How to use content marketing and link building to fill the funnel

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How to use content marketing and link building to fill the funnel

Content marketing is a popular choice among businesses because it can help them raise brand awareness and guide clients through the sales funnel. Many, however, have failed to capitalise on their content marketing initiatives because they haven’t covered all aspects of the customer journey, haven’t kept track of their assets and wasted resources on duplicate content, have failed to create unique content, or have simply failed in their outreach efforts.

Understanding the customer and mapping their journey

Your content should always have the goal of serving your brand by serving your audience at the forefront of your strategy and execution. “ It’s not so much about what you want to say to your audience as it is about what you think they want to know and what will help them learn more about your solutions and/or your industry in general. One of the most important things you should concentrate on is understanding where they’re coming from.

Mapping a customer’s typical trip can also aid in the development of audience personas and the identification of chances to address common queries at each stage of the journey.

What audiences typically search for at each stage of the funnel?

“When someone is in their awareness phase, we tend to see informational queries,” she added, giving the following kinds of questions a consumer at the top of the funnel can ask: “What are the possibilities accessible to me?” What are people’s opinions on those alternatives? What are the reactions of other market participants to the information provided by this organisation?

Consumers often attempt to educate themselves via how-to articles, studies, and influencers at the next step of the funnel. A potential consumer is limiting their alternatives, reading reviews or case studies, and comparing costs when they reach the consideration and evaluation phases.

After the purchase, the customer lifecycle continues. Teaching your consumers how to get the most out of your products or services can enhance their experience, and giving accessible support, such as FAQs or videos, can help you convert a first-time buyer into a loyal client.

Developing your content topic universe

The personas you’ve built can serve as the centre of the content topic universe, allowing you to come up with ideas for topics that are specific to that client type. “What are some of the usual inquiries people have based on their age and stage of life?”

  1. Cut down on wasted resources by managing your assets: Creating and keeping an inventory of your existing material allows you to see what assets you already have. This can help you determine what assets can be updated against what needs to be generated from scratch, reducing the amount of resources wasted on duplicate material. Knowing what you have also allows you to recognise the holes in your editorial calendar and where it might go in the future.

  2. Injecting your brand and goals into the content: Brand and market insights can help define how you develop content and, as a result, what that content does for your company: This is where you may include your brand’s rules to ensure that your content marketing has a consistent tone.

Creating unique, optimised content

Follow 4 simple steps to create and get your own optimised content

  1. Validate your topic: Before you start writing or developing the content, be sure the topic is relevant and interesting to your target audience. While conducting keyword research, you may confirm your topic by looking at the search volume linked with the terms you’ll be targeting.

  2. Align with search intent: “You can look at the SERP and start to understand what sorts of information are being exposed for someone who’s searching for this issue and see whether or not it would fit what you’re trying to accomplish,” says one expert.

  3. Differentiating your content: You’ll want to stay away from emulating the best-performing search result. Your competitive study should show opportunities to go above and beyond what’s presently available, allowing you to differentiate your content and brand. Obtaining expert quotes, hiring topic-specific authors, or even style (an infographic may appeal to your audience more than a listicle, for example) could all be effective methods to set yourself apart.
  4. Optimising and editing: After you’ve finished your draught, use SEO best practises like internal linking, title tag optimization, and structured data to help your audience locate additional information about your content and progress through the customer journey. It’s also crucial to do an editorial review before publication to verify that your material is professional, follows your brand tone, and serves your company and readers properly.

Building links for more traffic and better rankings

It’s essential to focus on promoting the most relevant and high-quality content for the audience you’re attempting to reach when developing backlinks. The ability of your content to captivate readers on an emotional level can also play a role in whether or not you receive the backlink.

Link building strategies

If you can obtain backlinks from authoritative media, link building can help you increase your discoverability, bring traffic to your most valuable assets on your site, and establish a sense of reliability for your brand. Link building can be approached in a variety of ways.

  1. “You can do tactical components like identifying if you have broken inbound links and reaching out to the sites that are connecting to you to see if they can update them,” an expert said, adding that PR coverage might be another way to turn a brand mention into a link if it isn’t already. Examining your competitor’s backlinks can uncover sites that are willing to link to your brand.

  2. Depending on the quality of your material and your outreach skills, resource-based link building, which entails promoting an existing piece of information that may add value for readers of other sites, can also be an effective strategy.

Content marketing is a continuous process

After you’ve developed the content and earned the backlinks, you’ll want to keep the momentum continuing by routinely assessing your content inventory and updating assets as needed. This will assist you maintain the content you’ve worked so hard to generate and get backlinks for. That way, the material will continue to serve your audience, and you’ll be able to maintain outreach for that particular asset, bolstering your brand’s reputation and maybe increasing conversions.