The marketing campaigns you and your team develop are only as good as the strategy that implements it. Creating a plan to see your project through not only measures and analyzes the progress of each metric you use, but also enhances the tried-and-true techniques that allows your content to be seen by a wide audience in search of a solution to their particular problems.

In this guide, we will discuss:

  • The ways to identify and nurture your audience
  • How to utilize funnel metrics
  • How to develop a content marketing objective and analyze performance results
  • The best practices for content development and distribution
  • Tools for increasing traffic towards your content and website

How to Strategize in 5 Steps

1. Know Your Audience

Chances are, there will be a wide range of people reading your content. While this volume is certainly a good thing, you don’t want to write content directed at the “whole”. Leveling the playing field does more harm than good, since generic content doesn’t speak to the specific sets of people who are more liable to act, and may either confuse or frustrate individuals depending on their position or their needs.

Cater your writing towards those who are in the demographic of buying and using your software. They’re already searching for answers, so explain why your product is relevant to their query. A thorough understanding of who is meant to be reading your content helps guide which keywords consumers will use to search for it, how the content is written, how they will react to this information, and how to best entice them to keep reading or engage with your CTA. 

Develop “Ideal Reader” Profiles

A comprehensive look into the lives of your potential leads will drive your content towards the right sets of people. The questions you and your marketing team must answer involve their personal lives, professional environment, and product behavior.

Personal questions include:

  • What is their gender?
  • What is their age?
  • What is their lifestyle?
  • Where are they located?

Professional questions include:

  • What industry are they in?
  • What is their role in this industry?
  • What is their income level?
  • What position is their business in?

Behavioral questions include:

  • What other brands are they loyal to?
  • What websites do they visit?
  • What social media platforms do they use?
  • What profiles do they follow on these platforms?

The answers to these questions will most likely vary, so the best practice to target different areas of the market is to create multiple “ideal reader” profiles that cover each of these groups. However, limit this group number to a manageable amount, and analyze those that are most effective in the campaign. 

A great place to start is by writing to those in the industry who are leaders or decision makers, and to those who are researchers or supporters. While leaders may be the ones authorizing the eventual purchase, they may not be the ones implementing the product or even going through the process of buying it, so be aware of these differences when writing to someone with a higher role within a company. Supporters usually aren’t the people with purchasing power, but they can certainly influence whether or not a product is bought. The language around both of these groups will differ, along with the message you’re trying to send.

Understand Their Unique Pain Points

How will your product solve their problem? If consumers are searching for answers, your content should lead them towards your brand and solidify it in their minds as a viable solution. 

Pain point issues may include:

  • Financial–they need help managing their revenue, expenses, or billing techniques
  • Productivity–labor and time management need to be streamlined for efficient workflow
  • Emotional–they’d like to alleviate any frustrations within the business
  • Technical–they are having issues with the present tools they use
  • Support–they require more training or better customer service than their current providers offer

​​The idea is to drive user behavior toward your brand. If your type of product can solve any of the aforementioned problems, the content created should shine a light on why your product is the best fit for alleviating these issues.

Additionally, having awareness of any barriers the reader might encounter as they are introduced to your brand will make sure your content doesn’t become another pain point. This proactive approach can determine factors such as whether or not users see the value of your product, if the user interface provides a positive interaction, and if your content promotes and supports engagement with the product.

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2. Nurture Each Level of the Marketing Funnel

Besides understanding who your audience is and what their needs are, knowing what level of the funnel they belong to will determine not only what kind of content you create, but also how it’s delivered. In order to write effectively to each of these levels, first let’s take a look at what a customer funnel journey might entail.

The steps within a successful user lifecycle may include:

  • Awareness of your product through SEO
  • Visits to your website and its resources
  • Intrigue built around your product and a sense of its value
  • Subscription to your email list for more information
  • Initiation of the onboarding process with a free trial
  • Successful onboarding sequence leading to the conversion from user to paying customer
  • Utilization of upgrades and full engagement with your product
  • Customer retention through the renewal of their subscription
  • Brand loyalty leading to viral marketing

This is certainly a best case scenario, but in no way is it out of reach for any SaaS company. The key is to write about your product for audience members at every stage. With that in mind, here is an outline of what each funnel level looks like and how to utilize them.

