Industry
In today’s world of information, the Internet is a universal helper, directing consumer choices and providing boundless opportunities for market research and shopping. Before making a purchase, most users study blog articles, video reviews, testimonials, and product images, and seek advice on forums.
On the other side of the screen, brands need to broadcast high-quality content to gain the trust and loyalty of their target audience. Since almost all mid-sized and large companies have branded websites, it can be challenging to overshadow competitors and win the favor of potential clients.
Creating a website or an online store is only the beginning of a long and thorny path. If you do not make any promotional efforts, your online platform is doomed to oblivion, buried pages-deep in search.
It is crucial to maintain lively and ongoing communication with your customers, satisfy their hunger for information, answer questions commonly asked in your niche, and resolve challenges that may arise while using your goods. Your communication should be open and multichannel, encompassing all possible ways to stay visible on the web.
The task of keeping customers engaged may seem way too tricky and expensive, but that is not always the case. A well-thought-out and highly customized content marketing strategy will save you from squandering your money and effort on irrelevant tactics and help you achieve impressive results, even on a modest budget.
The Challenge
The Clever team knows firsthand how to develop and implement content marketing strategies, delivering maximum value while expending minimal resources. We want to share our knowledge with a specific example.
One of our clients, a high-profile clinic, asked the Clever team to improve the performance of their website and brand exposure. When we undertook the project, it was in the following state:
- Extremely low traffic. The website was mostly visited by the company’s employees, regular customers, and contractors. There were few new clients visiting the site over an extended period of time.
- Random visitors came to the site to collect information rather than place orders. The existing content did not stimulate sales. Blog articles, product descriptions, and meta tags were lacking commercial keywords. The existing traffic did not increase the company’s revenue.
- The brand did not have any accounts on social media platforms.
- There was no content version optimized for mobile users.
- The company’s staff did not send emails to potential customers and did not post content on partner websites.
The project was assigned to us in a rather crude state, and a comprehensive content marketing campaign was needed to bring it to its current level.
Research
Building an effective content strategy is impossible without deep analysis of the target audience. It is extremely important for a marketer to confirm their hypotheses with facts, and develop a step-by-step action plan.
Collecting information is often the longest and most expensive stage.
A thorough market analysis, fact gathering, and hypotheses all contribute to the creation of win-win strategies, so the discovery process should be treated seriously.
Here are some questions to ask when developing a content marketing strategy:
- What content type would be most suitable for promoting the brand and leading potential clients through the customer journey? Each article, product description, image, or video should be created to stimulate desired customer behavior.
- What content is already available? How can it be reworked or updated?
- What content types do successful companies in the niche use?
- How often should different content types be posted?
- Where is it appropriate to use SEO and information styles? How can the brand deliver a selling message without being overly intrusive?
- What mission and corporate values does the brand project? How can they be reflected in content, in order to create a unique media image?
- What content marketing processes can be automated?
- What criteria should content meet to be broadcasted through different channels? YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, email, the company’s own website and other channels all require different approaches.
- How will you collect the contact data of potential clients?
- What metrics will you use to measure the success of your content marketing campaign?
The Solution
The Clever team’s content marketing strategy was focused on the following tasks:
- Increasing traffic and ensuring that people visit the website to seek medical services instead of passively scrolling pages.
- Establishing open and continuous communication with potential customers.
- Making the website user-friendly and visually appealing.
- Creating top-notch content to satisfy both SEO and information goals.
Here is how this strategy was realized, step-by-step.
1. Appealing Product Presentation
- We created a convenient catalog structure, filled it with detailed product descriptions, and refined the website’s design (reader-friendly fonts, sizes, and colors).
- Textual materials were diluted with visuals: we added juicy photos and demonstrative video tutorials.
- We added logical linking, calls to action, info on shipping and available payment options, smoothing the customer’s path to the checkout page.
2. Captivating Blog
At the beginning of our collaboration, the blog was viewed by the client as an ineffective sales tool, compared to the product catalog and other website elements. The clinic’s administration was reluctant to pay for articles, and relied on employees to provide blog content.
The Clever team had to convince the clinic’s staff of the value of professional writing. Healthcare professionals may know a great deal about medicine, but they are often unfamiliar with SEO principles, and do not know how to attract traffic to the website using the right keywords.
Doctors are unlikely to spend time blogging, especially if they see no value in it. Their texts may be full of complex medical terms that are unclear to average people, and no one is immune to grammar and spelling errors. A doctor can write a great article with helpful health tips, but complex terminology and missed commas can make a negative impression on readers.
After we convinced our client of the many advantages of outsourced writers and obtained their consent, we provided highly specialized articles on medicine and market features. We created a well-written scientific style that was both engaging and easy to read, both indispensable elements for any successful content marketing campaign.
Currently, the blog is regularly updated. We closely interact with the clinic’s staff to convey their messages to the target audience. Our writers ask doctors to comment on medical topics and controversial issues, and present their expert points of view in an interesting, engaging and reader-friendly version.
