Boo! It’s that time of the year again, when stories of ghouls and ghosts come to life! Those stories might be scary, but ones about content marketing and your 2015 strategy shouldn’t be…!
Thrive have been attending a lot of events lately to help small and large businesses alike get their mind set on 2015 strategies and what they should implement.
It’s clear from speaking to attendees that a lot of companies are not yet thinking this way, but this is the perfect time to get your head around changes, budgets and best next moves.
Content Marketing is one of the biggest tools that a marketing department can implement and optimise. Equally, it's really scary.
Why?
If it goes wrong, it could prove fatal - not Halloween-horror-slasher-fatal, but pretty messy for your business.
Let us walk you through some of the scariest aspects of content marketing.
6 Facts & Stats To Make You Shudder!
1. By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their interaction with the enterprise without interacting with a human.
That is scary!! It means that you will no longer be a touch point with your customer. What it is subliminally saying, without saying it, is your website and social media is going to be the first point of contact. If that is the case, workflows and landing pages are going to have a serious impact. They will be how leads convert. This involves no human action or interaction with YOU as a person whatsoever.
Find out about the impact of social media with our different blogs here.
2. 63% of consumers need to hear company claims 3-5X before they actually believe it.
Why is this GREAT for content marketers? They might not hear you on the first tweet, blog post or website homepage, but they will hear you if you create high quality blog posts.
Why is it BAD news for non-content marketers? It proves just how vital content is to keeping an active relationship with all leads.
3. There are 6.8bn people on the planet. 5.1bn own a cell phone. 4.2mn own a toothbrush.
This is a bit disgusting, but fairly believable. If more people own a mobile phone than a toothbrush, there's a scary but real possibility that there are more people looking at your website than having good dental hygiene (maybe...).
Getting serious, smartphones are becoming big money and a big say in whether or not your company succeeds with online marketing or not. Attract users by being user friendly - that is mobile responsive and engaging.
The importance of mobile and responsive websites are made clear in this blog.
4. 52.4% of US smartphone owners use their phone for shopping activities while in a brick-and-mortar store.
We're probably all guilty of checking the online prices of an item while still in the shop. However, what this stat shows for content marketing is that people are focusing on mobile technologies for things they never normally would. Content marketing is seeing the same results.
People are building relationships with companies, without necessarily having a human touch point with the managers or team. Instead, they're reading blog posts and retweeting tweets - they're basing their potential custom with a business on online, pre-programmed, scheduled information.
Updating your website is vital to repeat visitors and lead nurturing. Improve your website design with our workbook.
5. 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.
It's still true that ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) is only worthwhile if it's page one.
As speed, convenience and mobile technology overtakes everything else as factors for a good user experience, you have to be in their face first, otherwise you get missed.
What is also interesting is how SEO has changed in the last few years alone.
6. 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance.
The biggest area that content marketing targets is the nurturing process. Being able to attract leads is one thing, but actually converting them is the hard part. Making a website visitor interested enough - and trust in you - to decide they're going to consider becoming a customer of yours.
Nurturing your leads is done through repeat content - find out about blogging here.
Thrive says...
As much as we love what content marketing can do for you, it takes TIME and EFFORT. If you aren't willing to put those in - or outsource them to someone who is - then you're really wasting the time, effort, money and resources that you are putting in.
Although these facts are intend to make you think, we don't actually think content marketing is "scary" - it's incredibly important for generating and nurturing leads.
We can help implement a strategy, get the ball rolling, support you or implement content marketing strategies for you.
Find out more by emailing hello@thriveability.co.uk!
