Long story short: Look at the numbers. A data-driven content marketing strategy has emerged as a necessity for businesses aiming to attract qualified leads from organic search. By dissecting customer data and conducting meticulous research, marketers have the capacity to curate compelling and valuable content that profoundly resonates with the target audience. 

This thoughtful approach not only encourages meaningful engagement but is also designed to convert leads into devoted customers. The process of turning data into dineros unfolds through four key steps: 

1. Research
2. Strategy
3. Activation
4. Optimization

With a glimpse of how content marketing fuels organic lead generation, let’s turn our attention to the specific insights that will form the foundation for engaging, data-driven content (and remarkable results).

1️⃣ Research

What’s the best (and only) way to get the data that will serve as the foundation for your content strategy? Research, research, and more research. Qualitative and quantitative, hard and soft–now’s the time to follow your curiosity and find out everything you can about your audience, what makes them tick, where to find them, and what they need. 

Audience Research: Identifying Your Target Audience

Before starting the content creation process, you must clearly define your ideal customer profile(s) (ICP). By developing a detailed understanding of your target audiences, you can tailor your content to their preferences, pain points, and aspirations.

Creating Customer Personas

Craft detailed profiles that include demographic information, interests, behaviors, and goals of your target audience segments. This will help you empathize with your audience and create content that answers their questions, addresses their needs, and starts to connect the dots between their pain points and your solutions. The more your audience feels you understand them, the easier it will be to build trust.

Conducting Customer Research

Utilize as much first-person and third-party data as you can to gather insights into your audience’s needs, challenges, and motivations. By delving deeper into their preferences, you can better understand what type of content will resonate with them. Try these tactics to jumpstart your research process:

1. Surveys: Utilize surveys to gather valuable first-hand anecdotes and preferences. 
2. Customer Interviews: If possible, meet with customers or prospects to get a better understanding of their goals, pain points, and what they want from a product or service like yours, so you can tailor your content accordingly. 
3. Collab with Customer Support and Sales Teams: Engage closely with your client-facing teams to gather valuable feedback from customer conversations, allowing you to identify opportunities for improvement, where customers need the most help, and what trending topics come up frequently.
4. Case Studies and Testimonials: Research is a great catalyst for collecting case studies and testimonials from satisfied customers. You’ll be able to build trust with potential customers by getting specific about their needs and how your company addresses them. ABTSA: Always be 2 steps ahead!
5. Competitor Intel: Conduct thorough competitor analyses to understand the competitive landscape, identify your unique selling points, and differentiate your offerings, enabling you to position your company strategically in the market and in front of your audience.

Conducting thoughtful customer research sets the foundation for a strong content strategy aimed at generating quality leads. By leveraging what you know about your audience, you have the fuel to make informed decisions when planning content that speaks directly to what they care about. An audience-centric approach is the KEY🔑 to a successful content strategy that brings in the right leads at the right time. But there are more ways to get to know your audience and the information they seek, which is why we turn to keyword research to learn more. 

GA4 and Keyword Research: Identifying Organic Search Opportunities

At Tuff, we know that creating content that truly captures the attention of your target audience requires a deep understanding of not only their preferences, but also their behavior. By leveraging search and keyword data, we can craft content that will live a long, happy life online. Meaning – search engines can find it, your audience can use it, and it remains relevant and useful for weeks, months, years (?!) after publish. By combining metrics from GA4 and keyword research, you can uncover what you need to build an SEO-friendly content strategy. Here’s a good place to start:

• GA4 Analysis
  • GA4, the latest version of Google Analytics, offers advanced features/measurement that provide a comprehensive view of your website and marketing performance.
  • Use GA4’s enhanced measurement to track user interactions and behaviors across multiple devices and platforms.  providing a holistic understanding of your audience’s journey. Through that holistic view, you can identify patterns and trends that can guide your content strategy.
  • Leverage audience insights from GA4 to understand user demographics, interests, and engagement patterns. Then, segment your audience and tailor your content to their specific needs and preferences.
  • Content Performance: Analyze the effectiveness of your keywords by tracking key metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and time on page to see how your audience (or audience segments) interact with your content. 
  • Conversion Tracking: Multi-touchpoint conversion tracking can help you better understand which keywords and content contribute to conversions at each point in your audience’s journey. 

• Keyword Research

1. • Conduct keyword research using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to discover “hot” topics aligned with your audience’s search behavior. Check out search volume, keyword difficulty, and related terms and find the right balance of high demand and low competition to fill your keyword gaps.
   • Pay special attention to the intent behind popular search queries. Rather than focusing only on the words they search, try to understand their motivations, pain points, and desired outcomes when searching to get to the root of their needs.
   • Monitor your website’s SEO performance, tracking keyword rankings, organic traffic, and click-through rates. Use that data to refine your plan and continue to optimize for your audience, their needs, and the actions you want them to take. 

