Below we’ve laid out a six-step content marketing strategy that has proven to effectively bring consistent results both in customer engagement and the ability to draw relevant organic traffic back to your site, products and services. While this should of course be tailored to your specific audience, it is an excellent foundation to begin seeing results through content marketing. We also give you a use-case as well, so you can see how the process has worked in the real world…and as they say, the proof is in the pudding.

Let’s get started…

Step 1: Systematically recognize quality content

Remove the guessing game and get results by tracking what content your website visitors find valuable. Hone in on the searchable, shareable, valuable content by listening to your visitors. Contact your customer or sales support team and get a report on the common questions they receive. Better yet, add a public-facing Q&A tool (like Answerbase Q&A Software or you can find a more complete list here) or traditional forum software (like Vbulletin or phpBB) to your site which not only gives you insights to popular topics but also creates high-value user generated content. Publicly posted questions can result in tens of thousands of page views per month.

Don’t believe us?  Take a look at the graph below shows an individual question page from one of our clients that receives over 11,000 pageviews on its own, with over 9,000 ORGANIC visits from Google per month and growing from just one question asked!

That is extremely valuable user generated content driving both page views and engagement, and a powerful way to identify in-demand content. Use Analytics tools to track your content’s performance to identify popular questions and determine the most valuable topics and let that demand determine what subjects you should be posting about.  Through this identification, you can post about topics that solve problems where there is a proven demand!  Check out our Tips for Identifying the Best Content Marketing Topics for more on this topic.

Step 2: Choose a content format suited to the subject matter.

After you determine the subject matter of your next post, determine the format that will best communicate to your audience. The content that is most helpful and is in the best format (most readable, scanable, etc.) will be seen and shared most.  It’s important that you identify which format most effectively communicates your message. Content options include:

• Traditional text blog posts
• Video tutorials
• Infographics
• Slide Shows
• Combination of text, images and video

Best practices here vary. For example, if you’re showing someone how to use a hammer don’t write a blog post with diagrams. Its simply not the best way of communicating the message, make a short helpful video that demonstrates how to use a hammer and the most useful content based on the user’s needs.  If you’re interested in reading more on this topic, check out our Guidelines for Choosing the Best Content Marketing Format.

Step 3: Put clear calls to action on your content pages.

According to Hubspot, B2C companies that blog receive 88% more leads than those who don’t but in order to see those results you must give your visitors appropriate calls to action to become a lead. Content marketing is no longer optional, and when it’s executed right it can turn into new business.

First, determine what your goal is for your content marketing efforts. What are you selling? What response do you want? This is the most important component of your content marketing strategy. Each piece needs to have a clear call to action which accomplishes your goals. There are ways you can accomplish this so you can still keep the content front-and-center but have clear calls to action…hovering divs can be great for this which stay on the page as you read through the content….see this example below.

Make no mistake–you don’t want it to be spammy. People want useful content. If your content is relevant to your market then you should be able to expose them to your products and services in a natural way through content marketing. If your goal is to sell products on your website, lead them to content-related product(s) or to your online store.  If your goal is to get people to submit a contact form to contact your sales staff, consider having an inquiry form on the page where they can ask questions about how your product or service can help them achieve their goals.

Finally, make sure your calls to action stay in front of visitors through remarketing (aka retargeting).  Using services like Google Adwords and Adroll, you can make ensure that visitors will continue to see your calls to action after they leave your site as they’re browsing around the internet.  This gives you the opportunity to continue advertising to your target audience, and gives your visitors the opportunity to engage your call to action well after their initial visit.

We can’t stress enough that there must be purpose behind each post, don’t post content for the sake of having new posts.  The most effective posts will give your target audience useful information and then the opportunity to respond to a relevant call to action which helps accomplish your business goals.  If you’re interested in more information on this topic, we encourage you to read our post about how to get real business results from content marketing with a strong call to action.

Step 4: Effectively distribute your content marketing material.

Now that you’re created a piece of valuable content, you need to get people to know that it is out there. Through the internet, high quality content can travel fast. To begin the process of getting content out to your audience, you must begin with a presence on social media. Here are a few “must do” action items for effective distribution:

4.1 ) Make sure your content is optimized for Search, to get maximum SEO results.

Get someone on your team who can make sure your site is optimized for search and knows the in and outs of ecommerce SEO. This will increase the impact of your content marketing efforts exponentially.

4.2) Distribute your content on your own social media accounts.

Post your new content with engaging headlines to each social network including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin. The more value your post gives its readers, the more it will get shared. Valuable content gets others to market for you, and with tools like HootSuite (check it out) available it’s never been easier to share!

