your existing ones.
- Visibility and traffic increase. It’s easier for people to find you. Your existing customers are paving the way.
The Stats that Prove the Power of Custom Content
These stats from Adweek prove the power of custom content.
So it’s clear who custom content targets. Another misconception is where custom content comes from.
There are many ways to get more content for your website, email campaigns, or social media. We’ll look at a few in the next section.
You may choose to use these methods selectively. But these aren’t custom content.
They, therefore, do not achieve that online content marketing ROI you’re looking for.
Are you using these methods?
What Custom Content Isn’t
You can curate content from non-competitor thought leaders in your space.
This can be a cost-effective way to consistently increase social media engagement.
Show that you value the content of others. It’s not all about you.
But without a significant proportion of custom content.
You will look more like a regular social media user who is obsessed with a topic than you’ll appear to be a brand.
You can buy pre-fab content on a website that allows writers to post articles for sale. You find a topic you like.
Read a sample. Buy the article all ready to go on your website.
This is super quick and easy. And if you’re patient articles that haven’t sold go on sale.
But what you save in time and sometimes money, you lose out on customizability.
These sites often explicitly state that you may not alter the content. You may only slap a CTA on the end and publish it.
Without the ability to customize for your specific audience and goals, you won’t be able to get a decent ROI on this content.
You can also work with content mill websites that produce content on the topics you want. But you’re often working with many content creators.
It’s the luck of the draw. And it’s hard to get content that connects with your target audience or keeps a consistent voice.
Because you work with many people, no single person is willing to really learn about your brand.
You can’t meet marketing goals like that. Custom content isn’t any of these. This is custom content.
How to Create Custom Content that Boosts ROI
Custom content is created in-house or outsourced to a content creator who knows your goals, audience, and voice inside out.
No piece of content is an island.
Each piece of content works with other pieces to achieve specific marketing objectives. Rarely does a piece of custom content stand alone?
Here’s how to create it.
Get Clear on Your Objectives
Begin by setting a clear objective for your content. What do you need this content to achieve? It may be to:
Build Content Around Your Target Customer
Each piece of custom content is built around one of your buyer personas as we already discussed. Address their needs specifically.
Segment Content for Maximum Effectiveness
Segmentation goes far beyond dividing content up by buyer persona. But you can get started segmenting content based on them.
58% of people say email personalization is important.
52% say they would leave a brand that doesn’t try to personalize content.
People want to feel like you get them.
To segment, choose a trait to focus on. Build pieces of content around it.
If you’re using email marketing, send the more personalized content straight to that person’s inbox.
Another common online content marketing misconception preventing small businesses from getting the ROI they should is this idea.
If you build it, they will come.
Depending on which articles you read, it can sound that way.
For a long time, thought leaders promoted the idea of spending all their time producing content and waiting for people to find it.
It’s true that the strength of content is that it becomes a content magnet that draws people into your website.
But it doesn’t matter how amazing your content is. If no one sees it, it never has an opportunity to become magnetic.
Even Hubspot, the creators of the concept of a “content magnet”, say it’s just not true:
“Today more than ever, paid media is an important piece of our customers’ marketing mix — and for a good reason.
In the last few years, ad technology has evolved, making it easier for you to target the right users with the right message.”
Ads today don’t have to be the irrelevant, invasive, interrupting, and annoying tactics that people hate.
With today’s technology, you can create ads that people want to click.
You can limit ads so that only the people most likely to be interested even see them.
In fact, the more you align ads with your target audience, the higher your content marketing ROI will become.
In many ways, content is more like a siphon than a magnet. You have to get the flow going before it takes on a life of its own.
Social media advertising is one of the best ways to prime the pump and get content attracting its own traffic.
The more traffic a piece of content receives, the stronger its magnetic field becomes.
You may have good visibility on search results and lots of followers.
But social media advertising still allows you to more quickly see the return on your investment. Build the magnetism of your content over time.
How to Improve Your ROI With Social Media Advertising
Follow these steps to get the best return on your social media advertising budget:
Develop a Budget
Know how much you’re going to spend and itemize your expenses.
A written budget gives you an opportunity to consider what your real expenses will be. It’s more than just the cost of an ad.
When you have a clear budget you don’t overspend where it doesn’t make sense to do so. You spend in a way that makes you money.
A social media advertising budget will include the following:
-
Research & Planning — You can think of this in hours or in wages. Either way, time spent here is money.
-
Content Creation — Whether you outsource or create in-house, you need high-quality ads and the corresponding content you’re promoting.
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Campaign Management — Someone needs to post the ads and manage them to maximize returns.
Setting it and forgetting it isn’t the way to optimize your online content marketing ROI.
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Ad Spend — That one’s pretty easy. Just set a daily limit. Calculate your conversion rate.
Raise or lower the limit based on the number of new leads you can handle.
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Analytics — You may just use the free social media tools. But you still need to budget for someone to analyze and optimize based on that data.
Decide Who to Target
Always start with the people most likely to become customers. Don’t waste time on groups that are a long shot. You’ll lose money.
Who’s most likely to buy from you?
It’s your existing customers. Remember, they’re up to 70% more likely to buy than a new person.
