A multitude of strategies is available for optimising your presently underperforming content and converting it into a resounding success.
1) Analyse Your Data
First thing you need to determine – which of the posts or pages are most popular. Once you have identified which pages are most popular, it is necessary to analyse them in order to identify the elements of the pages that have led to their success. Could it be the structure, the tone, or the aesthetics?
Next, have a look at the pages with high bounce rate. It is a signal that visitors exit your site right after the first entry page.
This could mean that the content you are creating is not very interesting or is not what your audience wants to see. Take some time to carefully review all of the information presented on the following pages and look for parts that may need improvement.
Finally, look at the pages converting the most visitors into customers. These pages play a role in generating revenue for your business. Do examine the content on these web pages. Are there any prevailing themes or strategies that can be employed in your other content?
2) Review Your Target Audience
Your target audience is the clients or users likely to be interested in your offering (products or services).
Understanding the needs, interests, and pain points is crucial to creating good content that resonates with your users and buyers. Start by creating a buyer persona. It is a fictional character or representation of your brand or ideal customer.
Next, identify the pain points of your primary audience. What are the challenges that your buyers encounter in their everyday lives? In what ways do clients/users struggle and what obstacles do they need to overcome? By gaining a deeper understanding of their frustrations one can develop informative content that addresses their problems.
It’s also essential to identify the interests of your target audience. Which topics capture their attention? What varieties of content do they consume?
Review the needs of your primary audience. What features are most important to them?
3) Conduct Keyword Research
Use keyword research insights/tools to identify keywords and phrases.
These will give you insights into the keyword search volume. It will also provide information about the level of competition for each of your chosen keywords.
In choosing keywords, focus on long tail keywords more specific to your niche. e.g. instead of trying to rank for ‘food’ try the long tail keyword ‘cats favourite food’.
After you have identified your keywords, insert them in your content. However, it is advisable not to overuse these keywords. Keyword stuffing can hurt your SEO. It will make your content look spammy.
4) Refresh Old Content
As your business grows, and the industry evolves, it is crucial to update your content with current information, new statistics, and better visuals as the industry changes.
Start by identifying your old content that needs refreshing. Look for content that has outdated information, broken links, or poor visuals. Next, update your content with new information and statistics.
This could include further research, industry trends, or customer insights. Cite sources and provide links to reputable statistics and/or websites; this will help to establish your content as authoritative and trustworthy.
5) Add Visuals
Infographics are frequently lauded for their knack in simplifying and presenting information in an accessible and understandable manner.
Videos can work wonders in highlighting products or services – engaging your audience effectively.
For images, they should taken with adequate lighting and relevant to the content. Low-quality images or irrelevant visuals can hurt the engagement of your content.
Add alt tags and descriptions to images and videos.
6) Optimise for Mobile
Font size should be legible and do not use very long paragraphs of text. Instead, space your content over shorter, more frequent paragraphs and use subheadings. Use bullet points and numbered lists.
7) Experiment with Different Formats
Different users/individuals may have varying tastes and preferences; as a result of this diversity, some formats maybe appealing to some and not others. In order to better address the preferences and interests of audiences, you should also consider using various media formats. Videos, podcasts, webinars, and such like are some of the other relevant content options.
This way, you can find out what works best for your business audience and what they expect. In addition, using a variety of content types helps you reach everyone who likes to receive information in specific ways. Using this strategy, you are able to offer essential and interesting information that will be interesting for a large number of people, regardless of their medium – reading, watching or listening.
A key way to engage the audience is to create multimedia content. It could be videos showing the advantages of your products or services, webinars that could provide value to your audience or even a podcast that covers latest trends and news in the industry.
The use of observation and the analysis of the engagement metrics for various formats is vital during the implementation of format experimentation. It means examining view through rates, click through rates, share rates and comment rates. This valuable data enables you to identify the formats that your specific audience is most likely to resonate with.
8) Collaborate with Others
Guest blogging is a great way for people to build relationship with their peers. It is the practice of either writing a blog post for another website or letting someone else post a blog post on your website.
Through participating in this reciprocal interaction process,​ people can create meaningful connections and expand their circles of contacts​. When seeking a blogging partner​ it’s beneficial to seek out a partner with an audience demographic similar to yours​ who can offer a fresh viewpoint.
Lastly, a social media campaign is a good way to collaborate further. An effective approach would include the creation of a shared hashtag or the organisation of a collaborative social media contest.
9) Promote Your Content
In addition, a good caption can also give the user a brief idea of what to expect further on your website. It should capture the web user’s attention, and make him/her want to know more.
Use paid social media ads to easily steer your content towards the right people you want to reach.
You may also want to think about sending a regular newsletter to your email subscribers. This can be: weekly, monthly or quarterly basis and will provide them with access to your latest content with little effort on their part other than including some links to the appropriate content in the newsletter. For effective email marketing, you’d want a compelling subject line and preview text to encourage your subscribers to open and engage with your newsletter.
Besides using social media and email, it is also quite reasonable to try to spread the word about your content using other relevant platforms. Some of these channels may include industry forums, online communities or even the traditional media. It is also quite reasonable to try to get in touch with the influencers in your industry to get your content promoted and shared.
It is recommended to track and analyse the effectiveness of your promotion activities on a regular basis. Thus, you will be able to readjust your content promotion plan and focus on the platforms that help grow your business the most.
10) Use Paid Advertising
Google Ads is a very popular paid advertising network. It is a form of advertising where people can design their ads to show up in the search engine results whenever particular keywords are entered. In the end, they help to increase the number of visitors to their website through paid advertising.
Another very popular paid advertising channel is Facebook Ads. Using Facebook Ads, you can show your content to people who match specific demographics, interests and behaviours.
LinkedIn Ads is another effective paid advertising platform for B2B (business-to-business) businesses.
When using paid advertising to promote content, it is important to create interesting ads that will make people want to click through and visit your website.
11) Measure Results
This insightful knowledge will give you the tools to make the required changes to your approach in order to see outcomes.
There’s an array of tools at your disposal to gauge how well your content is performing; ranging from website analytics to tracking media metrics.
This is where website analytics like the ones from Google Analytics can come in handy. This powerful tool helps in tracking vital metrics like page views, post performance, bounce rates, and time spent on a page. When you get your hands on this valuable data, you will be able to find out which pages and what content is driving most people and getting most engagement. You can, therefore, make decisions on where to concentrate your efforts and effect the necessary changes to your content based on the information you obtain from this.
Social media metrics are very useful in measuring the performance of your social media content. Basic analytics tools like those that measure reach, engagement, and impressions are often available to users and are easily accessible on most platforms.
It is very important to define the general and specific objectives of the evaluation as well as performance indicators. For instance, one has to watch things like page views and unique visitors in order to improve web traffic. Another instance, to increase the number of leads, you will have to watch form submissions and email sign up. It is very important to set accurate results and performance metrics in order to assess your results properly.
Conclusion
By carefully analysing data, understanding target audience and trying out different formats, you have the capacity to turn your underperforming content into exceptional content.
If you are desperate with your content marketing strategy, you should try the following tips to improve your content and get the best results.
If you require further help
If you want to learn more about why your business has underperforming content on its website, we can help.
Our digital strategy services will allow you to devise a strategy that will help you understand your business better and engage with website users in a more effective way.
