A guide to setting your content marketing budget

A guide to setting your content marketing budget

 

We have all heard the term ‘Content is King’. But, how many of us know that way back in 1996, Bill Gates published an essay named ‘Content is King’ which is where this phrase originated from. Today, more than two decades later, content marketing is the focal point of most businesses. Every website is trying to create high quality content with a long term strategy in mind. Content promotion to the target audience involves many aspects like keyword position, SEO, etc. Cost is a big factor in marketing content and needs to be budgeted meticulously.

Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. In order to craft a successful content marketing strategy, businesses must focus not only on increasing the overall traffic to the website, but increasing the right kind of traffic; that being the number of visits from real people who have the potential of becoming a customer for your business.

To achieve the desired results, distribution of content through organic efforts like search engine optimization or paid efforts should be deployed. Without being too much of a fence-sitter, both paid and organic have the potential to be used at the same time to great effect. But it ultimately boils down to your business goals and what you intend to achieve with a content marketing strategy.

If you are looking to drive traffic and conversions quickly and money isn’t a constraint, then paid social advertising will be a quick fix. However, if it’s for something that will focus more on your client-customer relationship, organic would be well worth investing in.

In this article, you will get some guidelines to set your content marketing budget:

1. Focus on your organization’s business and size

Is your organization into manufacturing or technology services? You need to understand that each industry has its own content requirements. Focusing on your organization will help you understand the volume of content and the thrust required for a successful content marketing campaign.

Further, if you are a start-up, then your budget can be lesser than a big organization in the same business.

2. Define precise goals

What do you want to achieve with the campaign? Steer clear of generic replies like ‘getting more orders’ or ‘increasing customers’. These can be the ultimate motives behind any marketing activity but for content marketing you need to have more tangible and quantifiable goals. Some such goals can be:

  • Increasing organic traffic to your website
  • Improve search engine rankings
  • Build authority of your website, etc.

These goals will determine your content requirement and marketing needs, thereby giving you an idea about the possible budget.

3. How will you execute the campaign?

Do you have a fulltime resource to work on content marketing? Or, are you planning to employ an agency? Or, freelancers? Consider these options well because each one of these cost money and you will need to plug these costs in to your budget.

These three tips can help you set a content marketing budget especially if you are just starting out. If you already have such a plan running, then you can look at the areas that have given you good and bad results and plan accordingly. Remember, high quality content is king, provided it is marketed well.

3 Powerful Digital Marketing Tools To Boost Customer Loyalty

3 Powerful Digital Marketing Tools To Boost Customer Loyalty

 

Most companies with an online presence still find it challenging to acquire new customers and retain existing ones. Nowadays, it’s not enough to just have a great product; you should also have an ongoing conversation with your customers. Thankfully, an efficient digital marketing strategy can help your business drive customer loyalty. Given below are the top three digital marketing methods that you can employ:

  1. Content marketing

Start with a well-designed website and fill it with informative content relevant to the product. Apart from that, use content marketing strategies to create and distribute content that’s useful for your target audience in the form of articles, blog posts, videos, etc. This way you can establish your company as an expert in your field.

  1. Social media marketing

All businesses today are aware of the importance of social media. However, there’s a difference between trying to do it yourself and employing a clever social media strategist to drive customer engagement. Social media is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and to provide them with relevant information. The real-time nature of the platform also makes it ideal for addressing customer grievances and queries with regards to the product. Research shows that bad customer service is one of the reasons why customers switch brands. Using social media to resolve such issues would ensure that customers stay loyal.

  1. Email and SMS text message marketing

Though unglamorous in nature, email and SMS marketing are very effective when it comes to increasing customer loyalty. This is why websites make a big deal of capturing email, phone numbers, and social media ids at the time of registration.

(a) Email marketing: This is a great way to let your customers know you’re keen on maintaining a relationship with them. Use it to send regular newsletters filled with the latest company or product updates as well as links to your blog. Send them special customer only promotions, discounts and previews of new products or collections before they’re launched.

(b) SMS Text message marketing: Since almost all people own mobile phones nowadays, text message marketing is an ideal way to connect with them instantly. Ensure that you send messages tailored to the requirements of your target audience instead of spamming them with promotional messages. Use it to deliver customer-only discounts, info on flash sales and coupons.

