Best Content Marketing Hacks That’ll Skyrocket Your Sales

Let's understand the dynamics of content marketing. You're producing loads of different content and distributing them but you've failed to generate sales or add any relevant leads in your marketing funnel.

Understanding the WHY here is definitely important. If you're someone who:

• doesn't have a clearly defined content strategy
• has your marketing strategy focused on awareness and engagement and not on driving sales
• is struggling to make content marketing an indispensable part of digital marketing

If you are a content marketer, here are 6 reasons why you need these content marketing strategies to turn your campaigns into long-term success!

Really Understand the Sales Funnel

What is it that savvy B2B marketers who are actively involved in content marketing do differently that makes them succeed? Firstly, they produce content that's customer-centric. They research their target audience well, tap into their psyche, and understand their expectations from the brand.

The first thing that you should look into is to not stuff your content marketing strategy into the sales funnel in hopes that it will serve both the goals of meeting your potential customer's needs and the sales force's needs. Understand that these two goals are totally different. the need for your brand awareness always lies way before then identifying the buyer persona for your product/service.

Produce content based on which stage of the marketing funnel you're focusing on. If it's at the bottom of the funnel, then the content type needs to be in line with the buyer as well as the product. 

• Research your customer - knowing about the brand, product, or industry they prefer will only help you to create a content marketing strategy that's going to bring in leads.
• Educate your customer about how your product can make an impact on their lives. Create a content marketing campaign that neatly explains what you do and why should they invest in you.
• Let marketing teams collaborate and come up with an integrated campaign that allows for a smooth and seamless customer journey. Give out relevant content marketing examples to establish your point. This will help your leads to gather all the required information they need to turn into your customer.

Know the Concept of Customer Persona

Once you've figured out what kind of digital content works for your audience, it's time to develop a customer persona that actually fuels your conversion rates. Go in deep about the people that you're selling to and continue to adjust your content strategy based on your findings. Work on content ideas that not only produce valuable content but prove to be essential for your entire content marketing plan. Below is a content audit example from Quicksprout that paints a clear picture.

It is important to look at all the factors associated with whom you're selling to as it is much more specific. And as a result of that, you'll be building several of these customer personas that are based on these different factors.

Bottom line - customer personas will help you create a relevant content strategy.

Revamp Your Video Content Strategy

No, we didn't just whip out the old trick in the book. There are lots of people out there who usually don't do the best job of delivering the right message through their visual content.

Your video can be informative and entertaining and still be about your business. One fine example would be actor Mathew McConaughey's short film on Wild Turkey made about a year ago. It gives us an idea as to how you can integrate your brand or product with your content marketing effort in the form of a video.

The video is informational and effective in telling us the thought leadership concept surrounding the product as well as the creators behind it. In short, you're not being sold but being told an interesting story that revolves around their brand and still has interesting, good content material attached to it. It certainly educates the viewers but most importantly, audiences can relate to the emotional aspect of it. So much so that they might even go ahead and buy the product. Hence the key takeaway for producing engaging content would be to:

• Focus on how the products work and what needs it meets.
• Introduce your products with quality content where they make sense or are more practical.

Develop a Customer Journey Map

This is a good one - having a customer journey map in place will take you even further than the conversion funnel when you're in the buying process. From focusing on events that take place after the purchase to prioritizing customer retention, this strategy is an important driver of sales while it also help in creating content that is sales worthy.

Primarily because you won't always stay focused on acquiring new customers. Sure, getting new customers is a wonderful thing, except that it costs and rarely gives you the desired results. In short:

• Analyze customer behavior after the initial purchase through native advertising
• Put yourself in your customers' shoes and then choose an appropriate distribution channel

Keep Track on Conversions and Leads

Here's a question, do you know where your leads are coming from?

If the answer is "no" then we've got a huge problem. Not knowing where your leads come from is one of the major reasons why your content isn't making the impact that it needs to make.

Knowing this was easy with traditional marketing since the options were limited then. There was very few content asset to promote, the search engine was not as powerful, but now the times have changed.  

Almost every customer journey, as we know it, is made on the Internet. And that's awesome because you can track where they came from and how they discovered you. This can give you a better understanding of why they made a purchase and adjust your content strategy accordingly.

• You can track your leads using UTM parameters - it helps in determining where the leads came from - Twitter, Facebook, Google Ads, email marketing campaign, a social influencer, or any other social media platform.
• You'll also have tags for each post within a specific platform for instance if the leads came from Facebook, which specific post?
• Go to Google Analytics to set up your UTM parameters. It's easy, just navigate to the "Demos & Tools" menu and "Campaign URL Builder".
• Also, measure your ROI accurately. You can check the direct sales results to determine how successful your campaign was, whether on social media, display, or any other medium.

Leverage Webinars

Webinars are impactful and extremely educational for a content marketing agency. They can fuel your conversion rate without making you seem super "salesy", that's the great thing about webinars. Adobe reported a 19% conversion rate off of webinars while BuzzSumo had a conversion rate of about 20%.

• Webinars can position you as an expert on the field
• When done right, they are great for audience engagement
• You can generate new leads and build relationships
• You get to invite guests and deliver tremendous value

In conclusion, your content marketing strategy should be focused on not just reaching your target audience but converting them into customers. Make sure to build your strategy according to what your target audience wants rather than what the sales funnel requires. And lastly, keep up with the latest trends and news to stay relevant in the market so to be at the top of your content creation game.