By integrating these data points, you can develop content ideas that both engage your audience and are also rooted in real behavior metrics. This data-driven approach will enable you to create highly engaging content that resonates with your target audience. This level of planning, when done right, will attract relevant traffic, increase visibility, and build long-term site authority. As we move onto the next section, we’ll discuss turning these data points and trends into a practical, usable, data-drenched content strategy. Let’s do this.

2️⃣ Building a Content Strategy

Building Content Pillars

After conducting your initial research, you’ll have uncovered and collected relevant topics and themes that align with your audiences’ search behavior. You’ll have enough data to identify your top target keywords, which will form the basis for developing content pillars that address your audience’s interests and challenges. 

Content pillars are a fundamental aspect of any successful content strategy. They serve as the backbone of your plan, guiding your content production and ensuring consistency and relevance across everything you produce. By organizing your content around central pillars (think: themes), you establish your website as a reliable and authoritative source for specific information, boosting your credibility for search engines and in the eyes of your audience. 

Creating content pillars based on search and audience data lets you organize and optimize your content for search engines while providing valuable info to your audience. It’s a strategic approach that not only improves your SEO performance but also establishes your expertise and builds trust with your readers. 

Identifying the Right Promotion Channels 

Choosing the right distribution channels is a critical aspect of developing a successful content strategy. Here’s how you can determine which channels will drive quality leads: 

• Historical Performance: Revisit the performance of previous content you’ve published. Tap into key metrics such as engagement, conversion rates, and of course lead volume and quality. Identify the channels that are driving the highest quality leads and focus your efforts on developing content tailored to them.
• Audience Data: Use your audience research to select channels where they are most likely to be present and engaged. Assess the relevance of each distribution channel to your content and target audience. Are they Tiktok users vs. newsletter subscribers? Do they attend industry conferences or consume mostly digital content? Are they more likely to Google something or search Instagram for info?
• Industry Best Practices: Stay up-to-date on the latest industry trends and best practices for content distribution. Look for successful case studies and examples of companies that share a similar target audience and see what their publishing patterns look like. What do their ads look like? Which blogs do they continue to promote month after month? That may give you an idea of their top-performing content.
• Start with Key Channels: Begin by focusing on a few key channels that have proven to be effective for your industry and/or target audience. Allocate your resources and efforts accordingly to maximize your impact on those channels. As you gain more insights and resources, you can scale to more channels and begin testing. 

Scheduling and Logistics

This one’s for all the planners and organizers out there–logistics 🤓 A consistent content publishing schedule is key to maintaining audience engagement and building trust, two important factors in attracting and converting quality leads. Plan your content creation and publishing process in advance, allowing enough time for research, writing, editing, publishing, and optimization. To streamline the workflow, develop a comprehensive content calendar as your single source of truth. Include essential details like content pillars, topics, keywords, formats, distribution channels, and publication dates. This structured approach speeds up resource allocation, provides transparency, and sets the stage for a smooth and consistent development process.

When planning your timeline, make sure to incorporate repurposed content into your plan to extend its reach and lifespan. Transform existing content into various formats like videos, infographics, blogs, or social media posts. Reach new audiences and reinforce your message across channels without extra production time.

Here’s a snapshot example of a content calendar for a project management software company:

By implementing a comprehensive schedule, you can ensure that your content reaches the right audience at the right time through planned keywords, rich content, and optimized publishing channels. This naturally leads us to the next component of a strategic marketing plan: the funnel. Let’s talk about how we plan for content that guides prospects through each stage of the funnel, ultimately converting engagement into valuable leads. 

Full-Funnel Content Marketing

At a glance, the marketing funnel consists of three sections: 

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): Grab their attention
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): Collect their contact info
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Make the sale!

For your content to make sense to the audience, it must not only align with keywords and address pain points, but it must also match where your audience is in “user journey”. By mapping out the touchpoints your audience has with your brand (from TOFU to BOFU) you can tailor your content to address their needs along the way. It’s the data that tells us what they need when! 

We lean on UX (User Experience) to guide the audience naturally to the next step of their journey. By offering opportunities for capturing contact information from interested visitors, you can nurture and convert them into paying customers over time. Strong calls-to-action (CTAs) play a key role in driving conversions. Place persuasive CTAs throughout your content, encouraging readers to take action and provide their contact details in exchange for information or resources.

By strategically incorporating these lead gen tactics into your content, you can optimize your content strategy to convert engagement into valuable leads. 

