When it comes to content marketing, online platform developers make for a fantastic case study. Although companies like HubSpot, Shopify, WordPress or Drupal all have only one or two software products each to sell, their customer demographic itself is quite varied. Shopify is not only popular among enterprise manufacturers, but also among wholesale distributors and your neighborhood freelance photographer. Building a content marketing strategy that can equally appeal to all these different markets can be quite tricky. In this article, we will dig deeper into the techniques used by these platform businesses. This four-step guide can help your business optimize your content marketing strategy.
Break down your customer’s challenges into separate components
Regardless of the product sold, entrepreneurs all face similar challenges – how do you create a business plan? How does one make use of Facebook or Twitter to grow traffic? Or, how does one efficiently ship products to customers around the world? These are questions that entrepreneurs and marketers look up online even if they are not in the market for your product. HubSpot, for instance, has amazingly comprehensive articles for such topics that address all questions a prospective customer might have. Not surprisingly, such content topics help bring new visitors to the website from search engines and third party referrals. In addition to this, such guides and articles are also extremely useful for existing customers since it provides them with the advice required to continue using their software platform.
Target your customers uniquely
Launching an eCommerce business is not as simple as setting up a shop online. Depending on your industry, there are unique licenses to get a hold of or government regulations to follow. For instance, if you are a photographer, you may want to learn about the various copyright licenses. You must also know how to deal with situations where your work is stolen. On the other hand, a food entrepreneur will be curious to know more about dealing with expiry dates or FDA guidelines. Shopify has helpful articles that target these customer groups uniquely and addresses their issues separately. This helps the company attract these different kinds of entrepreneurs to their website even if they are not actually researching eCommerce tools.
Diversify your content channels
Businesses invest a significant chunk of their marketing budget on channels like SEO or Adwords. Customers who look up ‘money keywords’ for purchasing a product are a small percentage of the overall customer base. One look at the company blogs will tell you how diversified their content is. Every article on the blog specifically meets one of these three objectives – SEO, virality or conversions.
For instance, ‘How to’ articles are targeted at the search engine and help bring customers who are specifically searching for these related keywords. There are also listicles and articles focused on trends that are popular on social media channels like Facebook or Twitter. They help bring the target customer who is not actually searching for your product. Finally, a section of their blog offers success stories that nudge towards conversions. Content diversification is not just about the topic either. For example, the Shopify blog also has dozens of podcasts, videos and infographics that all reach out to prospects with unique consumption behavior.
Give customers what they want
Content does not always imply text, images or video. More generically, it is used to refer to all kinds of elements on your website that trigger the visitor to take relevant actions. In this context, Oracle has tons of content that gives the customers exactly what they want. This makes their site sticky and helps bring visitors back again to the site which improves conversion rates. For instance, the marketing cloud section of Oracle has tools to perform tasks like marketing appraisal and ROI calculation. On the other hand, entrepreneurs visiting Shopify have other types of content sections to help with their business. This includes installing custom themes for their website or engaging with freelancers to help them with their eCommerce website. In essence, these platform developers give customers what they want and they return the favor by sticking to the site.
Companies like Shopify, Oracle and HubSpot are market leaders in their respective industries. The techniques mentioned above are a result of tried and tested practices. Following them is a fantastic way to achieve the same level of content marketing success that these companies have.