And they’ll spend more when they do. On top of this, they’re more likely to share your content with others.
That gives you a potential 2 for the price of 1 on that cost for a click.
Just like custom content, when you target existing customers you also bring in the people who are like them.
These people are more likely to convert when they click because they’re like people who’ve already bought something.
Collecting data on who your customers are will help you more effectively target them.
If you don’t have that data, put systems in place to collect it to improve your campaigns as you go.
As you select options for your ads, refer back to your buyer personas.
Create & Set up Your Ad
You probably won’t create one ad. Instead, create one or more that speaks directly to each target customer persona.
Set up ads based on things like:
- Location
- Interests
- Job roles
- Age
- Gender
- Behaviors
- Whether they follow you or not
You can also upload a customer file on Facebook to target just your customers. Or you can use pixels to retarget people who have visited your website.
These may not be customers yet. But they’re closer to becoming one than a stranger.
Retargeting people who visited your website can increase CTR as much as 400%. They’re 70% more likely to convert than a stranger.
You may just be getting started with social media advertising. Are you apprehensive about losing money as you learn?
If so, create a couple similar ads.
Find out which performs best on a low-cost campaign. Then expand your reach and increase the ad spend.
Analyze & Optimize
Closely monitor your conversion rate for different ads. Often small tweaks can make a big difference in CTR and Conversions.
Track your campaign. Look for improvement opportunities. And optimize it.
4. Create More Video Content
63% of businesses now use video content marketing. 83% believe that video returns the highest online content marketing ROI.
Content Marketing Influencer Treepodia wondered: is video effective regardless of industry?
They found that on average video increased conversions by 80%.
The conversion rates through video were higher in some industries. But each saw a very satisfactory return.
Another study found that 74% of people who watch an explainer video will buy the product.
Can you get a conversion rate like that on any other content format?
But you may be thinking. Sure, it has a higher conversion rate. But is what I spend on it worth it?
Our answer: It wouldn’t be one of our secrets to a higher ROI through online content marketing if it wasn’t. But it does need to be done right.
How to Create Video Content that Increases ROI
Studies show that the single most important element of a video is whether or not it clearly explains/shows what it’s intended to.
This element outranked both design and quality. In other words, when it comes to videos, it’s more like giving a presentation.
It’s the thought that counts.
This isn’t free-reign to publish pitiful content.
But if you’re shying away from video because you can’t afford a million-dollar production, you’re missing out.
Put your time and money into determining how to make the video easy to understand, transparent and meaningful to your target audience.
Focus on creating a compelling script to get the lighting right.
Do invest in some decent equipment and editing software. But it doesn’t have to be top of the line.
You can create more video content on a budget by:
- Repurposing a popular blog and setting it to a slideshow
- Creating gifs
- Talking into the camera
- Setting up a live feed
- Hiring your more animated employees to do voice-overs.
Yes, you can do these on a budget. But this doesn’t mean you should not be concerned about having a professional finished product.
Quality and design are important. They’re just not the most important.
Do the best you can with what you have. You may be surprised.
A professional video content marketing company will be able to help you get the most out of your video marketing budget.
They have the tools in place to achieve all of the above for less.
5. Know What to Measure
The final key to optimizing your online content marketing is knowing what you measure. Measure it and learn from it to maximize results.
A mistake many make is trying to measure online content marketing using KPIs (key performance indicators).
KPIs are your most important metrics. No doubt about that. They’re tied directly to overarching goals. But they don’t offer the whole picture.
Companies that only focus on KPIs aren’t seeing the entire puzzle completed.
It’s hard to diagnose problems that may exist in your supply line to fix them.
Here are the main metrics you need to measure to optimize your content marketing ROI across platforms.
- New vs Returning Visitors — You want to see returning visitors going up
- Time spent viewing content — The longer they dwell, the more likely they are to convert
- Bounce rate — You want a low one. A bounce is when a visitor doesn’t click on anything on a page.
- Shares/Comments
- Net Increase followers (social media)
- Rank in searches on targeted keywords
- CTR (Click-through rate) — for a call to action (CTA)
- Lead-generation rate
- Conversion rate
- Positive review rate
If any of these metrics are underperforming, you have a clear guide for improvements. Let’s look at some troubleshooting examples.
High Bounce Rate
You may be attracting the wrong people. It may not be clear what you want people to click on.
The email or website may be providing a poor customer experience.
Few Returning Visitors
Was your content not informative? Entertaining? Does your content not give people a reason to come back?
Are you mismanaging the customer relationship?
Low Click-Through Rate
Your offer may not be compelling enough. The button may be too far down the page.
Descriptive buttons have a much higher click-through rate. Go for CTA’s like:
- Get the book
- Stay Informed
- Find Your Match
- Triple Your Sales
Optimize Your Online Content Marketing for a Higher ROI
If you’re not optimized you’re either paying too much or getting too little in return.
But with these 5 secrets, you can get more out of your online content marketing efforts.
Target the audience most likely to buy. Build custom content around them.
Get returns more quickly with social media advertising. Leverage the power of video. And measure everything to improve over time.
Are you struggling to get results with online content marketing?
We can help you grow your business through content strategies that work. Contact us today.