How Online Chat Makes Your Content Strategy More Effective

How Online Chat Makes Your Content Strategy More Effective

Content marketing is incredibly popular these days, and it makes sense. Text is king when it comes to helping Google and other search engines understand what you do.

The more text your website contains that is relevant to your work, the easier it is for search engines to direct potential leads toward your site. However, content marketing is at its most effective when you know exactly why you are creating your content, why you are promoting it in a certain way, and what outcomes you want to result from that content.

Content marketing isn’t as simple as occasionally posting on a blog, at least not if you want to achieve results.

Defining Content Strategy

Every content marketing effort has a strategy, but for your content marketing to achieve maximum efficacy, it needs to also be an intentional, sales-focused strategy. Understanding content involves understanding client relationships:

  • What content will first bring your lead to the site?
  • What content will keep them browsing on your site, familiarizing themselves with your brand?
  • What links between content and sales can be established to make conversion a nearly seamless process?

Your strategy involves planning, long-term, how to make all of this content become conversions, and different pieces will involve different metrics: some pieces, for instance, will be content marketing landing pages, bringing in huge page views but not directly tied to sales that often (brand awareness matters).

Other pages will be the “closer” pages, the ones that sell your product incredibly persuasively and, hopefully, end with sales. Other content, like e-newsletters, do a mix of both items, and sometimes focus on other specific goals, like turning one-time customers into regular customers.

All the positive outcomes of content strategy, however, have something in common: customer engagement.

Understanding Content Strategy With Conversational Marketing 

Platforms like Drift exist in order to help you promote greater engagement between your staff and your customers; when you can’t be available, you can use scripts for bots that you create yourself to help your customers feel seen and acknowledged no matter what time it is on the day or night. Online chat is a way to make live messaging a key component of every single page of your website.

What’s exciting about these services in combination with the blogging element of your content strategy is that you can customize online chat options and prompts to the content of the page. If your customers still have a question, want to speak up on a topic, or want to thank you for your incredibly useful content, the chat box gives them a chance to engage, and the prompt you use can help them want to engage in particular ways.

The powerful connection between conversational marketing and content strategy is just starting to be fully understood, so the potential gains in sales aren’t even fully realized yet. There are some clear benefits to this synergy, however.

Five Benefits of Linking These Concepts On Your Site

  1. The “on-demand” nature of the internet has made even comments sections too slow for most customers. A pop-up chat bar that shows up as you finish skimming an article can be the exactly level of engagement, in the very second when you are interested, and allows for the “just-in-time” marketing push. Readers become engaged leads when they respond to a bot’s question or prompt after reading content.
  2. When your readers start chatting with your bot from different parts of your website, you are given better information about them when they reach out to one of your live staff with a question. You know what they’ve read already, and that information allows you to address their concern without sending them back to resources they’ve already seen. Knowledge is power in helping customers, and customers don’t stand for having their time wasted. This is your chance to show just how engaged you are.
  3. Content marketing works hard to avoid “sales-y” style in most of its content; after all, customers have read a lot of advertising copy, and many of them want content marketing to simply be informational, upbeat, and helpful content. This means, if a lead is not willing to engage with you about the topic of the product itself, they are more likely to ask questions that are focused more fully on the topic. By gaining their trust, it becomes much more natural for them to see your brand as a non-pushy, interesting source of content that, eventually, creates brand loyalty to your products as well. 
  4. The best content strategies take advantage of channels like social media to promote the content and make sure it is getting more views than just organic search engine traffic, and that information goes into how you make your next content strategy choices. The same can be said for conversational marketing: if you notice that people tend to live-chat with you on a few particular blog posts, take note! What is it about those pages that seems to spark up a conversation? Work to create more content that has that same spark of life, and you’ll reap the rewards in greater and greater brand awareness, sales, and loyalty.
  5. While noticing analytics is a great step, the actual conversations you get to have with your potential customers are, as always, the best rewards for the conversational marketing platform. If you feel resistance from a lead when chatting with them about your product, you can always use content strategy as a way to re-engage them: “What kind of posts would you like to see on our site, as a person interested in our topics?” People love to have their opinions solicited, and your content marketing team will love the chance to get straight-from-the-lead’s-thoughts feedback on how they are doing.

As you can see, making your content marketing effective involves garnering strong engagement, and that engagement is rooted in the ability to get leads and customers alike talking to you, in the moment, off-the-cuff.

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