Top of Funnel

What they’re searching for:

  • How to solve the problem pertaining to their pain point
  • They are unaware of your brand and your product at this stage

Best Practices:

  • Utilize broader keywords that this group is most likely using in their search 
  • Your content is applicable to a wider audience to generate an abundance of traffic to your site
  • This content introduces your brand even though they’re not ready to buy your product
  • You can become a trustworthy name by offering insights and resources on the subject that pertains to your product

Middle of Funnel

What they’re searching for:

  • More information on your product and how it will serve their needs
  • They are aware of your brand and the variety of support you have to offer

Best Practices:

  • Use intentional keywords as their search gets more specific
  • Content created at this level should begin to show how a product like yours is applicable in various conversations
  • This content should link your product with other relevant topics within your blog or various channels to further the engagement with your brand
  • Offer customer reviews and other forms of social proof to build credible trust

Bottom of Funnel

What they’re searching for:

  • Deciding on why your product is the best option amongst your competition
  • How to begin using your product

Best Practices:

  • If they’ve gotten this far, chances are they’re looking to buy
  • You can write in-depth about your product to further express its value
  • Connect them directly to your product and any information regarding free trial options or price packages

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3. Main Objectives and KPIs

Setting a clear goal for your marketing campaign not only provides the blueprints to guide your team towards a profitable end result, it also determines a way to measure and evaluate performance as the process is carried out. 

The first stage in knowing what objective is best suited for your company is to look at the data you have already collected and note what tactics are most successful, and which need a bit more work. This can point you in the right direction as to the type of goal to set, because the data offers some insight on where your company is naturally growing and where it needs to improve. All companies want growth, but analysis of your current metrics will show you where your marketing goals can be the most profitable.

After the objective is determined, the second stage is to work backwards from this goal to develop each of the necessary steps to achieve the desired result. This is how a proper timeline and realistic deadlines are set, and tasks are split amongst the members of the marketing team.

The third stage involves implementing this plan and collecting all the data that comes out of the process. From this point on, it’s essential to review your marketing metrics regularly in order to stay on track and notice any deviations from your main objective. Your Key Performance Indicator monitors these metrics as a whole so the team is aware of when they’ve reached their goal, and can also alert your team with insights during the process.

Individual metrics can show you which content receives the best results, and therefore which should be promoted and how to best deliver it. For instance, if your YouTube channel is seeing more traffic than your blog posts, you should lead with your best foot forward and invest more into that video platform. Metrics can also allow you to experiment with changes within your content to see which version is most effective by utilizing split-testing.

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Metrics to Monitor for Tracking Performance

Rank of Keywords

The keywords used in your content can determine whether this content shows up in search results and how close it gets to the top of the list. Monitoring the effectiveness of these words shows the marketing team what consumers are searching for, and allows content writers to shift usage as needed for better results. Trending topics change often, so reviewing this regularly is ideal.

Analytical Tools:
  • SEO Profiler – tracks competitors’ keywords, offers insight on keyword opportunities, integrates with Google Analytics
  • SEMrush – ranks web pages through their URL

Traffic

It should be noted not only how many people visit your content pages, but also which channels are the most popular. This metric can be analyzed month to month based on the traffic to content from organic searches, email subscriptions, and paid advertising. By monitoring the rate of visitors through these channels, your marketing team will see where to invest their effort and budget.

Analytical Tools:
  • Adobe Analytics – reports on traffic from various channels, advanced algorithms predict trends for better insight
  • Google Analytics – analyzes traffic and user data, displays visitor count in real time

Onboarding Rate

How many people are signing up for free trials and demos? What groups have a higher volume of signups? Answering these questions through onboarding metrics can show the efficacy of promoted products and their features, and how enticing the content is with engaging potential leads.

Analytical Tools:
  • AppCues – customizable onboarding guide, user segmentation, tracks conversion
  • Smartlook – shows how users experience the onboarding process, records data of users who churn, includes heatmaps

Lead Conversion Rate

The amount of onboarded users who convert to paying customers measures the success rate of your onboarding process. This metric tracks the effectiveness of each onboarding technique and illuminates the successes and failures, which shows the level of investment required to generate a certain amount of customers and the corresponding revenue that they yield monthly, quarterly, and yearly. Your company then has a better understanding of whether or not they need to work towards increasing its LCR in order to meet their revenue goals.