While viral activity is great, you should also ensure the ongoing exposure and sharing of your content through advertising.  Each of the social networks have advertising services which allows you to promote your posts and consistently present them to your target audience.  This allows your content to stay alive and active well beyond the initial post, and can consistently attract relevant people to your site and services.

4.3) Make sure you have social sharing widgets on your content

Don’t let the initial exposure simply be a short term boost. As people discover your post and find it valuable make sure you have easy share tools on the post so they are able to share it with their friends, followers, and colleagues.

If you’re interested in seeing more content distribution tips, we encourage you to read our post detailing 6 Ways to Distribute Content Marketing More Effectively.

Step 5: Effectively measure your content marketing results

After you achieve the above steps, you should be (1) consistently creating great content that is valuable to your target audience, (2) consistently drawing new relevant eyes to your content, and (3) have the appropriate calls to action in place in order to have that audience engage and accomplish your business goals.  Now, its time to make sure you’re able to effectively measure results.

Make sure you are concentrating your efforts on areas that are most effective. What types of posts get the most traffic? Track this through analytic tools like Google Analytics. Monitor how many times a post has been shared. Tools like AddThis make this easy. A good analytics tool will give you detailed reports that allow you to effectively track your content’s response and growth.

What posts are getting the most attention? Is it customer service questions? Sales related? Focus your content on the questions that are drawing the most traffic and desired conversions. The market tells you what it wants. You can fill the demand. This is achieved by studying metrics. Learn from your activity and make sure every minute you spend is used to maximize your efforts. ROI is the bottom line.

Step 6: Learn from your results, repeat, and refine.

After going through Steps 1-5 several times, you should be able to navigate which posts work well, what you may need to improve, and where you should focus your resources. Take the information you’ve gleaned and refine the process. Focus your efforts on subjects that have the best chance of repeating earlier successes. Results are the bottom line. So give yourself the best chance of achieving success by streamlining your process and creating a fine-tuned machine of quality content marketing pieces that give consistent and measurable results.

There you are, a six step content strategy to achieve great content marketing results.

…So, about that pudding!

We wouldn’t just leave you hanging with a bunch of claims without any real world examples, so let’s dive into the pudding. Let us introduce you to Angie’s List, who provides user reviews on local businesses and services. Here’s an example of how Angie’s List followed this strategy to get clear results.

Angie’s List supports public Q&A (Powered by Answerbase) and discovered a high-demand topic by identifying one of their most popular questions: “How much should water heater installation cost?”.  In response, they created a more detailed article using the same title but covering the topic in more depth.  Just do a quick Google search for “How much should a water heater installation cost?” and see what pops up….surprised?  Also recognize how they’ve put all the appropriate calls to action in place in order to get the desired response from all their new visitors (as we showed in an earlier screenshot in Step 3).

Angie’s List followed each of the steps we covered:

• They identified high content demand by using user generated content through public Q&A. They responded to the demand.
• They created an informative, professional blog post with a consistent style that effectively communicates the topic.
• The call to action is clear. It includes a summary of what Angie’s List is, how to join Angie’s List, how to ask a question specific to the visitors’ need on the Q&A site and gives users the opportunity to subscribe to the newsletter. Each of these items engages the visitor based on his or her needs and accomplishes the goals of Angie’s List.
• After the post went live you can see that they distributed the post on their social media profiles like Twitter.
• The share options are easy to find. Located at the top of the page, visitors are able to easily share the informative post with their followers.

Take a look at some of our more detailed posts that unpack the above steps. We encourage you to take advantage of this strategy to create an effective content marketing strategy and get consistent results for your website and business.

For those who are interested, here is a link to the Hubspot Report that we reference earlier in the post.

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“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from website owners who had used a traditional forum to their website in the past, and were looking to more effective solution to facilitate customer engagement and community based support.” says David Givoni, Co-Founder of Answerbase.com.

From the dawn of the internet, traditional forum software was one of the first tools website owners had available to add to their sites in order to engage visitors and facilitate the creation of user-generated content.  As the Web 2.0 phenomenon introduced improved ways for users to interact and for website owners to reap the benefits of that interaction, forum software largely kept its same format.

At Answerbase we saw the opportunity to provide a next generation solution to website owners for engaging users, taking the lessons from the social media revolution and provide online community Q&A software that can better serve both website visitors and owners.

“We wanted to create a platform that gave visitors a better experience when trying to find solutions, while facilitating the creation of higher quality user-generated content which benefited the website owners by driving new organic traffic back to their site.” says Givoni.