Setting Goals

To prove the success of your content marketing efforts, establish benchmarks and goals from the start. All goals should be specific to your brand and ladder up to business objectives, whether they’re increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or a combination of all three. Whatever you choose, it’s crucial to proactively define your objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and evaluate your progress. Setting specific, attainable, and time-bound goals will help you stay focused and measure the success of your content efforts. Here are three examples of tangible goals, broken down into two phases (think: crawling and walking) to get you started: 

Example Goal 1: Increase monthly website traffic

Drive more potential leads to the website by increasing the number of unique visitors. Expanding brand visibility and attracting a larger audience to the website increases the potential for lead generation and future conversion opportunities.

• Phase 1: Increase unique visitors by 20% (compared to the previous month).
  • This will be our initial benchmark to gauge progress and assess the effectiveness of the content strategy in attracting a larger audience.
• Phase 2: Increase organic traffic by 30% (compared to the previous quarter). 
  • The emphasis shifts to increasing organic traffic to the website within a quarterly time frame. This will tell us about the content’s ability to rank higher in search engine results and attract more qualified leads.

Example Goal 2: Improve lead quality through content

Attract high-quality leads by creating content that addresses their pain points, offers valuable insights, and positions the company as an industry thought leader. 

• Phase 1: Increase average time spent on site by 15% (compared to the previous month).
  • The focus is on engaging visitors through better site UX and content. A longer time on the site signals a higher level of interest and better lead quality.
• Phase 2: Increase conversion rate by 10% (compared to the previous quarter).
  • A higher conversion rate signifies that the content effectively convinces and motivates visitors to take the desired actions, indicating better lead quality.

Example Goal 3: Expand email subscriber base

Grow the email subscriber list to nurture into a loyal audience. A larger subscriber base provides a direct communication channel for further qualifying leads and driving conversions.

• Phase 1: Increase email subscribers by 25% (compared to the previous month).
  • Attract more sign-ups through successful lead generation content and improved UX.
• Phase 2: Improve email open rate by 10% (compared to the previous quarter).
  • The objective is to optimize email content and subject lines to increase open rates. A higher open rate indicates greater engagement and interest among email subscribers, resulting in better lead quality and potential conversions.

By focusing on increasing website traffic, improving lead quality, and expanding the subscriber base, your content strategy can achieve clear, measurable, and attributable results that directly impact the bottom line. With that data, you’re able to provide a better roadmap for attracting more potential leads, nurturing them through engaging content, and ultimately converting them into customers. 

As we’ve discussed in this section, you have the opportunity to address your audience’s pain points throughout their journey. By utilizing keyword and audience data to create content pillars, you can spark your audience’s interests and acknowledge their challenges. Choosing the right promotion channels and establishing a consistent publishing schedule allow you to systematically fill in the content gaps on your website while giving your audience exactly the information you KNOW they need. Setting specific goals and KPIs sets you up to prove the impact your content has before you even hit the launch button. That’s up next ➡️

3️⃣ Activating Your Data-Driven Content Strategy

Writing Content for SEO

Simply put, the best content empathizes with the audience’s pain points and provides practical solutions that just so happen to be related to your product or service. Show up where they’re searching, educate and inform, offer solutions, and collect leads. It’s as easy as that 😉

To make sure your blogs and videos and infographics and whatnot reach the right audience, they all must be optimized for search engines. By employing basic SEO best practices, you can increase your content’s visibility and attract people (re: qualified leads) actively searching for solutions related to you.

SEO Writing 101

Start by including your target keyword in the post title, preferably at the beginning, and mention the target keyword early in the article (ideally in the first sentence). Reinforce it naturally throughout the content, aiming for at least five mentions while maintaining a healthy keyword density of 1-3% (so if your article is 1,000 words, 10-30 of those words should be keywords). Don’t forget to incorporate related keywords to expand the scope of your content and cover various aspects of the topic that users might be interested in.

To add links to your blog, prioritize a methodical internal and external linking strategy. Avoid too many consecutive paragraphs without links, as it can negatively impact user experience and SEO. Include at about five internal links in each piece of content with keyword-optimized anchor text. Be mindful not to link to another page with the primary keyword you want to rank for, even internally. Distribute the links naturally and ensure they are all working properly.

Don’t forget readability! Use subheadings to break up the text, keep paragraphs concise (3-5 lines), and optimize images with keyword-optimized alt tags. Maintain a natural flow without keyword stuffing, and remember that online readers prefer shorter sentences and dislike large blocks of text. Include an enticing call to action or clear next steps to inspire action.

When writing, focus on providing value, solving problems, and delivering a seamless user experience to attract the right leads and improve quality overall. 

Publishing 

A well-executed publishing process is absolutely crucial in activating and maintaining a strong content strategy. It ensures that your content gets to your audience consistently, maximizing its impact and driving the greatest possible engagement. With the content calendar as your guide, you have a clear plan of action already in place. There are quite a few considerations to make before launch:

Start by establishing clear workflows and responsibilities. By defining roles upfront, everyone knows their tasks and deadlines, preventing bottlenecks and reducing errors or delays. Streamlining the workflow promotes collaboration and accountability across content creation, editing, proofreading, and publishing. The less time you spend on logistics, the more you can spend on the content and strategy itself.

