So, you’ve carefully crafted a content strategy for your website. You’ve corralled all the consultants within your firm and encouraged them to produce a regular flow of educational content. You’ve optimized your site against search. You’ve shared and promoted your content through social media. And, after all your hard work you’ve seen a modest increase in site traffic and even a few conversions from your content. Now what?
What Usually Happens With Conversions
You’ve now run about 26 miles of the content marathon. Unfortunately, this is usually where most marketers fall down. It’s what you do in those last two-tenths of a mile that will make your content marketing approach succeed or fail. Here are some of the typical mistakes firms tend to make:
1. Web Forms to Nowhere
A good 20% of web forms are just glorified email links. The information is filtered and delivered to some webmaster’s inbox to be routed somewhere in the organization later. The conversion creates no visibility for anyone or worse gets completely lost in the shuffle.
2. Forgotten Followers
All too often, firms simply fail to do what they say will do. The call-to-action is a monthly newsletter, but a month or two goes by without an email being sent. That original useful content is quickly forgotten, along with the firm.
3. Rush to Respond
The call-to-action is quickly followed up by an unneeded, unwanted, pushy promotional email or phone call. All the trust built with that high value content is flushed away instantly.
What You’ll Do With Your Conversions
Of course, you’ll close those last two-tenths of a mile like an Olympic champion because you’ll follow these three recommendations:
1. Explosive Web Forms
A proper web form simultaneously delivers useful information to four places – an email marketing platform for future communications, a CRM for the business development team, an automation platform for useful analytics, and to the right person within your firm for targeted follow-up where appropriate.
2. DWYSYWD
Do what you say you will do. If you said you’ll send a monthly blog digest — do it. If you committed to a monthly newsletter — do it. Be consistent and frequent in your ongoing delivery of email communications. Chances are the moment you feel like your communication is too frequent is the moment prospects actually start to pay some attention.
3. Nurture Intelligently
You’ll go into your analytics on a monthly basis to evaluate which content is producing the most conversions, which email content is producing the most opens and click, and you’ll work to produce more content like it in a more timely manner. And, you’ll nurture your prospects over time with additional follow-on educational content to establish your expertise in a meaningful, not pushy, way.
