Businesses frequently leverage content marketing as a powerful tool to build brand awareness and navigate customers through their sales funnel. However, many fail to maximize their content marketing efforts by not addressing all aspects of the customer journey, neglecting to track their assets, wasting resources on duplicate content, not creating unique material, or falling short in outreach endeavors.
In her session at SMX Convert, Eve Sangenito, a director at Perficient, presented a comprehensive content strategy for engaging potential customers throughout their journey and gaining backlinks to enhance discoverability and rankings.
Understanding the Customer and Mapping Their Journey
Your content should primarily serve your audience’s needs, which in turn serves your brand. Sangenito emphasized, "It’s not so much about what you want to tell your audience; it’s about understanding what they want to learn and how it can help them understand your solutions or the industry better." Knowing your audience’s starting point is crucial.
Mapping the customer journey can help craft audience personas and identify opportunities to answer common questions at each phase. "From your business’s standpoint, think about how the customer lifecycle fits into the sales funnel, as you’re fostering relationships with target audiences and buyers," Sangenito added.
Developing Your Content Topic Universe
To cater to different personas, you need to create a "content topic universe" that targets specific customer types. This helps avoid irrelevant topics and ensures your content guides audiences further down the funnel instead of leaving them with more questions.
The personas you create form the nucleus of your content topic universe, allowing you to brainstorm themes relevant to their stage in life, such as whether they are first-time homebuyers or purchasing a retirement home. This approach can minimize wasted resources and streamline your editorial calendar.
Creating Unique, Optimized Content
Validate Your Topic: Ensure your topic is relevant to your audience by validating it through keyword research and search volume.
Align With Search Intent: Understand the search intent behind your target keywords by examining the types of content that rank well in search results and determining if it aligns with your goals. Competitive analysis can also uncover opportunities to diversify your content strategy.
Differentiate Your Content: Avoid simply imitating top-performing content. Differentiation can come from expert quotes, specialist writers, or unique formats such as infographics.
Optimizing and Editing
Apply SEO best practices like internal linking, title tag optimization, and structured data to enhance discoverability. An editorial review ensures your content meets professional standards, adheres to your brand’s tone, and serves both your business and readers effectively.
Building Links for More Traffic and Better Rankings
Determine What’s Link-Worthy: Focus on promoting high-quality, relevant content. Sangenito advises marketers to consider the scope, relevance, and potential impact of the content they want to promote.
Link Building Strategies: Employ various approaches, such as fixing broken inbound links, converting brand mentions into links, reviewing competitor backlinks, and resource-based link building. These strategies can enhance your discoverability, drive valuable traffic, and build trust in your brand.
Continuous Improvement
Content marketing is not a "one-and-done" endeavor. Regularly audit and update your content inventory to keep your assets relevant and effective. This ongoing process can sustain your audience’s interest, maintain your brand’s reputation, and ultimately drive more conversions.
To delve deeper into the session, sign up to watch the entire SMX Convert learning journey on-demand.