Maintaining editorial standards ensures that your content reflects your brand’s voice, style, and mission, building trust and reinforcing your brand identity. Implementing a review and approval process guarantees quality control and accuracy, ultimately upholding the quality of content you produce. Leaning on automation tools, such as content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, HubSpot CMS, or Adobe Experience Manager. These tools provide a range of features to support content creation, distribution, and scheduling, enabling you to efficiently manage and automate your content strategy. By implementing some or all of these tactics, you can enhance efficiency, maintain quality, and deliver excellent content to your audience!

Now, let’s move on to the best (okay I’m biased) part of the process: reporting and optimization, where we analyze our results and make data-driven adjustments to further improve our content. It’s coming full circle now!

4️⃣ Reporting and Optimization

Reporting

Like most aspects of growth marketing, your reporting process simply must be structured and consistent in order to demonstrate success. First things first, you should always revisit your goals and KPIs. Take the time to reassess what you set out to achieve with your content. For example, if your goal was to increase website traffic and conversions, your KPIs may include metrics such as page views, click-through rates, and conversion rates. 

Quality ≠ Quantity

Next, pay attention to lead quality. To assess the quality of your leads, track their movement through (or out of) the funnel and collaborate with your sales team for additional context. They have valuable insights into the leads generated from your content and can provide first-hand feedback on the quality and conversion potential of leads your content has delivered. By working together, you can identify which content pieces are attracting high-quality leads that are more likely to convert into customers. This collaboration also helps ensure that your content aligns with the sales team’s objectives and that they have the necessary information to effectively nurture leads through the funnel. It’s a win-win 🤝

At the same time, make sure to assess the quality of your content itself. Look at metrics like engaged sessions in GA4, time spent on page, click-through rates, referrals, and bounce rates. These metrics provide insight into how well your content resonates with your target audience, captures their attention, and encourages further interaction. Further down the funnel, conversion metrics such as form submissions, newsletter sign-ups, and downloads, point directly to whether your content is generating those high-quality leads we’re after.  

Once you have all that juicy data, it’s time to uncover patterns, trends, and highly specific audience preferences. This deeper understanding will help you plan and optimize for even more data-driven, targeted, and engaging content that resonates with your ideal audience even better than before. 

Optimizing Your Content Strategy

To attract more qualified leads, refining and optimizing is the name of the game. Here’s how to jumpstart that process: 

Double Down on Success 📈

When you discover content that performs exceptionally well in terms of lead generation and engagement, you’ll want to sprinkle that magic into more content. Identify the key elements that contribute to its success and replicate them in your next content plan. The more data you collect, the stronger your plans become (and the better your results!)

Make it an Ongoing Process ♻️

Optimization should be an integral part of your content strategy cycle. Continuously monitor and analyze your content’s performance, making data-driven adjustments along the way (can we rework this content that’s not gaining traction, can we repurpose this winner for another audience?) Iterating on your content marketing strategy lets you supercharge its effectiveness in generating qualified leads while the gettin’s good. 

Our advice? Follow the numbers. Let your data be the heart of your marketing planning and content strategy. Marketers have access to so much information–and it’s up to us to use it wisely! Don’t let all your hard work go to waste. Report, analyze, optimize, and repeat. 

Embracing Data-Driven Content Marketing

Content lets us connect with people on a more personal level. By taking the time to understand their needs, interests, and preferences, we can build content that truly resonates with them, sparks genuine interest, and solves a pain point or two. When we tap into the insights we pull from (so, so much) data, we get to know our audience better than we did before, allowing us to create content that speaks directly to them, in the way that they want us to.

To effectively share our content, we rely on channels that help us connect with individuals in more useful ways. Our content and websites should guide the audience through a logical journey that actually addresses their real-life, in real-time, needs. 

By embracing data as our compass, we continuously adapt and refine our strategies, staying attuned to what truly matters to our audience, positioning us as a trusted resource. Ultimately, data-driven content allows us to infuse our online presence with humanistic elements, forging connections with a lasting impact.

Ready to rank higher and close the deal with your audience? The pros can take it from here 💪

Hannah Burks

Hey! I’m HB, the Head of Operations at Tuff. With a decade of experience across marketing and web, I specialize in complex problem-solving, strategic planning, and organic acquisition. My focus is on facilitating client growth, supporting our creative teams, and consistently improving efficiency across our org. Let’s chat!

The post Optimizing Your Content Marketing Strategy for High-Quality Lead Generation appeared first on Tuff.

There’s been a lot of talk about an economic downturn—and what that means for marketing budgets. In a recent survey, 75% of global brands said signals of a recession influenced their media budgets for 2023. 