Analytical Tools:
  • HubSpot – lead capture software, records lead journey data, insightful data on prospective customers and current customers
  • Sumo – provides tools for successful CTA, easy avenues to build email subscription list, integrates with plugins like WordPress and Google Tag Manager

Customer Acquisition Cost

Essentially, this is the difference between your marketing costs and the amount of acquired customers. This metric determines how much it costs to obtain new customers within the marketing budget, and shows your team whether or not their investments are viable.

Analytical Tools:
  • Mixpanel – tracks user behavior and interactions, identifies disengaged customers, includes A/B testing experimentation
  • Kissmetrics – follows and analyzes customer journey, targeted ads for re-engagement, tracks user interaction at every stage

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4. Distribution and Volume

The way in which content gets published can affect how readers react to the writing. For example, if you’ve flooded the inboxes of your email subscribers every day for weeks on end, they’re likely to unsubscribe and have a negative perception of your brand. It’s important to have a content production process in place to plan out an effective guide so that you have enough content to be discovered by new readers, but it isn’t so much that it frustrates or overwhelms people.

This process is simply:

  • Research topics that your target audience is searching for
  • Set a publication goal
  • Develop a timeline towards this goal
  • Build a content creation team
  • Schedule publications within the timeline

In the beginning stages of creating a content production process, it’s important to know that these steps are experimental and subject to change as you discover more about the behaviors of your readers and the success rate of each piece of content. The best way to test for a wide range of readers is to create and distribute a variety of content with differing forms. Content methods such as short and long-form blog articles, whitepapers, video content, and posts for social media platforms will reach potential leads across a wider expanse of the internet and draw in a bigger audience than if you stick to one outlet.

Another thing to consider is offering different forms of delivery to cater to how people absorb information. Everybody has a unique way of learning that works best for them, so by providing several styles of content around the same subject, you allow readers to view this content in the manner that best suits their needs. Forms like how-to guides, infographics, and helpful video tutorials or demonstrations are excellent resources to incorporate into your content production and distribution plan.

The rate at which this content gets published matters just as much as its form. Publishing too often can lead to shorter content with a lower quality, or too much long content that doesn’t give the reader enough time to process everything you’ve distributed. Quality will outrank quantity in most cases. Readers will find your content once it’s optimized to be searchable, and they’re more likely to engage with your brand if you keep your content at a high standard that they learn to trust. That being said, make sure there is enough searchable content to give people more chances of finding your content in its various forms, and don’t be afraid to cover the same topic more than once or recycle old content with updated information.

Project Management Platform Tools

Utilizing an organizational tool such as a project management platform can greatly improve the tactics around publication and provide a clear guideline for your content production team. Here are a few examples:

  • ProofHub – manages tasks and workflow, provides collaboration from customer feedback, proofreads content, tracks timelines and time management, integrates with other applications
  • Trello – customizable dashboards for multiple creators, tracks progress of individual pieces of content, email notifications, mobile-friendly app
  • Concured – content SEO, tracks performance of content, finds trends in what topics your audience is searching for, works with multiple languages
  • Narrato – content ordering platform, algorithm pairs a qualified writer with your content requirements, proofreading capabilities, free image suggestion tools

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5. Optimize Traffic

Your marketing team could create the most helpful, enticing, and thorough pieces of content, but it won’t make a difference unless the right techniques are implemented for readers to be able to find it. There are a variety of ways to share your content and optimize it so that it doesn’t get buried under your competitors. Let’s take a closer look at the best practices for increasing traffic volume.

Keyword Usage

We already discussed how to track keywords and measure their performance within a marketing metric plan, so let’s discuss the ways to figure out what keywords will enhance this performance and garner a wide audience.

The first step in learning what keywords to use in your content is by researching what your audience and your competitors are using. You want to make sure these terms are relevant to your content and your product, but the search volume can’t be too high or too low. It’s the difference between competitive keywords where your content will likely be lost and overlooked in the search, and unused keywords that have a low search rate so you’ll rank higher, but have a much lower volume of people using those terms.