As you can see, with the right digital marketing strategy, you can boost customer loyalty and attract more customers to your business. Therefore consider hiring experts and watch your business grow in leaps and bounds.

Tenovia’s Top 4 Guidelines for Writing SEO Content

Tenovia’s Top 4 Guidelines for Writing SEO Content

There’s content and then there’s SEO content, and on the internet at least, SEO content is king because it has keywords that correspond to the search terms used in Google search.

Here are our top tips on how you can improve your page rankings with SEO writing:

  1. Always follow SEO rules

The Google spider visits your page to see if you have used a specific keyword, and if those keywords appear in:

  • Title tag – The clickable headline of your page
  • URL – Your web address
  • Image ALT text – The alternate text that would appear if your image doesn’t load
  • Meta description tag – A brief summary of the content
  • H1 tag – Tag used to define and rank your headings
  1. Write authoritative content

Google likes SEO content. Until a few years ago, keyword stuffing was all the rage. Thankfully, Google has since revised its rules and now rewards well-written content. Therefore, write well-researched articles on your subject. Write articles that are 2000 words long and covers everything that a Google searcher would want to know about a topic.

Use subtitles and section your content for easy readability so that readers linger on the page. Add surveys, stats and embeddable images that other bloggers can share and link back to your page.

  1. Use LSI keywords

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are words and phrases associated with a particular topic. These words show up in context to your topic and show that you’ve done your research and covered the topic well.

To get LSI keywords, search for your keyword on Google and scroll down to the bottom of the page where they’ve listed “Searches related to…”.

  1. Learn to link right

Hyperlink your content to other articles on your site as well as relevant external articles from other authoritative sites. This is especially important while citing studies and research outcomes.

Apart from these, ensure that your site has a speedy load time so that it delivers results faster on search. It also helps if your site has a responsive design so that your content appears on mobile searches too.

Remember that SEO content pays off in the long-term. Therefore focus on quality content that brings in and engages readers and establishes your authority over time. We hope these tips help you set up your page and get more traffic on your website.

 

Integrating Content strategy with SEO

Integrating Content strategy with SEO

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Introduction

According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Quality content in the form of images, product descriptions, product specifications, reviews, ratings, ads etc. is a crucial part of the content strategy for an eCommerce website. The main purpose of all these forms of content is to attract, engage and retain customers. The content helps marketers to market their website and attract traffic through search engines. These search engines to a great extent, depend on keywords for attracting traffic.

Over the years, SEO and Content Strategy have each evolved in their own unique ways and we can no longer consider them as two separate entities.

In today’s post, we will try to understand the importance of integrating SEO with your company’s content strategy.

Why should we integrate SEO with Content Strategy?

A well-crafted content strategy must present quality content to the audience without stuffing it with too many keywords.  Here are a few aspects on why SEO is as important as your content strategy.

Search Engines look for quality content

Today, the digitally savvy customers totally depend on Search Engines for any information that they seek. Depending on the keywords that the customer searched for, these search engines present only those websites that have quality content. This clearly shows that we cannot separate SEO and Content.

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Research on the keywords that your customers use often and try to include them in your product description, specifications etc. This helps search engines to feature your website high up in the order when a customer searches with relevant keywords.

Quality content engages readers on Social Media

Quality content engages its readers. For example, if the offers displayed on your website are very attractive for a user, he is most likely to share it on social media. These social media interactions by customers will increase traffic to your eCommerce store and thereby, help in boosting your sales.

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Meta Data Matters Most

Meta data descriptions are most important for your web pages. Make sure you include the keywords in your product page’s meta data descriptions.  By providing comprehensive and concise descriptions, search engines will be able to discover your web pages more often.

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Conclusion

Often content strategy and SEO have similar goals: to increase awareness, get more traffic and improve sales. It is clearly evident that we cannot consider them as two different entities. Next time you set out to develop a content strategy for your eCommerce website or decide to revamp it do consider the following:

  • Understand your customers. See what they are searching for? And what they are sharing?
  • Develop your content around the interests and preferences of your customers
  • Connect with brand influencers like bloggers, celebrities, online magazines etc. and share your content with them.