Some have already seen their budgets shrink. While others are keeping or increasing their marketing budgets, but taking a much closer look at the return on investment (ROI). 

The challenge many marketers face now is how to do more with less money.

Regardless of the state of the economy, there are two main priorities you can focus on to make the most of your marketing dollars: 

• Spend smarter on paid media channels – Analyze data on your audience targeting, media channels, creative, and landing page performance to reveal where to put your money and what you need to improve. 
• Invest in owned media channels – A strong content strategy drives inbound traffic, leads, conversions, and revenue.  

As a growth marketing and content strategy agency, Tuff helps brand partners with paid and owned channels. However, in this article, we’ll focus on owned channels—in particular, your website, content, and search engine optimization (SEO). 

We’ll show you how to build a content strategy that helps reduce your paid marketing spend and contributes to customer acquisition, sales, and revenue. 

Table of contents 

• Why brands need a strong content strategy in 2023
• How to build an acquisition-centered content strategy
• Types of content that drive traffic and conversions

Why brands need a strong content strategy in 2023

When marketing budgets are tight, organic marketing shines. The main reason for this seems obvious—money. Here are the main reasons that investing in content marketing can save you money (and help you make more) in the long run. 

1. Get nearly free traffic

SEO is one of the few remaining ways to raise brand awareness and reach potential customers without paying for every click.

Unlike paid channels, you don’t pay for every click and sale that you get. You may pay upfront for the cost to create content. But, once you publish it, you don’t pay anything. If you’re on the first page of Google search results, you could drive hundreds to thousands of visitors from it every month for free. 

2. Attract higher-quality inbound leads

Instead of going to leads (outbound marketing), you get them to come to you (inbound marketing). Content is a core component to build an inbound marketing strategy. It helps you attract and convert new visitors and leads. Around 76% of marketers use content to generate leads.

According to Hubspot’s 2022 report, SEO is the second most effective channel for acquiring new customers, behind social media. 

When prospects and potential customers find your content organically and reach out to you, you’re more likely to make a sale. For over 60% of marketers, inbound marketing—SEO, blogs, and so on—is their highest quality lead source. 

3. Build brand awareness and educate customers

Content Marketing Institute’s (CMIs) 2022 report found that the top five goals marketers achieve through content marketing are:

• Raising brand awareness
• Building trust 
• Educating their audience   
• Building loyalty with clients and customers
• Generating leads and demand

If you only focus on ads, your brand can feel too transactional. Organic content tends to be more educational. 

For example, you might create content that answers a common question or pain point for customers. This type of content provides value without outright asking for anything in return, which builds trust and affinity. 

When customers are ready to buy, they might click on an ad or go directly to your website. However, there’s a significant chance they entered the funnel by consuming your content first.

How to build an acquisition-centered content strategy

All the benefits above might sound great, but they also rely on having a strong content strategy. Here’s how to build one like a pro. 

1. Outline clear, measurable goals

Every marketing strategy starts with goal-setting, but it’s even more important for content. Goals vary widely and tracking is challenging, so be as clear as possible. To set goals for content marketing, begin by answering these questions: 

• How does your marketing goal contribute to your bottom line? 
• To be successful, what milestones do you need to reach?
• How will you measure success? 
• When do you need to reach your goal? 

Some examples of content marketing goals could be to:

• Grow organic website traffic by at least 30% month-over-month (MoM)
• Attract at least 250 organic leads monthly 
• Increase organic revenue by 25% in six months

Once you’ve set a clear direction, then you can begin planning your content strategy. 

2. Choose content topics based on data

The biggest mistake that I see some brands make when planning content is choosing topics without data. 

Instead, they brainstorm themes and generate ideas that are based on assumptions. For example, let’s say a brand sells products and services to women business owners. The brand creates a week’s worth of content around Mother’s Day, including a listicle of Mother’s Day gift ideas. 

But, is that really what the audience wants? Simply because your audience is made up of women, it doesn’t mean they’re mothers. Plus, how does that topic relate to the service or solution you provide? 

When you base your content strategy on assumptions, at best, you’ll have little to no results. At worst, you could end up offending and losing your audience. 

When money is tight, the last thing you want to do is invest in creating content based on assumptions. So, what do you do instead? Use data to inform your content decisions. Here are two types of data you’ll need: 

• Audience data – this is where you uncover customer pain points, motivations, hesitations, and more factors that influence buying decisions. 
• Keyword data – this is the traditional SEO approach to building a content strategy, by looking at monthly keyword search volume and difficulty to rank. 

The best content strategies include both types of research. In the next two steps, we’ll walk you through how to do both—audience and keyword research—to create content strategies that consistently deliver results. 