When researching your competition, pay attention to not only what words they’re using, but how they implement them. This involves how the keyword is incorporated into the title of their content, and if the keyword is included in their URL. By analyzing the successes of your competitors, you have an opportunity to see what keywords and techniques rank high, and also how you can stand out from the crowd.

Long-tail keywords are the most effective form to use, as they allow a search to be specific while still offering a healthy amount of traffic to your content. This means understanding the intent of a reader and predicting the string of words they’re most likely to use when looking for a solution to their particular pain point.

Keyword Optimization Tools

  • Google Keyword Planner – research tool, suggests relevant keywords, insights on search volume over time, bid estimates for better marketing budgeting
  • Clearscope – tracks relevancy of keywords, shows rank of keywords within content, integrates with apps like Google Docs and WordPress
  • KeywordTool – keyword research tool, suggests long-tail keywords that are relevant to your content, utilizes Google Autocomplete so you can proactively plan your keyword usage

Organic Search

Organic searches come from anyone who found your brand through their search engine naturally without being prompted. Because this method of connecting an audience to your product is calculated by an algorithm and not through paid advertisement, it’s crucial to optimize the avenues in which readers will find your content when they look through their search query results.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the way in which you can improve this unpaid traffic to lead towards your site. Besides optimizing your keyword ranking, use techniques like structuring your website so that search engines can properly categorize it, and meta descriptions or tags that involve your HTML to help describe the content within a webpage. 

A great way to draw leads closer to your product is by linking your content to other internal sources within your website. The longer a reader stays within your blog, the more chances you have to show them the value of your product and persuade them to interact with it. Offer things that guide readers down the funnel, like resources to related posts, links to more in-depth information, and customer reviews and recommendations, as well as products they may be interested in based on their search and an easy path to onboarding.

Another good practice is to refresh your content with updated versions in order to stay relevant to search queries as well as your audience. Deleting old content also helps to alleviate too much outdated information, which can hurt your rankings.

SEO Tools

  • Ahrefs – optimizes your website, analyzes competition and industry trends, tracks your progress
  • Moz – tracks the rank of your keywords, analyzes backlinks, researches and targets keywords, offers site audits
  • BuzzSumo – tracks your high-ranking content, researches your collected data, monitors performance and trends in the market

Email Subscribers

The second most important way to drive traffic, your email subscription list is a controlled route towards how and when users see your content. Although this doesn’t increase your reader audience like organic searches, it can drive your current audience further down the funnel towards a CTA, and allows for personalized messaging that subscribers will find relevant based on previous user behaviors.

Creating a streamlined plan for the process of sending emails to your list sets a standard of how often users hear from you, as well as the quality of information you share with them. 

The process for initiating and continuing these messages can include:

  • Welcome sequence for new subscribers
  • Weekly content newsletter
  • Regular product updates
  • Announcements of a new product launch

To entice readers towards signing up to your email list, you can offer something like a free course with signup. This works in everyone’s favor, as it’s a finite commitment for your readers, but you’re also building your subscription list. On top of that, after the course ends, your product is more likely to stick in the reader’s mind when they think of a solution to their problem, because they already know and trust your brand.

You also have the opportunity to reach out to inactive users with re-engagement tactics. Since you’ve already collected data on these users and have some understanding of their past behaviors, you can offer them content that pertains to their needs and supports their journey with your company to drive traffic back to your site.

Email Marketing Tools

  • HubSpot Email Marketing – customer resource management, ease of use with templates and visual editors, organizes subscription lists, tracks performance, sends automated courtesy post-purchase messaging and kickback emails, integrates with other HubSpot apps
  • Sender – customizable newsletter templates, strong performance analytics, enhances user profiles via behavior analysis
  • Mail Chimp – easy-to-use dashboard, customizable audience segmentation, contact organization, tracks performance and user behavior, records feedback through survey analysis, automatic responses with their paid account, integrates with apps like Salesforce and Google Analytics

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Conclusion

Without proper organization, research, and analysis, the content developed for your marketing has a higher risk of falling flat and never reaching the audience for which it was intended. By implementing the proper tools and techniques, your content will not only be able to show up in search queries more easily, but also guide readers towards your product with messaging that relates to the solution they need. This allows your content to have the opportunity to show readers the value of your product and the trustworthiness of your brand, driving leads to take that next step towards converting into paying customers who are satisfied with the quality of work your company provides.