4 Ways to Transform Your Bottom Line With Content Marketing

“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.” – Andrew Davis

For you, your product is the apple of your eye but why should your target audience care?

Before you tell your audience how your product does this and that, you need to recite the tale from the beginning of time to build context for why they should care. Otherwise, you’re just sharing the end of a story they’ve never read about.

Content marketing is how you recite that story.

It’s no secret that when B2B marketers embrace content marketing, it brings in attention, awareness, leads, and sales. And isn’t that all you are looking for?

In this blog post, we’ll share how content marketing impacts your bottom line and how you can use it to your advantage. Let’s get started.

How does content marketing help?

Content is crucial to driving inbound traffic and leads. It helps:

• build your brand
• increase quality traffic
• boost credibility
• nurture stronger customer relationships

Content marketing can help reach your target audience at each stage of the sales funnel. It would be a rookie mistake to not tie your content strategy to your entire sales funnel. Content marketing impacts all the 3 stages – top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel.

Content marketing can help you drive consumers to the bottom of the funnel and ultimately create a positive impact on your bottom line.

4 ways to make content marketing work for your bottom line

To improve bottom line results with content marketing you should carefully craft your content strategy in a way that it exhibits you as a trusted organization in your industry. Here are 4 ways to do it right.

1. Leverage on-site content:

“Your blog is your best networking tool.” – Andy Crestodina

We couldn’t agree more, your on-site content is the backbone of all your efforts. You can use it to establish yourself as a thought leader, for instance, Marie Forleo aced thought leadership with her work on MarieTV. With her inspirational interviews with industry leaders, blog posts, and courses in business coaching, she set herself apart.

Use a mix of high-value content like white papers, case studies, and eBooks or get creative with videos or infographics. Make sure your content includes a call to action. Asking your audience to provide their email in exchange for your content offers the opportunity for you to provide additional content that can drive them further down the funnel.

OpenText, a software company, created a site with educational assets like white papers, product pages, ebooks, case studies to welcome new customers, and get upsell, cross-sell opportunities. This campaign resulted in 1,700 new contacts along with 31 new opportunities worth $1.8 million!

2. Build a strategy to use off-site content:

Increase awareness through an off-site promotion strategy that aligns you with authoritative sites. Why, you ask? Not only does off-site content help build trust with your audience when trusted sites publish your content, it drives traffic to your site, increases your audience outreach, attracts new subscribers, and improves lead generation. With building links from high-quality sites, you can improve your site’s SEO position on search results pages.

Buffer, a social media management platform, used guest blogging as a way to fuel their initial growth. They wrote a few times a day and published content on high-visibility sites. This helped them attract their first 100,000 users.

3. Be consistent and patient:

Use a mix of on-site and off-site content to attract new consumers, drive traffic, and convert leads. But when should you expect to see results? Remember, it’s a long-haul game, what you do today will reap results in a few months or maybe a year. Make sure you stay consistent with your efforts and focus on important KPIs for on-site and off-site content which are:

On-site KPIs

• sessions
• pageviews
• average time on page
• conversions

Off-site KPIs

• quality of links
• quantity of links

4. Equip your sales team with content:

Usually, the sales team thinks of content pieces as lead generation tools. However, sales can use content for building relationships with current and potential clients. Arm your sales team with the content you create along the buyer’s journey like case studies and whitepapers that would help sales reps showcase your proficiency in the industry and move your leads towards the final ”handshake”. Since sales teams work on the front line, they can share incredible insights with you that can help create relevant content.

Wrapping up

Content marketing strategy, when powered the right way, can make potential leads move down to the bottom of your sales funnel. The aforementioned ways will help you initiate a conversation with your target audience and stay at the forefront of your prospects’ minds, while improving conversions.

Content is the present and future of marketing. So, make the most of it to flourish like a green bay tree.

Do you want to make content marketing work for your bottom line? Talk to us.