3. Conduct audience research and create personas

Most audience research starts with basic demographic information—age, location, income, education, and so on. You can pull this information from: 

• Your current marketing channels (email, social media)
• Google Analytics and other attribution software
• Customer relationship management (CRM) tools 

However, this is only a start. True audience research goes beyond demographics and digs into qualitative data including: 

• Pain points
• Aspirations (desired outcomes)
• Motivations
• Hesitations
• Perceived value
• Other influences on buying decisions

There are many ways to collect qualitative audience data, but we recommend starting with two—message-mining and customer interviews or surveys. 

Message-mining example

Message-mining, also called review-mining, is when you pull feedback from your customer reviews on your website, Google, and sites like Trustpilot or G2. You can compile the reviews into a simple spreadsheet like this one. 

The process often reveals:

• Features and benefits your customers love
• Products and services you need to improve 
• Your unique value proposition

You can also message-mine competitor reviews. Positive reviews will show you where competitors are winning. Mixed and negative reviews reveal opportunities—they show you where you can beat competitors. 

The key is to look for patterns and de-prioritize outliers. What benefits or drawbacks appear the most? 

Example customer interview questions 

If you’re conducting interviews or surveys, here are sample questions to ask and which data point they reveal:

• Pain points – What problems does this product/service solve for you? 
• Aspirations – What do you hope to achieve by using this product/service? 
• Motivations – When did you realize you needed this product/service? 
• Hesitations – Was there anything about this product/service that you had questions or hesitations about? 
• Perceived value – What made you choose this product/service over other competitors?

We could devote an entire blog to audience research, and it still wouldn’t cover everything. If you have limited resources though, this will help you get the most important audience data. 

With all this data, you should have a better understanding of your audience to create personas. Audience personas should include demographics as well as qualitative research like pain points.

4. Perform keyword research 

How will you get your content in front of your audience? Most people won’t navigate directly to your website and go to your blog, so you need a way to distribute your content. 

For most businesses, that means SEO. First, you need to identify which searches your audience is putting in Google, and which you want to show up for—these are your keywords. 

To find them, you’ll conduct keyword research with a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. 

At the start of keyword research, it’s okay to have a lot of ideas. Later on, you’ll trim your list and prioritize keywords that will have the most impact on your bottom line. Now that you’ve done audience research, it’s easier to put yourself in your audience’s shoes too.

How to identify keywords

To identify keywords, begin by looking at your: 

• Paid keywords – Are there keywords in paid campaigns that you could rank for organically?
• Current rankings – What is your site ranking for currently? Which pieces of content could rank in a higher position if you refresh the content? 
• Competitors – What keywords and pieces of content drive organic traffic to your competitors’ sites?
• Audience and intent – Does the person searching this keyword align with your audience? How likely are they to convert to a lead or customer?

Paid keywords you can find in your Google Ads and Analytics account. 

Current rankings you can find in Google Search Console. You can also use keyword research tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. If you’re using Ahrefs, you’ll go to Site Explorer and drop in your website URL. Then, click on organic keywords from the left menu. 

If you’re using Semrush, you’ll go to Domain Overview, add your website URL, and hit Search.

Then, scroll down to Top Organic Keywords and click View details. For SEO research, you’ll want to exclude branded keywords. This is usually your company name, so it wouldn’t be a keyword that you target with content. 

For example, this is what it looks like if you put REI’s website into Semrush and filter out branded terms. Three of the top keywords that drive non-branded traffic to the site are: hiking shoes, paddle board, and sleeping bag. 

To find what keywords your competitors are ranking for, follow the same process or do a keyword gap analysis. 

For audience and intent, refer back to your audience research. You can also bring in data from sales and customer service teams to identify questions and pain points that arise after your initial research. 

Keyword research is only one part of SEO. To rank in search results, you’ll need to structure your content and website intentionally with best practices. You may need technical SEO experts to optimize your website too. 

Also, you may create content without SEO. But, that means you’ll need a budget for paid content distribution to get content in front of your target audience. 

5. Prioritize topics that relate to your products and services 

To make the most of your marketing dollars, you’ll narrow down your content strategy to focus on the most impactful topics.  

To do this, start with a map of your customer journey and ask:  

• What questions do potential customers have as they learn about your business? 
• How can you help answer those questions with content? 

Then, narrow down your choices further by asking: 

• What pain points does this content address and do I actually have a product or service that helps solve them? 

Every topic you choose should originate from data—either keyword or audience data. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t leave a small percentage open for experimentation. However, when marketing budgets are small, it’s harder to take those risks. 

You’ll also want to select topics that map back to a core product or service and include an internal link to those landing pages.  

6. Measure results and adjust 

How you measure success will ultimately depend on the goals you set at the start. For SEO content, the typical metrics for success focus on the quantity and quality of organic traffic. 

Here’s some examples of ways to measure results for content and SEO.  

SEO tends to take longer to see results than paid because you aren’t paying for a spot at the top of search results. Typically, we start to see results after three to six months. 

