You have a website, right? And you want your website to convert, which means that you want your visitors to become customers. You have probably been setting up goals in Google Analytics and sees how many percent of your visitors become customers? Am I right? Otherwise you should really start with setting up that before you do anything else on your site, you need to know if the things you are doing online gives you ROI or not. Especially if you are a webshop owner. Read more about the value of ecommerce tracking here.
But now we suppose that you know this. You know that your conversion rate is 2%. Which means 2% of your visitors does the “thing” you want. You cannot say if 2% is a high or a low number, it is different in every niche, but for this article we use a 2% conversion rate as example.
Now you can make your business grow in two ways, one way is to get more visitors and keep the conversion rate, and the other is to keep the same amount of visitors and improve the conversion rate.
- For websites with a low visitor count: I suggest you start with getting more visitors. By doing content marketing. This is what this blog post is gonna be about.
- For websites with a lot of visitors: Focus mostly on getting a higher conversion rate. Make more visitors become customers, then you will get more money, and with that you afford to focus even more on growing your visitor count later. And profit more. But more about this another time.
Let’s talk about getting more visitors. By doing content marketing like a boss!
Okay, you know what content marketing is? Anyway, I’ll tell you an example, it is all about creating content on the sites you control, content that other people read, like, share, and probably convert from. Often it is company blogs, videos, infographics, pictures, fun stuff, statistics, everything that your target group may be interested in. Let’s say you have understood that you need to create this kind of content all the time. And we focus on blogging and articles, which is the easiest one to profit from (I think). And you have a Facebook page as well, and maybe a twitter account where you share your content when you have been writing it. And the people that reads your content mainly comes from this kind of sites, and of course, the loyal visitors that always hang around your site reads it as well. But that’s about it. You might get a bunch of more visitors from Facebook if you make something so great that people starts sharing it, but it is all temporary visits. You get the visitors because of writing and sharing it on Facebook. Of course, you get some visits from Google as well, and that number grows a little all the time when you get more content, including more and more long tail searches, but it is not as effective as it could be.
The picture above visualizes the traffic that comes to the /blog or /articles part of your website. It is usually like this if you just have started, or have just a few visitors. Always when posting something, the traffic spikes, and comes mostly from the sites you shared the content on. But the average amount of traffic is not rising so much, you will still pay the same for every visitor even a year after starting with your content marketing.
This picture visualises a much better curve. The traffic still spikes when posting things, but here it does not go back as low as it was before the post. This is the result of a better planned content marketing, the traffic should increase at least a little for every new post.
Why plan your content marketing?
I think you got it already, but I can make it all much clearer as well. Every visitor costs money. Money that in content marketing usually is time. And if you have counted how much your content marketing all together costs, you will know what a single visitor costs as well. And if you continue as in picture one, the price per visitor will never become lower. If one visitor costs 5 euros in the beginning, it will cost about the same after one year. And if the value of visitors are lower than this, you will only lose money. It would be cheaper to buy visitors from AdWords than do that kind of crappy content marketing.
But if the angle of the red arrow is bigger, if you with every post gets new visitors, you will eventually end up with almost “free” visitors, that costs you a lot less to get than what they are worth. The cost for visitors will become half of what it was quite fast in the beginning. And then half of that. And then a lot lower than any CPC campaign would give you.
If you always try to get the angle of the red arrow to be as big as possible, you will succeed in content marketing.
How to plan content marketing for success?
This post is mostly about telling why a planned content marketing is great, how to plan it can get its own blog post later. But I’ll share one way already by now. And that is planning your content for getting visitors from Google.
It goes like this: seek for phrases in Google Keyword tool or in your AdWords reports that have searches every month. If a non-competitive search term that fits the topic of your site has a hundred or more searches per month, then go for it and write a post about it. If it fits your topic, you will quite easy end up on the first page of Google, and drive “free” traffic from there as long as you are there. And you will probably be there for a long time if it is a longer phrase. And you will still get the same spike when you share the post to your loyal fans. The only difference is that the amount of visitors will not become as low as before when the spike is over. Even a couple of more visitors is a step towards cheaper and cheaper visitors. But we can step it up a little.
A simple plan for simple content marketing: Make a list of headings to write about for a time, example a half a year from now. Check how many searches every phrase have next to it. Write when you are going to publish it. Do some math. Count how many more new visitors you will get every month. And divide it with ten. Because Google always tells you too high numbers, and you will not always end up on first page.
Now you will have a great view of how many visitors you might get every month in half a year after now. The time for writing about the topics you have planned for is not more than it would be for writing something else. So the cost for writing the content will be the same. But the amount of visitors will get higher every month. Calculata as well the “cost” for making the content and compare it to the amount of visitors. Divide (You did not think blogging was about math, right?). You will see that the cost for a visitor will decrease all the time, even if you spend the same time writing as you did before.
You will see when you reach break even. When the cost for a visitor is equal to what it is worth. You will see how far away that point is. Or how close. And after that point, every minute spent on making new content will give instant payback.
The big fat conclusion
Do you see it? This whole post is just a reflection of marketing campaigns in general. The spikes are successful marketing campaigns, and the visitors are sales. Adapt the same plan to all the marketing you are making. Do not make “successful” campaigns that does not give you anything anymore when it is finished. Do campaigns that gives you value even after ending it. Campaigns that are planned for success. Not only short term, the spikes are easy to get. After the spike, the sales should be higher than before. Plan a year of this kind of campaigns, and try to get the red arrow as steep as possible. I am quite sure that leads to some kind of marketing success.
I got the idea for this blog post after making this kind of plans and after reading Jesper Åströms post about data driven marketing strategies. If you have read this far, you could keep on reading that post as well. And do not forget to drop me a comment if you think that I am totally wrong. Or if you think I have a point. And contact us asap if you want to boost yout content marketing, or even get started with successful content marketing.
