10 STEPS TO CONTENT MARKETING THAT CONVERTS - PART II

Step 6: “Socially Charge” Your Content And Get in the Conversations

Besides scheduled publication and syndication of your content throughout social channels, always make your content (including landing pages) shareable in social media by adding social sharing buttons to encourage people to share and talk about your content in different channels and emails. 

Tip: Adding social sharing buttons to your blog is as simple as inserting a piece of code to your page. Use AddThis, ShareThis to quickly boost your page views and visits. Is your content designed for mobile consumption? Check out Socialize, a ShareThis company.

Step 7: Convert Web Traffic to Leads with Calls to Action

• First, insert a call to action: typically, for smaller purchase or B2C products, you can solicit sales directly. Since the sales funnel is much longer in B2B marketing, try encouraging signups by providing valuable-add content such as whitepapers or newsletters so the email addresses are collected.
• Second, take a hard look at your signup form and landing page – does it convert? Do you provide the benefits you promise? Could you guarantee no spam? Did you tell people that you respect their privacy?
• Third, lead nurturing. Follow up with emails that contain more premium content or offer, and calls to action. Personalize the email content if you can. Some companies, such as HubSpot, even follow up with phone calls.

Step 8: Measure Impacts

Decide what key metrics you should be tracking to impact the bottom line, and set improvement goals. Here are some examples:

• How well is your app or brand ranked - on Google, in app stores and in social channels?
• How many followers do you have?
• How many comments, views, retweets, shares does the piece of content have?
• What is the engagement rate?
• Which piece of content enjoys the most “shares” or “views”, and why? 
• Where was this content shared? If it was on Facebook, would it still be as popular on Linkedin?

Step 9: Build a Database to Personalize Offer
Once we have enough insight into who the visitors are and what they download and subscribe to, we can personalize offers. Allowing customers to choose what they want to receive will also help you gain insights on your customers, and decreases the chance of your offer being marked as spam.
Here at SAP Community Network, we always ask new members what kind of newsletters would interest them when they sign up as a new member. Is it Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing or Technology News, or all of it? Let your customers decide. Personalization allows deeper engagement, which increases of chance of conversion. 

Step 10: Drive Email Marketing Home in the Last Mile

Two things you can do with the email addresses you’ve collected: send your customers newsletters for loyalty formation or email campaigns for “flash sale”. Don’t underestimate the power of email marketing: it is the most personal intimate medium. This study from Optify has shown that good email campaigns converts more than twice than social media.  

Because emails are so intimate, the most important thing is not to be marked as spam by your customers. Once you are marked spam, you can never return to inbox.

Avoid being marked as spam by:

• Decreasing of the number of links in the email
• Sending out as many “safe” emails as possible (explained below in tip)
• Use different IP addresses and monitor. If the emails sent from one IP address is reaching spam limit, stop. Send emails from another IP address

Tip: What are “safe” emails?Use human curiosity as your advantage. Provide community updates (Quora), network updates (Linkedin and Twitter) because people are curious about what their friends did or shared. Or, send out questions such as “want to find out the secret to successful email campaings?” and provide two buttons: “yes” and “no”. Even if your customers don’t want this information, they are more likely to click “no” than marketing it as spam.

Last but not least, test out different mediums, offers and channels, and always tie them back to your metrics to discover key areas for improvement. Break the silos. Keep everyone on your sales and marketing teams on the same page and make sure they are contributing to achieving the goals.