Now you have a solid plan, here’s how to execute it with high-quality content. 

Types of content that drive traffic and conversions

Part of the challenge of building a content strategy is deciding what types of content to create. There are so many options that it can lead to decision paralysis. 

We’ve created many types of content for B2C and B2B brands. Here are some types of content we recommend to drive inbound marketing efforts and focus on more traffic and conversions. 

1. Comparison content

For this, you create in-depth comparisons of you vs. your competitors. There are two main reasons to create comparison content. First, if you don’t have a lot of brand recognition, you could possibly steal some from your competitors that do. 

Second, it’s ideal content that sits at the consideration stage of the marketing funnel. Your prospects and customers are already researching your brand. They can either get the information from a third-party or even your competitors or hear it straight from you. 

Many companies from project management tools to bookkeeping software create comparison content. Gusto, for example, has an entire pillar page of comparison content. 

Each page features a comparison chart and an overview of the most important differences. ClickUp is another company that leans into comparison content. Comparison pages have easy to understand charts with key features. 

2. Articles about pricing  

If your company is being mindful of spending, your customers may be too. Be upfront about pricing, because it’s one of the first and most important factors that buyers look for on your website. 

You could also drive organic traffic and qualified leads to your website with content around pricing. There may be keywords that follow one of these formats: 

• How much does (your product or service) cost? 
• (Your product or service) pricing 
• (Your product or service) cost

For example, let’s say you search “how much does a mattress cost”. According to Semrush, there are over 6,600 monthly searches, and it’s possible to rank for the term. 

It could be a great keyword for a mattress company like Casper or Nectar to rank for organically. (Even though they are paying for paid shopping spots.)

On the other hand, Enterprise ranks in the number one spot for a pricing question: how much does it cost to rent a car? With over 6,600 monthly searches, it likely drives a large chunk of qualified traffic every month for free.

By the time someone searches for pricing, they’re close to buying. As a company, you want to show up when they are ready to buy. Prioritizing pricing content is one way to do that. 

3. Video content

Video is the top content type for marketers, followed by blogs and images, according to HubSpot’s latest marketing report. 

You can use all those types of content together and repurpose them on channels outside of your website like YouTube. 

Combining and repurposing content has two benefits. You save money by stretching how you use your creative assets, and you increase your content effectiveness. 

For example, on average, blogs with videos get 70% more organic traffic. 

Here are some examples of videos to include in your content strategy:

• Product demos 
• Short-form videos
• Tutorials

4. Templates and interactive content

Interactive content gets almost 53% more engagement than traditional static content. Examples of interactive content include: 

• Quizzes
• Calculators
• Webinars
• Video 
• Templates 
• Forms

Another perk that comes with creating interactive content is that you can use it for lead generation. For example, when potential customers take a quiz, they may provide their email along with information about themselves that helps you get to know them. 

These are only a few examples of content to get started. Along the way, you may add other types of content that are inspired by customer and audience research. 

Investing in a strong content strategy will help you spend smarter. But, remember to base your content decisions on data, like you would with any other marketing campaign.

Interested in working with Tuff on a content strategy for your business? Let’s talk!

The post Building an Inbound Content Strategy to Acquire Customers appeared first on Tuff.

Cleary Bikes is not just any kids bike brand. The company—based out of Oakland, CA—makes among the highest-quality kids bikes out there. Their philosophy: instead of giving your kid training wheels and a rickety frame as they’re taking their first pedal strokes on their own, give them a sized-down experience of what it’s really like to be on trail, in the air, or at the park. That way, they’ll be building real, transferable skills from the get-go. It’s a perspective that resonates. That’s among the reasons that, when we first met the folks at Cleary, we learned their organic revenue was already booming! 

The health of their organic traffic was one of the reasons we were eager to partner with them. We knew that continuing to put in the work to improve Google search results while layering on other acquisition channles would help us build a holistic, long-term, and scalable path to growth. 

When we look at partnering with a brand at Tuff, really any brand, but especially eCommerce, we examine their current traction to help us understand how we plan to craft our Growth Marketing Strategy to help them reach their goals.

For Cleary, our minds were blown (literally), when we saw that organic revenue was the largest sector of their overall revenue d2c eCommerce makeup. 

Here’s how their traffic looked prior to April when we started our partnership: 

Of their organic traffic, a large percentage of it converted due to Cleary’s success in showcasing the benefits of their bikes, the high quality of their messaging, and the overall praise from their customer base. 

From a growth perspective, we could see that a great formula for growing Cleary’s revenue would be to increase the volume of quality organic traffic to the site. 

This step by step guide lays out how we were able to develop an SEO Growth Content Strategy to increase Cleary’s organic traffic by getting them to rank on page one on Google for keywords specific to their business. 

