For years, marketing and SEO specialists have been banging the drum of “Content is King”. Although the dominant search engines giants like Google don’t share their algorithms with the general public it is the general consensus that they love new content when it comes to ranking websites. Blogs and new landing pages continue to be required, therefore, to stay ahead of your competition when it comes to getting your name at the top of the search listings. But that’s not the whole picture.
Rick Carlson, Founder at SharpSpring explains why the marketing landscape is more complex than immediately meets the eye. “Contrary to popular belief, content is not king: it’s more of a foot soldier. You need a strategy to use content effectively or it will just sit there, accomplishing very little.” Many companies choose, either deliberately or by default, to let their content sit on their website and hope that visitors will simply stumble upon it for themselves.
Generating larger numbers of visitors to your website is certainly important however, for business growth, what marketers really want to achieve is an increased number of better qualified, on-profile leads. The quality of your website visits, as well as quantity needs to be considered. Adding behavioural tracking and building dynamic lists means that companies now have an alternative – that of sending leads the content they request for themselves by using a marketing automation system.
This is where content that is highly relevant to different segments of your market becomes critically important. Not all leads are created equal and not all leads will be ‘sales-ready’. Ideally businesses need to present content that appeals to a market segment which can be ‘drip-fed’ to them over time, a process marketers call ‘lead nurturing’. Relevant content, delivered to the right audiences will encourage them to engage more with you and eventually contact you when the time is right for that prospect. Alternatively, a personal sales call may be appropriate when a prospect has engaged several times with different pieces of information and accumulated a large enough ‘lead score’. At this point it is worthwhile for a salesperson pro-actively to reach out and make contact, for example with a direct telephone call.
So, yes, the quantity of marketing content your business produces is important but the ideal scenario is to allow use of your quality content to engage in high converting one to one conversations with your leads.
To find out how your business can make more effective content and convert more sales ready leads using automation,why not have a confidential chat with us or read more about marketing automation here.
Happy Marketing!
Gill