While traditional forums have successfully facilitated interaction between visitors, content created through forums is typically in the form of ongoing conversations that can sometimes go on for pages.  We realized that this format is not friendly towards other users browsing the internet or website, as it’s difficult to identify valuable contributions.  This also leads to website owners spending time managing content and conversations that bring little value to a broader audience.  These shortcomings have created a demand from website owners for a system such as Answerbase’s Q&A platform that approaches user engagement in a different manner. We’ve received feedback from clients like GetApp.com that are consistent with those demands;

“When looking to provide a platform where our SMB visitors could interact and get specific answers from qualified web-based business software experts, forums left something to be desired.  We were focused on finding a solution that facilitated a much better ratio of high-value user-generated content that benefited both our current visitors and other users across the internet.  We found that Answerbase’s Q&A platform provided these benefits.” says Christophe, Founder of the business software marketplace Getapp.com.

The advantage that our community Q&A provides over forums is that our platform is focused specifically on problem solving; ensuring that all the content produced is relevant to anyone else on the internet who shares that same question.  Given the nature of this interaction, our clients only spend time managing content that is more likely to be valuable to other users across the internet.

Answerbase Q&A software also provides a better experience for users looking for answers to their questions on search engines.  Each question asked on an Answerbase Q&A site provides a new page optimized specifically for search engines, so those pages pop up in search results of users with similar questions.  Where a traditional forum makes visitors sift through pages of discussion to find the quality answers, Answerbase Q&A has a voting system worked into the platform that easily recognizes the best answers and highlights those solutions above the other available content.  This provides a much better experience for visitors, and better impression of both the website and its brand.

As the internet continues to evolve, it’s natural that the applications driving user engagement become more effective at providing value to both users and the websites who serve them.  Our goal here at Answerbase is to provide online tools that are doing just that.

Add Q&A to your site today and start what Answerbase can do for you.

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One of our customers experienced an average of 32% organic traffic growth month over month for a period of 12 straight months, clearly showing Answerbase’s ability to consistently attract new visitors to your site from search engines and continue to grow that activity.  Another client experienced an average of 19% organic traffic growth PER WEEK for the first two months after launch, again showing the demand for Q&A content as people search for solutions on search engines.

We asked one of our customers directly why they have community Q&A as a tool on their site, and her response was simply ‘This thing is a SEO Cash Cow’.  When we hear responses like that, we get a tremendous amount of satisfaction that our Q&A system is bringing value to our customer’s websites with its ability to drive new traffic.

We also wanted to report on some notable averages in the ability of each individual question posted on your Answerbase Q&A system to draw new visitors to your site, with some systems getting up to an average of 36 unique visitors per month for every question posted.  That’s encouraging given the fact that all of the questions are user generated, not requiring the overhead of hiring writers and editors to try and create relevant content.  This provides a low cost way for you to continuously create content that is both relevant to your site’s subject matter and that drives new traffic in return.

This activity on Q&A sites may not come as a surprise to any of you who have been following the recent trends in how people are searching for content.  A recent article by SEOMOZ communicates that there’s a large increase in the search volume of question queries, where users are actually searching in the form of questions which leads to organic traffic growth on Q&A systems.  That trend is making Q&A content very relevant for those search results, and in turn bringing impressive results to companies who integrate an Answerbase Q&A platform into their website.

As asking questions on the internet becomes the preferred way for people to find solutions for their problems, we think you’ll find that adding a Q&A section to your site is an effective way of engaging your audience and draw new traffic from search engines.  We look forward to serving you in that effort.

Setup a Q&A site today and start seeing similar results for your site.

The post Q&A Attracts New Search Engine Traffic to Your Site appeared first on Answerbase.

Using our powerful Q&A system with a wide range of features, we’ve packaged all of those capabilities into an easy to use and maintain online service (SaaS), enabling anyone to take advantage of the platform.  Whether you’re a part time blogger or a highly active enterprise client, Answerbase provides a range of service levels that can cater to any size site.

With Question and Answer sites getting more and more popular across the web (just look at Quora, Stackoverflow, Answerbag, Blurtit etc.) along with the continued growth of niche sites focused on a particular subject matter, the Answerbase platform can help drive the success of those sites by easily offering Q&A features to your users. Experience consistently growing organic traffic from search engines as your user generated content grows, allowing you to sell more advertisement or lead more users to your paid services and thus getting a great ROI. Answerbase has a large range of integration features and customization options, so you’re able to seamlessly add your Q&A features to your existing website.

We invite you to start your free trial today, and experience how social Q&A can work for you.

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