4 Steps to Increase Revenue with Marketing Content Strategy

Last Updated on January 20, 2021

Do you feel like you are spending too much time and money creating content? Do you feel like you are talking to a wall at times, and your customers and prospects aren’t listening? We’ve been there, too, and we understand how frustrating it can be for businesses to create a marketing content strategy.

The good news is that we’ve helped hundreds of clients clarify their message, spend less time on marketing that doesn’t work, and grow their businesses. You can do it too: follow these 4 steps to simplify your organization’s messaging and start generating more leads.

Step 1: Know Your Audience

We don’t mean spending a fortune on creating customer personas, archetypes, and doing demographic research. While that information is helpful, you can still create powerful, lead-generating content without it.

What you really need to know is who your customer is and what keeps them up at night. You need to uncover the deeper problems that prompt them to pick up the phone and call you. It is your job to help solve those problems through your content. This framework is called customer-centric messaging, and it really works. It works so well, in fact, that businesses who use this type of marketing content strategy and messaging are actually 60% more profitable (Deloitte and Touche).

What does this look like?

Company-Centric: Autotrader

The homepage shows a Range Rover being delivered to a neighborhood that looks nothing like the places we actually live. They encourage you to “Search Cars for Sale” and their sub-heading advertises “Great cars. Delivered to you. Get in.” Not very inspiring.

Customer-centric: CarMax

What someone buying a car really wants is more than just the car. They want to have space for their family, their stuff, and their life. More importantly, they want to get back to living their lives instead of spending hours searching for cars online. CarMax shows what success looks like for their customers, and as a result, they generated over $18 billion in revenue in 2018 (source).

Step 2: Know Yourself

What do you want to accomplish? Consider at what point in your sales process, or sales funnel, you think you are losing customers.

• Top-Level: Are customers seeing my company? Do they know we exist? (Review performance of ads, videos, blog posts, website content, paid search, and social media)
• Mid-Level: Are people signing up? Am I offering them value? (Review performance of blog posts, email marketing, PDF downloads, re-marketing, webinars, and social media).
• Bottom-Level: Are people converting? (Review performance of CTAs, offers, email marketing, and re-marketing).

Start with the step of the funnel that is “leaking” needs the most attention, and build your marketing content strategy around that.

For a more detailed look at what a sales funnel is and how it works, read our blog post on How to Build a Digital Marketing Sales Funnel.

Step 3: Know What’s Working

Boosting your content doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. Consider pieces of content that are already generating leads and driving sales for your company, like:

• Presentations or PDFs from your top salespeople
• An email that a customer service person sends to unhappy customers
• Training documents or videos used within your teams
• Trade show materials
• Website or social media content

Evaluate the performance of this content and decide what you may be able to repurpose. Then, you can decide where you have gaps that you’ll need to write new content to fill.

Step 4: Know Progress

One of the benefits of marketing digitally is that testing out new content is relatively low-risk. Unlike producing a billboard, if your website header is not generating phone calls, you can change it quickly and for free (or for very little cost). Start putting content out there, and don’t be afraid to take risks.

Get in the habit of reviewing your efforts regularly. How is that blog post performing? Did you get 10 calls from that email? Recognize when content is working, and do more of that.

If you want to dive deeper into this framework for creating content, watch the Power Hour video below.

Are you struggling to clarify your message and create content that gets leads? Request a Free Digital Assessment, and we’ll show you how you can start improving your website today.