Content Marketing PT. 1

Content Marketing: It’s Either Boosting or Killing Your Web Presence
The most vital asset your organization can have in 2014 is a solid web presence. Every day, countless pieces of content fly around the web in all directions with the intention of reaching and influencing targeted readers. Whether you’re creating your own original content or curating and sharing content from somewhere else, Content Marketing is an optimal method of reaching a mass number of your potential consumers online, and it doesn’t look like it’ll slow down anytime soon. According to a recent study by Trapit, nearly 60% of marketers say that more than 10 pieces of content should be shared by a company per day. This number may seem staggeringly high, but the industry’s top marketers are making it their goal to share that much content with the hopes of making a sizeable impact on the web.
Once you’re posting and sharing content, you’ll want to know what kind of buzz your content is producing. After all, what good is all that posting and sharing if you can’t see the results on paper?
Five key benchmarks will give you a well-rounded perspective of how successful your content is among readers:
• Traffic
• Engagement
• Social Shares
• Backlinks
• Conversion Rates
Today, we’ll discuss the importance of traffic and engagement.
Traffic
The first goal for your content is a simple one: get people to read it! Driving up traffic through your content is the first step to having a strong web presence. The amount of traffic your content receives depends on a number of different factors that allow users to see your posts. These can include the extent of your organization’s followers (whether it’s on social media or email based subscriptions) as well as your page’s rank among search engines. Measuring your content’s traffic is not all that difficult nowadays thanks to tracking websites like Google Analytics. You can see exactly how many people viewed your content if it’s posted on your website, and if you’ve curated the content, you can track referral traffic to see how many users have gone to your site through your post.
If you aren’t getting the traffic you desire, there are things you can do to help get a bigger reach. First, look into any supporting factors that may be causing your traffic to dwindle. Take a look at your email titles and social media announcements; rework any titles that need love and make them exciting for the reader.
Now that you’ve got them on your site, it’s time to reel ‘em in.
Engagement
A user’s engagement with your content is both the length and quality of interaction with it. The extent of user engagement is driven by the relevancy of the content itself, the design and layout of the site, and the content’s ability to grab and hold user attention. Posts that hold true to these core principles encourage readers to read the content in its entirety and share it with like-minded people.
If you find that your posts get sufficient traffic but not much engagement, take a second look at your landing page. Something could be off-putting about your content (such as an overload of ads or too small font), it could be targeted to the wrong audience, the content could be poorly structured, or there could be simply too much content for the reader’s liking. Your content should be powerful, succinct, and to the point.
You’ve gotten your content to the reader and gotten them fully engaged in what you have to say. Now, the ball’s in their court. In the second part of this blog, we talk about what the reader will do with your content once they get their hands on it, and what makes certain posts spread like wildfire. Until then, share this with anyone who could benefit from content marketing, and get in touch with us if you’d like to discuss today’s topics!
Read the second part of our content marketing blog here.