These guys put their money where their mouth is and got results.
Say your traffic is down or you never really got your website off the ground like you wanted to. Or maybe you’re selling something specific like diving equipment or radio devices and you have a lot of material explaining the technical details, the features, how to use them, the benefits or why they’re better than the competition.
No matter what you want to sell online, whether it’s services or products, if you have the information you just need to find the best way to leverage it so that it gets you traffic and raises brand awareness.
Sometimes it’s as easy as educating your audience on what your product does or what a certain service is. The concept of copywriting, for example, isn’t common knowledge. Depending on how your client is, you still need to explain what it can do for you as a business.
Other times, you just need to rewrite your technical materials and put them on a user-friendly landing page that’ll get people to interact with the brand instead of sending over a product sheet.
Here are 2 strategies that worked.
Content marketing strategy nr. 1: How Ridester focused on long-form content and increased organic traffic
Depending on what you’re selling, whether it’s a product or a service, think of the 2 things: who you’re addressing but also, how much do they know about what you’re selling?
Sure, if you’re selling personalized mugs or private Spanish lessons, people will know right away what you’re offering but if you’ve chosen a less beaten path, then you might want to explain things a bit.
Like Ridester. They provide tailored content about the on-demand transportation industry. So, let’s say you’re in the delivery business, they’ll give you tips on how to earn more money delivering food on a weekend.
It’s safe to say it’s not 100% clear what they do from the get-go. Also, their organic traffic went down drastically at one point so they decided to take action.
One of the strategies they went for was to focus on informative long-form posts as part of their content marketing strategy, and educate their audience.
Research shows that detailed posts typically outrank shorter, less comprehensive blogs, and the average first-page search result on Google has over 1,400 words.
So, that’s exactly what they focused on.
One example is answering questions people leave in the comments section of your social media, your blog posts, your competition’s social media… everywhere. They went deep into cyberspace and found what people were looking for.
It seems that after revamping its long-form content, Ridester saw a 487.1% organic traffic increase and improved its search rankings for 16 search phrases.
Wowza!
Content marketing strategy nr 2: How International Fund for Agricultural Development chose a smooth landing page instead of a highly-technical report
Imagine a 30 page document that describes in detail the projects that were implemented over 4 years. Taking the time to gather all this information is, of course, very important because it showcases the results of the projects, which in this case, came down to the impact that was achieved by using certain funds.
What companies should never forget is that even management and the board of directors are human so form is everything.
You strip it down to the bare minimum, show the numbers and package everything in a lean 1 pager is golden - especially for people that have packed agendas.
That’s how the International Fund for Agricultural Development did it and I was lucky enough to be writing the copy for this ambitious endeavour. I say “ambitious” because when it comes to talking about your achievements, it’s very hard to decide what to cut out. Everything seems important either for the context, the implementation or the results. It’s not though.
So, I cut and trimmed, edited and rewrote until we landed on this.
My point is start with what you have, define who you need to impress and what they know about what you’re selling, and only THEN start writing or editing.
But that’s just me… thinking out loud.