Content Marketing

What are people reading about you when they are online? How can you use words on your site and in other online locations to help prospective customers find you and stay with you?

The key is to actively build content that reaches your audience right where they are now - searching and interacting online. Online marketing guru, David Meerman Scott, supports our view that content is what it’s all about:

Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.
The New Rules of Marketing & PR

Search engines pick up on content that is reliable and continually updated. The more you have of this kind of content, the more likely searchers will find you and link to your site.

This has a snowball effect, enabling your site to rise in the search rankings by a process of natural selection.

Our article on Search Marketing explains the importance of content in the search process. We separate out Content Marketing as one of our 4 marketing pillars because the success of your business depends heavily on the written word.

Content Marketing plays a vital part in each step of the marketing process:

Presence → Traffic → Conversation → Conversion → Follow-up

This article shows how you can drive this process simply by focusing on the quality of the content published on your website and in your Email Marketing.

Establish a presence - then bring in the traffic

A good website is well presented visually, but most importantly is rich in content. Given the choice between a beautiful glossy site and a site with great content, go for the great content every time. This is what online searchers are looking for, and it will make the difference between a website that merely has a presence on the web, and one that draws traffic.

Think about how searchers come to your site. Are they searching for pictures, flashy animation, pretty colours or clever graphics? Possibly, but most likely they are searching for information. They will key in words and phrases to find information that is focused on their search intention.

So its the information you provide online that will attract their attention. Here’s another quote from Meerman Scott’s New Rules:

Guess what? When I arrive at a site, you don’t need to grab my attention; you already have it!

This means crafting content that gives searchers what they’re looking for. Authority pages on each of your keywords are likely to be picked up by search engines when those keywords are typed in by searchers. So the searcher is then brought directly to a page that is highly relevant to their search.

For example, my recent search on ‘abseiling’ placed the tour company High ‘n’ Wild at the top of the organic search list. But it wasn’t the home page that appeared as the link - it was the page on abseiling within High ‘n’ Wild’s website. So my search took me straight to the relevant page. Third on the list was a page from adrenalin.com telling me about a beginner’s abseiling course in Sydney.

So you can see how the search engines pick up not just a website, but highly relevant pages from websites.

Knowing your keywords and using them wisely within clear authority pages is a vital Content Marketing strategy. A page that focuses on a single keyword (or phrase), and uses the keyword more than once within that page, is more likely to attract search on the same word or phrase.

Keeping your visitors engaged

Once visitors arrive at your site and find the kind of information they are searching for, you need to keep them engaged, encourage them to browse, prompt interaction and give them a reason to come back for more.

You want your visitors to regard you as a reliable source of information, advice, news and assistance. You want them to trust you and regard you as an authority on your style of travel experience or your destination.

All of this depends on good, carefully crafted content, that is regularly updated and added to including email broadcasts, newsletters, blog posts, authority pages, press clippings and testimonials.

The all-important bookings

And of course what you really want is bookings! This is where your content proves itself as a marketing tool. Attract your prospects, engage them in conversation to build trust, and the conversion process is so much easier.

Conversion can come relatively early in the process. If I’m really serious about wanting to abseil, I might go to one of the sites thrown up by my search and book there and then. A compelling authority page with a clear booking path can achieve conversion with very little conversation getting in between.

Beyond this, conversion often comes from the sales-letter process - a style of content that presents an offer at just the right time for your prospects. They already trust you, they are already engaged by what you have to say, and the content of your offer is your step to conversion.

Your offer will also be informed by the conversation you have already had with your prospects. You have a better idea of what travellers are looking for when they plan their trips online.

You will have gathered an email database from interested visitors who want to hear more about the experiences and destination you represent. And you can distribute your offer direct to the list as well as uploading it to your site. This isn’t spamming because the prospects on your list have already said they want to hear from you.

Your customer database is also crucial to your marketing because experience shows that:

• Attracting new customers is a lot harder than retaining current ones.
• Successful businesses find up to 80% of their business comes from around 20% of their customers.

This means that repeat bookings are as important to you as new ones, and good content in your Email Marketing will ensure the follow-up process encourages repeats as well as word-of-mouth marketing.