Most of our blog articles emphasize the advantages of the clinic’s medical approaches and provide useful tips on preventing various diseases or continuing treatment at home.
We balance selling with informative content to stimulate the site’s visitors to request the clinic’s services, without exerting too much advertising pressure. Apart from SEO and calls to action, our writers provide information that positively impacts readers’ lives.
3. Promotion on Social Media
Today almost everyone has an account on one or more social media platforms. People use social media for fun, relaxation, and finding valuable information. Users increasingly order various products and services in this booming environment. Social media promotion is an indispensable part of any strong content marketing strategy.
Each platform requires specific content that should differ from the articles shared on the website’s blog. The success of social media relies on vivid impressions rather than education. To leverage social media marketing, it is best to use attention-grabbing visuals and short videos, and avoid overloading posts with text. It is enough to list key ideas, explain their importance, and invite readers to follow a link to your website to read an extended version.
This strategy skyrocketed our client’s traffic. Links organically incorporated in social media posts brought new visitors to the website. In fact, we created our own media about medicine, where the latest innovations and breakthrough treatment approaches were reviewed and discussed. The healthcare center gained respect among the professional community, improved its brand exposure, and established contact with a large number of potential clients by using multiple information channels.
4. Mobile-Friendly Content
Viewing a website’s desktop version on a compact smartphone screen is uncomfortable and frustrating. Nobody wants to read long texts and strain their eyes viewing compressed images. In our case, we had to create specific mobile-friendly content for people accessing the client’s website from gadgets.
Product descriptions were shortened and the most important data was displayed first, while additional details were hidden in tabs. Clear, large, and readable fonts were used.
5. Email Marketing
The clinic held a number of promotions aimed at collecting an extensive email database. Discounts and free services were provided in exchange for clients’ contact data.
Our email marketers send weekly letters to people from the database, informing them about breakthrough treatment methods, the clinic’s awards and accomplishments, interesting propositions and bonuses, as well as symptoms and causes of diseases treated in the medical center.
6. Guest Posting
Our specialists researched the medical web community, selected websites with high domain authority, contacted the editors of their blogs and negotiated publishing of our client’s content.
Links incorporated in guest posts and anchorless mentioning of the brand on reputable online platforms have greatly benefited the website’s traffic.
Monitoring the Results
It is impossible to achieve lasting positive results without constantly testing and optimizing. The following metrics were used to analyze the efficiency of our content marketing campaign:
- Traffic (organic, social, referral, and direct);
- Number of new visitors to the site;
- Number of regular visitors;
- Behavior flow (visualization of customers’ path through the site);
- User demographics and location;
- Search rankings by keywords;
- Domain authority;
- Links earned from other websites;
- Page popularity;
- Bounce and exit rates;
- Average time spent on a page;
- Time of stay on the website;
- the number of subscribers, likes, and shares for each social media platform;
- The number and quality (positive/negative) of comments;
- Money and time spent on content creation;
- Content performance over time;
- Email openings and clicks;
- Brand visibility (the number of queries with brand’s name in search engines);
- Conversion ratios (the number of buyers / the number of visitors to the site);
- ROI (return on investment).
All these metrics are analyzed by the Clever team on a regular basis, mainly using Google Analytics. They help us improve our content marketing strategy, select the most efficient tactics, and achieve even better promotional results for our client.
Conclusion
With the bulk of work on the project behind us, and the only remaining task to regularly update content, we are able to summarize our experience and its impact on the client’s web traffic.
The main challenges we faced when realizing our content marketing campaign:
- The project’s need for continuous maintenance. To see a continuous increase in traffic, it is not enough to place a limited number of articles with strong keywords on the website’s blog, even if the content is evergreen. Popular keywords and search engine algorithms can change, making it necessary to update your SEO strategy on an ongoing basis.
- Since all our client’s social media accounts were created from scratch, we had to work hard to fill them with high-quality content, make the brand stand out from competitors, attract a large number of subscribers, and establish open, trusting communication with them.
- Since the original website was not optimized to bring commercial results, we had to fully change the style of content presentation and create a new online image for our client.
Notwithstanding the challenges, we achieved excellent results. Our strategy was carefully chosen and adjusted along the way. We thoroughly analyzed each step, and various approaches were tested before they were implemented. Our client received:
- A robust influx of traffic. Over time, less effort was needed to get the necessary number of clicks from search engines, partner websites, social media, and other channels. It is always easier to maintain an existing working system than to create one from scratch.
- The revised website projected the brand image of a credible expert rather than a commercial enterprise. The clinic now stands out from similar medical centers that focus on selling services rather than delivering value to their target audience.
- Our client’s authority gained recognition in its niche. Customers began to feel loyalty to the brand, even before contacting the clinic.
- The site received more requests for services. Thanks to “selling” keywords, people now visit the site to order medical services, not just to collect information.
Content marketing has now been integrated as an essential part of our client’s general marketing strategy. All corporate events and promotional solutions are now reflected online, helping our client expand their target audience and facilitating communication with existing and potential clients.
We hope this case study proves useful. If you have questions, do not hesitate to ask them in the comments feed.
