Glossary Terms:
- Lead: A person who is considering your offering
- Entry/Landing Page: The first page on your website that a visitor sees.
- Conversion: When a lead takes your desired action, that equates to one conversion
- User Flow: The path a visitor takes once arriving on your website, the order of pages they visit
This is the second post in our Introduction to Website Marketing Series. In the previous post, we discussed prepping your website for success by creating a purpose statement, building a clear sitemap with essential pages, and testing the user experience for potential friction points.
The result should be a website set up in a way that describes your offering, builds trust, and has a clear path to convert leads.
That path begins with the entry or landing page, the first page a visitor "lands" on your website. With your efforts in step one, visitors should land and have no problem jumping around your essential pages and ultimately taking the action you are hoping for, whether that's applying for a scholarship, signing up for a major, or subscribing to a newsletter. In this post, we'll discuss maximizing your content strategy to generate traffic for your website.
Leveraging your competitive value
When writing your purpose statement, you reflected on what makes your offering different from your competitors. These differences are your selling points, and they support your website's purpose.
For many of our website clients, the value provided is knowledge. The content might be news items, blog posts, upcoming events, resources, or something else you offer to get your valuable expertise in front of your audience. No one knows your audience better than you. Consider how they consume information; this will tell you the best type of content to communicate your value.
Next, generate a list of topics you know your audience is interested in. The goal here is to create content your target audience is actively searching for and will benefit from.
To create this list:
- Expand on each of your competitive value points: Take time to think about what makes your offering different from your competitors.
- Research which questions your target audience is asking: By providing answers to these questions, you can draw new traffic to your site and encourage more browsing of your content.
- Analyze content from competing sites: Create more compelling, in-depth resources. Doing this can fill content gaps so that your audience has no reason to look elsewhere for information.
- Frequently asked questions: Jot down notes of common topics discussed with clients and create a resource on your website that others can reference and share.
- Use keyword research: Refresh your keyword research knowledge by referring to our post The Basics of Keyword Research.
Generate this list of topics and a plan to create each piece. Create a content calendar to publish consistently. With regular, high-quality content, you'll build a valuable resource library that demonstrates your expertise and provides sharing opportunities.
Extending your digital reach
The benefit of creating these value pages is that they are great for sharing. Post these pages across multiple channels:
- Share on your social media platforms where your audience spends the most time
- Include the content in email newsletters with engaging subject lines
- Optimize pages for search engines with strategic keywords and meta descriptions
- Promote pages through targeted paid media to reach new audiences
Use these marketing channels to drive traffic to your website. Meet your audience where they are with this content that demonstrates your value. These value pages will bring new traffic in, where visitors can follow your carefully designed user flow from entry page to conversion.
Next steps
Now that you're creating and sharing content consistently, it's essential to track performance to verify that your strategy is working.
Remember that content marketing is an iterative process. Review your analytics monthly to assess progress and make adjustments to your content calendar. By consistently monitoring what works, you can optimize your strategy to attract leads and demonstrate clear return on investment for your content marketing efforts.
Make sure you have access to and know how to navigate your website analytics dashboard. In the next post, we'll discuss how to tack your content's performance and analyze audience intent with your common website user flows.