Successfully promoting a business is not an easy task and how to optimise content for better ROI is vital to any success. It takes hard work, dedication, and most of all, it takes more than a bit of money. Unfortunately, that fact is making a lot of business owners wary. They don’t want to invest a lot of money and see it go to waste, which is something we can understand.
After all, the entire point of marketing is to help you make money, not waste it. And, one of the most popular approaches to marketing lies in creating optimised content. Make sure your blog posts and other content that you put out boost your profits.
However, in order to do that, you will have to learn how to do it. So, make sure to audit your ROI for the content in question. But, let’s not skip steps and take it slowly. We have some tips that should help you make more money by using the proper content.
Mastering Analytics
Data is at the forefront of pretty much every industry in the 21st century. And, if you want to stay in control of your investments, you will have to find reliable ways to analyse your data. However, as an owner of a small business, you probably can’t afford top-level analytics. Thankfully, you don’t have to. Believe it or not, Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool that is entirely free.
And, if you don’t know exactly how to use it, there is no reason to worry. Google also provides comprehensive free analytics training. Believe us, mastering this tool will be of great help down the road.
Don’t Let Your Evergreen Content Die
After you stay a while in a particular niche, you will end up putting out a lot of high-quality content. Focus on creating valuable content that is useful to the reader. For example, some typical types of evergreen content include articles and posts that help the reader solve persistent and common issues.
But, many companies forget about their best pieces of content and let them die. We are here to tell you that you should never allow that to happen. It takes a lot of time and effort to create evergreen content. The whole idea behind it is to have something that is passively generating income for your company afterwards.
Remember, if you just let the content sit without updating it from time to time, it will go out of date. So, once you identify which of your posts are doing the heavy lifting, do your best to keep them afloat. Update them so that they include new trends or other relevant information two to four times per year. Make sure you read through them every now and then to refresh your memory. After all, barring extreme circumstances, it doesn’t take much more than 10-15 minutes to go through most of your best pieces of content.
Once you update a piece of content, you will essentially get a new opportunity to blast it on social media or other outlets to drive people to your website.
Streamline Your Social Media Campaigns
Everybody wants to be everywhere. So, many smaller companies try to manage every single social media channel they can think of. While that is not an inherently bad idea, a lot of platforms can turn out to be a waste of time.
If you are advertising cross-platform, there are two possibilities in regard to reaching your audience:
- You are reaching the same audience
- You are reaching new people
If you are just reaching the same audience, then apart from slightly increasing your “air time” for those people, you aren’t achieving much. That is why it is very important for you to find the exact numbers for the traffic you generate through campaigns on different social media platforms.
Naturally, you want to reach as many new people as possible. However, just getting the people to see you or visit your website isn’t enough. What you really want is to convert those visits into sales. For that reason, focus on ROI analysis and check which outlets generate more sales. When you get those numbers, divide those sales by the amount of money and effort that went into the campaigns for their respective platforms. By doing that, you will get a general idea of which channels are doing the heavy lifting. Once you do, simply focus your efforts on the couple of channels that are providing the best return for you.
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Come up With Good Titles
The amount of content online is incredible. So, if you want to get some attention, you will have to use some smart tricks. For starters, make sure to give every piece of content you put out a good title. After all, it is the title that will get people to click on your link. Without a good title, no amount of optimisation or high-quality content will help. Furthermore, there are millions of people who share articles without ever reading them. So, make sure to write a title that will pique the interest of your customers.
Make sure you don’t end up with a typical “clickbait” title. While click baiting still works and gets the views, the general audience has learned to recognise it. Nowadays, people have a tendency to develop negative emotions towards companies that use clickbait. While it would generate traffic, it could alienate people as well. In the end, try to make the title relevant enough so that nobody can accuse you of click-baiting.
Use Images
Let’s go straight to facts – images in an article can greatly improve the performance of the said article. In fact, studies show that articles that use images once every 100 words get twice as many shares as articles that don’t. Furthermore, analyses of Facebook campaigns show that posts with images enjoy 330% more engagement than posts without images. As you can see, the effective use of images is crucial for the success of any piece of content. However, you can’t just throw pics in. They have to be relevant to your content. And, you should focus on optimising them as well.
Create Shareable Snippets
While search engine optimisation is definitely important, it is not the only way to boost your performance. While getting people to share your post can be difficult, you can focus on creating snippets they would be much more likely to share. In most cases, those snippets show hard statistics or other types of information. However, you can also insert phrases or statements that are quotable.
Make these snippets stand out in the article. Bold the essential phrases, make them look important. In fact, you can even include a share button for those phrases alone. And, the more shares those snippets get, the more visibility the article generates.
Cut Down On Your Expenses
OK, we know that we are talking about optimising content. However, if you really want to improve your ROI, one of the ways to do it is to optimise the production costs of the content. We have said that you should optimise your content with images and that remains true. But, you don’t really have to spend a lot of money to do it. Creating images or graphics can be incredibly expensive.
Make sure that your optimising efforts aren’t too taxing on your company’s bank account. It is great that you can increase the profits by adding custom images, but at some point, the scales will tip. You can’t just pay experts to create a countless stream of infographics for you. It isn’t worth it.
So, follow the rules of diminishing returns and stop spending once you notice that you are at the turning point. You always have to have the “first” graphic in the article. The one that people will share and talk about. However, you should consider the cost-to-profit ratio for any following image.
Stay in Touch with Current Trends
We have given you some tips that should help you out with content optimisation. However, in order to do any of that, you first have to figure out what to write about. An excellent starting point for your research would be to start checking out current trends. Find out what your potential readers are keen on reading and what has the best chances to work.
But, do not jump on the bandwagon of a trend that has been around for a while. The thing about trends is that they tend to be replaced by newer trends quite rapidly. And, trying to jump on the bandwagon too late won’t bring about any benefits.
Mention Influencers in Your Articles
You want to make yourself stand out in your industry. But, you are probably not the first one to show up at the scene. So, linking your content to some powerful influencers can help strengthen your authority. Furthermore, a lot of influencers use tools that automatically detect and potentially boost other articles that mention their work.
However, if you don’t feel like linking to anything but your own work, you can always simply include some of the quotes from influencers in your content. Just make sure to credit them, and you will potentially get them to recommend you. Having articles that mention them makes it easier to establish a professional connection.
If you require further information or have any specific questions, don’t hesitate to give a member of the GoPromotional team a call on 0800 0148 970 or simply email us today.
