Dear Byron,
My marketing team seems frozen in the Ice Ages. They stay huddled in their cave all day, posting the same white papers they wrote for our company’s MySpace page a million years ago. We updated our website with keywords and made it SEO-friendly in 1999, but somehow that just doesn’t seem to be bringing much traffic to our website anymore.
Can you help thaw our frozen sales by bringing my content marketing into the 21st Century?
Wooly Wally
CEO Wooly Wally’s Mammoth Underwear Company
Hi Wooly,
Thank you for your letter. We’d like to see everyone in wooly mammoth underwear, so we are more than happy to help.
Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to improve your marketing return on investment – you just need to evolve your content marketing strategies to reach today’s sophisticated buyers.
Here are three tips to bring your website up to speed in the Information Age
1. Optimize your content for voice assistants
A 2017 survey by Pew Research Center found that nearly half of adults in the United States use digital voice assistants, which are programs that understand natural voice instructions and performs tasks on command. Juniper Research predicts the use of digital voice assistants, such as Siri, Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant, will triple between now and 2023.
Nearly half of voice assistant users speak commands or ask questions directly into their smartphones, while about 15 percent use voice assistants on their computers. Nearly one in five currently own a voice-enabled smart speaker, such as Alexa and Google Assistant, which is an internet-enabled speaker controlled by spoken commands. According to the Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Report from VoiceBot, the number of Americans using these speakers is growing.
When someone asks a question, the voice assistants search the internet for snippets that best answer the question asked. You can optimize your website in an FAQ-style format that poses questions your customers are likely to ask, and answers them in a short, accurate manner.
2. Try some old-fashioned storytelling
Today’s storytelling goes much further than dancing naked by the fire like our ancestors did – digital storytelling helps your customers understand your passion and dedication for your product or service. Storytelling helps create an emotional connection, and a case study by Harvard Business Review found that making an emotional connection is more important than customer satisfaction. The company mentioned in the case study increased its number of active customers by 15 percent and boosted same-store-sales growth by 50 percent simply by using a customer experience strategy based on emotional connection.
3. Post videos
Take advantage of the faster internet speeds available to most consumers these days by posting live and recorded videos. Things have come a long way since the days folks painted stories on the walls of caves.
People love watching live videos because they like living in the moment with their favorite brands. Live videos also create a line of communication between you and your customers. In fact, Content Marketing Institute says that audiences are 10 times more likely to contribute with questions and comments, and this type of user engagement can provide valuable feedback instantly.
Recorded videos can provide detailed information about your brand in a visually exciting way. Add meaningful text and colorful graphics, along with plenty of live action shots. People nowadays love that stuff.
Wally, please let me know if you need any assistance in bringing your content marketing efforts – and ROI – into a more evolved state. WriterAccess has highly experienced content marketing strategists that understand the needs of today’s consumers. We know you are just itching to get noticed in wooly mammoth underwear, and we are glad to help!
Lynn H has been a professional writer, providing exceptional content online and offline, for nearly 20 years. In that time, she has penned thousands of articles for doctors, universities, researchers, small businesses, nursing organizations, sole proprietors and more. She writes everything from blogs to white papers; her specialty is putting complex scientific concepts in simple terms. She specializes in medical writing, creating informative and engaging content for professionals in medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, medical manufacturing, chiropractics, optometry, emergency care, plastic surgery and others.
