Content Marketing Not Working For You? Think Again. Here’s How to Use Content to Drive Traffic, Leads And Revenue

Most content marketing sucks.

Content is poorly-written, it’s targeted towards search engines (not humans) and there’s zero connection to the product or service your business sells.

It’s no wonder most companies say “content marketing doesn’t work for us”.

So, how do you change that?

How do you create content that generates traffic, leads and revenue for your business?

Well, by creating high quality content that promotes your business and is written for humans.

Easy, right?

Not quite.

Here’s the new process we’ve introduced at INEVO.

It’s similar to the process we’ve used to grow LeadSquared, SuperOffice and Digizuite (more on this later) - albeit, tweaked, tested and fine-tuned over the years to deliver a content strategy that will drive results for your business.

Why content isn’t working for you

Content marketing success starts by defining goals.

What do you want content to help you with?

In terms of website performance, most businesses choose traffic as their content goal.

Agencies translate that into organic search traffic - and in turn, it leads to content being written for search engines and the focus becomes solely on SEO and “educational” content.

There’s nothing wrong with that approach.

But most businesses don’t need more traffic.

They need relevant traffic that converts and then buys from you.

As they say - “traffic doesn’t pay the bills”.

And to convert relevant traffic, you need to show the reader you understand their problem.

→ You understand their problem and you can recommend a solution.

And that’s a really difficult thing to achieve when you hire a freelance writer or agency and don’t provide them with insight into who your ideal customers are, what problems they have and how your product or service can solve them.

Do this - and you’ll be much more successful with content marketing.

(This leads nicely to the process we use at INEVO).

Audience-centric content marketing

Our content marketing process consists of 3-steps:

1. Audience research
2. Website communication
3. Content strategy and execution

Most content marketing agencies skip steps 1 and 2 and get right into step 3.

And that’s why they fail.

1. Audience research

What challenges do your customers face?

I don’t mean surface level challenges (i.e. “they need more sales”), I mean really understanding their pain points. You can find out by:

• Talking with customers
• Attending onboarding sessions with new customers
• Analyzing customer service tickets and live chat messages
• Reviewing third-party review platforms for input and feedback

That’s exactly what we will do for you.

We’ll communicate with customers, collect their feedback and group it into a list of their biggest challenges and pain points.

Then, we’ll sit with your sales and marketing teams to understand exactly how your business solves them.

For B2B SaaS companies in particular, this means sitting with your product marketing department and understanding how the product solves their pain points in specific detail.

What we end up with is a document that includes:

• A list of problems your customers have
• What the solution is to their problem
• How your product or service solves them.

This is the basis for a successful strategy.

But it’s just the beginning. While it’s easy to skip straight to creating content based on what we find, that’s the long-term strategy. We first need to focus on the short-term.

2. Website communication

So far, we haven’t created any new content.

That’s a good thing!

Armed with the knowledge we have from your customers and the solutions your business provides, the place to start isn’t your blog.

We start by reviewing your product or service page.

Next, it’s your paid search landing page(s).

And then, it’s the most-visited (i.e. top 5) pages on your website.

We’ll review existing webcopy on these key pages and suggest recommendations on how to improve the messaging. As experienced copywriters, we can rewrite them for you, too - all based on the input we've collected from your customers.

This is how we increase conversion rate on your website in the short-term.

The reason why this works so well is because a website that doesn’t convert won’t convert better with more content. That’s not how you fix the issue. You’re making it worse

(More traffic and fewer conversions leads to lower conversion rates, not higher).

So we start with website communication first for 2 reasons:

1. Most sites don’t clearly communicate how they solve buyer pain points
2. Most sites don’t convert many visitors and have low conversion rates

By addressing both of these issues early, we can increase conversion rates and build a solid foundation for new content we create when we’re ready.

Which one would you prefer?

Create new content for a website that has a low conversion rate…

Or, create new content for a website that has a high conversion rate?

3. Content strategy and execution

Guess what?

We’re still not ready to create new content.

But we will now shift the focus to your blog.

In many cases, you already have a lot of content that’s been published, is ranking in Google and generating some traffic. The content may not be performing as well as you like, but it’s a great starting point.

Besides, it’s much easier to take a piece of content that already exists and make it rank/ convert better, than starting from scratch and creating something new.

So, that’s where we’ll start.

We’ll apply the same insights we drew from step one (audience research) and include them on high traffic/ low converting content. The content improvements can range from one additional paragraph suggesting your product or service as a solution all the way to a full rewrite that is more targeted towards your ideal customer.

Finally, we’re ready to create new content.

And in theory, this is the easy part.

We have the audience insights categorized into pain points and matched them with solutions you can provide. These are the content topics.

Here’s an example of how this can look using Digizuite:

• Challenge: We have offices in multiple locations and find it difficult to share the most up to date asset with everyone that works in marketing.
• Solution: Digital Asset Management (DAM) software
• Content angle: How to use DAM software to share up-to-date assets with a remote-based marketing team.

We’ll produce one new piece of content per week that addresses the challenge and presents a solution - combined with keyword research - to create content that is written for search engines and humans.

We’ll follow this process for 12 weeks (one quarter).

After 12 weeks, we’ll analyze which topics are performing best and then double down on those topics for the next quarter (and then rinse and repeat).

Over time, we get closer and tighter to customer pain points and are to be more personal and relevant in our content. The right content, right person at the right time.

Digizuite: A $45 million case study

We started working with Digizuite in September 2021.

By using the approach above - audience research, website communication and content strategy - we played an important role in their $44 million acquisition by Luxion.

Here’s how:

• Audience research: By including the question “What is your biggest challenge in managing digital assets?” to their “book a demo” form, we were able to identify more than 10 category pain points that we could use in our sales and marketing communication.
• Website communication: The number one challenge their target audience experienced was to search and find digital assets within their organization. Digizuite’s DAM platform solved that problem, but it was not communicated clearly on their website. So, we developed the find digital assets landing page, which is used in their paid search ad campaigns.
• Content strategy and execution: We created a content strategy that focused on addressing their audience (enterprise companies) biggest challenges - all based on the insights provided in the demo form. Given the number of challenges related to managing assets (share, store, organize, manage), we created a cluster of content on topics, such as:
  • 10 Best Practices For Sharing Digital Assets Internally
  • The Best Way For Enterprises To Store Digital Assets
  • How To Manage Digital Assets Across Channels At Scale
  • 5 Ways To Organize Assets In Enterprise Companies
  • Best Practices For Sharing Digital Assets With External Partners

Conclusion

When people have a problem, they Google it.

The bigger the problem, the more specific the search - and the more determined they are to find a solution. That’s why the content strategies we create are successful.

We create content that your audience wants to consume.

Not through guess work. Based on real conversations. With them.

Because if you’re going to invest in content, at least try to help your customers.

Otherwise it’s just noise.

And that’s why most content marketing sucks.

Want to get started on your 2024 content strategy? Contact us today and we’ll show you how this process can help your business use content marketing to increase traffic, leads and revenue.