Most people would answer the above question with: well, you make a great piece of interesting content (free magazine, infographic, e-book, newsletter) someone reads/consumes it and then they go to your website and purchase your services/products. Actually, this rarely happens, and is not the way content marketing works.
What really happens is this: user ‘A’ reads your amazing blog post ‘B’, and then goes on about his business. He needs to have more interactions with you and your content before he’ll even think of buying something from you or visiting your site. So he’ll roam around on the web and maybe (if you’ve promoted enough) he’ll run into another piece of content you’ve created, and then go about his day. This cycle will continue until he’s had enough positive encounters with your content, and have come up to a point of interest/curiosity, where he thinks: ‘wow, these guys are pretty cool; what else do they have on their website?’. It is at this point that he will visit your site and may (if convinced) purchase something from your website, or send in a lead/estimate form.
The common mistake made by marketers is their incorrect estimation of effort for how many content marketing campaigns will be needed in order to create enough opportunities for users to encounter their content, and then win a place min their mind. Once is not enough, people need repetition. So don’t expect to create that one piece of awesome content and expect to be done. You actually have to create a long series of awesome content, and promote it properly before you can actually get an ROI.
How to improve the ROI of your content marketing
Be different, not Better
The individual is being bombarded today with advertising and other company’s own content marketing. Therefore it is critical that you avoid being ‘safe’, ‘normal’, and ‘conservative’ in your content marketing. You have to be willing to take some risks. People remember things which are different and forget things that are normal. In order to separate yourself from the pack you must be different.
Use SEO
When one is promoting a piece of content there are two circumstances. It is either:
1) Content which is already searched for and has some demand
2) Content for which no one is searching for, and one must create the demand
With the later you will need to do extra promotion to help pick up the slack. For the prior you can take advantage of organic SEO, as people are already searching for things related to your content. In this case good keyword research is a must.
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