Why do you have a website? Most likely, it’s to establish a reputation, attract potential customers and increase conversions. Many of those reasons also apply to your content marketing goals. But, it’s possible that the way your website looks and works is actually reducing the overall effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns.
In this article, we’ll be taking a look at steps you need to take to make your website more attractive, more usable and more trustworthy to customers via content, marketing funnels and the overall structure of your site.
The Importance of a Well-Developed Blog Section
As the name suggests, content is the base of content marketing. If you want to utilize content on your website, you need a place where you can publish it. The most common way to share your content with your audience is a blog/resource/news sections.
But we’re not here to discuss benefits of having a blog section as that’s already well-known. What we want to put the focus on is well-developed blog section.
What do we mean by that?
While you can publish mediocre content and possibly rank well, that might not get you the results you want. That’s because mediocre content won’t give you great conversions, but great content that ranks well just might.
The more value you provide through your content, the more potential clients will see you as an expert who can solve their problems. This is why it’s so important to avoid filler content and instead focus on in-depth advice that answers user’s queries and educates them on your brand, your products and any topics related to your niche.
To make sure that you stay on top of your blog, it’s a good idea to plan a content strategy with a content marketing calendar that lets you plan ahead while covering every stage of the sales funnel for every persona.
If you’re still not convinced, let’s explore some additional benefits.
In the context of content marketing, a blog:
- Boosts your SEO performance by reducing bounce rate and increasing the number of total visitors
- Actually improves your link-building efforts because editors don’t mind linking to valuable resources
- Gives you the ability to move prospects through the sales funnel with targeted content
- Shows a human side to your brand and conveys your business’s personality (which creates trust)
- Helps with your social media management by giving you interesting content to share and promote via your social channels
Considering everything we just mentioned, it’s not surprising that blogging has become a key tactic for B2B businesses as they look to shore up their website and boost conversions.
Source: artillerymarketing.com
As long as you’re creating content that works, time spent on developing your blog will be well worth it.
The Impact of Website Design
When a website looks like the one below, it understandably puts people off. And who can blame them?
But that’s not even the point.
Having good overall structure and an appealing interface is something that will greatly support your content marketing efforts. A professional-looking site that’s easy to navigate reduces bounce rate, improves brand trust and invites people to find out more about your business.
The worst thing you can do is to heavily invest in content marketing without first polishing up your website. Publishing great content on a slow loading, unsightly page is like inviting people to pick up a fresh-looking apple from a garbage bin.
Some might do it, but even the ones that do won’t really feel great about it.
Additionally, one of the prime reasons for a high bounce rate is poor site structure and painfully slow loading times. Nobody is going to wait 10 seconds for your homepage to load and even fewer are going to waste the same amount of time finding interior pages where you describe your core business or your features/services.
To create a good site structure, there are a few things you can do:
1) Plan your hierarchy – how are you going to organize your information in a way that’s simple and makes sense?
2) Create a URL structure which follows that hierarchy.
3) Create your site navigation in CSS or HTML.
4) Implement a shallow-depth navigation structure; in other words, you’ll want to avoid burying your important pages too deeply on your website.
5) Create a header or a sidebar that people can use to quickly navigate through your site. Ensure easy access to your blog, about us, contact and feature pages. It’s a no-brainer.
6) Put together a logical internal-linking structure. Internal links make it easy for people to get from one page to another and help with SEO optimization of your site.
Long story short, before you start with any bigger content marketing project, do yourself a favor and ensure that you have a good-looking website that provides good user experience through logical structure and navigation.
Develop a Marketing Funnel
A B2B business website without a marketing funnel is essentially a website that’s leaving money on the table. Getting people interested in your content is great, but it will get you nowhere if they only consider you as a free library and not a potential partner. To improve conversions and sales, you need to pull those visitors into a marketing funnel.
A great way to do that is, you guessed it, through content. And by that, we don’t mean just on your articles and infographics. There are a lot of different content types you can use to move the prospect through your marketing funnel. Actually, everything that is currently on your website can be considered as some form of content.
“Why/About us,” “Testimonials,” “Case studies,” and “Get in touch” pages can all have an important role in developing your marketing funnel.
Think of it this way. To move the prospects through your marketing funnel, you need two things: a way to “catch them” and content you can use for lead nurturing.
Besides paid promotion, the most straightforward ways to catch leads is to use landing pages, lead magnets and Facebook pixel.
Now that you have their contact info and a way to get in touch with them again, you have to use the rest of your content to turn them into paying clients.
To improve your conversion rate, your lead nurturing process should consist of content that is:
- Aimed at specific buyer persona you identified in your target audience analysis
- Developed for a specific stage of the marketing funnel
In some cases, including things like “testimonials” in your retargeting and email marketing efforts could be just the thing that will tip the scales in your favor and nudge the client to give your business a chance.
When all is said and done…
…the way your website looks and works is going to be the foundation for your online success. To improve the results of your content marketing efforts, you have to ensure that the visitors you bring to your website always get a nice reception and have all pertinent information at their fingertips.
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