Step 1: Lay The Technical SEO Content Foundation

No matter what you’re selling – SaaS, physical products, or a service – having the correct Technical SEO foundation for your performance content to work from is the most important thing you can do. 

With Cleary, they happened to be in the middle of a website overhaul so making some of our big changes was a no-brainer for their website and easy to implement. 

Step one was identifying tactics and updates we could implement to help us earn a website health score over 90%. A high health score helps our performance content rank faster and more efficiently. To get to the bottom of what was keeping us from better site heath, we first needed to run a SEO site audit. 

The results of this audit showed us what to change and included information about page errors, broken links, and more. The site audit also shows us how to fix those errors. 

In addition to the website audit solutions, we also provided Cleary with information about how best to migrate their website. 

Our biggest fear with their website migration and with any website migration is that we’ll lose our organic traction and need to rebuild from square one. This is not a great scenario to confront, so the only way to keep that from happening was to make sure the website migration process was accompanied by a strong SEO perspective.

Here are some of the suggestions we made: 

• Setting up redirects on the server side for product pages, collections, etc. 
• Switching to WP Engine servers. 
• Using a third party migration tool like Cart2Cart

The final suggestions we made addressed Cleary’s product page descriptions and collection page descriptions. We noticed that most of Cleary’s rankings were coming from their home page. To help diversify the high-ranking pages as well as lead high-intent users further into the funnel, we worked with their team to develop SEO-focused copy for the mentioned page descriptions. 

Step 2: Develop A Strategic Content Strategy

As the decade-old saying goes “Content is King!” 

Yes that’s true, but not if the content itself is total garbage 💩. 

To develop an informed content strategy, it’s imperative to do some research. A great place to start is to first run a keyword gap audit against your brand’s competitors. Here’s the one we did for Cleary to show us where we were weak against their competitor Guardian Bikes. 

As you can see in the above “Missing” category, Cleary didn’t have any ranking keywords (KWs) related to bike sizing. Therefore, we determined that our first piece of content needed to be related to sizing. 

Step 3: Produce Content, Publish, Repeat 

This first piece of content wasn’t just a normal article, instead, we created a main hub page, which we called Kids Bike Sizing Guide. This is designed to be a sort of center around which all of our following sizing content could sit. This clustered approach—essentially similar to a whike wheel hub and its spokes—helps communicate to search engine algorithms that Cleary truly is an expert in this topic and therefore should appear at the top of search results.

Leveraging this one hub page, we were able to help Cleary rank for multiple KWs related to kids bike sizing, which tied back into the data we saw in our Competitor Keyword Gap Analysis. Examples of our focus KWs for this hub page were: kids bike sizing guide, bike size guide, bike wheel size chart, bike size chart.

Once we had our hub page developed we began developing auxiliary content pages that were related to our hub page and would help us boost its ranking through internal linking. 

Examples of these auxiliary content pages included a “Bike For X-Year Old Series” that featured more than four content pieces related to kids bike sizes that we could use to support our hub page. 

From there, we were in a great position to begin supporting our other hub pages like our product and collection pages using high volume KWs related to Cleary’s industry, missing and weak topics (from Keyword Gap Analysis), and full-funnel strategy content. 

Step 4: Improve Google Search Results  

Within 60 days, we started to see encouraging results with our Growth Content Strategy for Cleary. 

Step 5: Keep Repeating The Formula

Just because you land on page one for specific terms doesn’t mean you’ll stay on it forever. Similarly, if you haven’t gotten onto page one for a specific KW, that doesn’t mean you won’t. 

Growth content is a long-term solution, not a quick fix, but you’ll see key indicators of growth like higher search rankings and new traffic within 30-60 days of publishing in most cases. Typically, within four to five months you should see significant traction toward your goals.

Excited about growing your organic traffic but not quite sure where to start? We’ve got your back. Let’s talk about how to level up your site traffic and land you on page one. 

The post “Bikes:” How We Helped Cleary Rank on Page 1 And Snag a Slice of the 135k Monthly Search Volume appeared first on Tuff.

So you’ve determined that a growth-focused content strategy has definitively moved up your priority list. We wholeheartedly approve. A holistic SEO content strategy really pulls its weight in the acquisition department. It’s a great compliment to a paid strategy, and although it doesn’t drive immediate wins like a Facebook or Google Ads campaign can, the power it has to be an integral pillar of real, sustainable growth makes it an important strategy for almost any company serious about growing over time.

Before you jump in both feet, though, it’s important to lay the groundwork. And a super important part of that is identifying the right competitors.

Here at Tuff when we’re creating a content strategy for one of our clients, we’ll think of competitors in two different ways. 

1. An organization that directly competes with you; your customer or clients might consistently pitch you against them. 
2. The competitor that ranks high on the search terms we’d like to rank for. 

Step One: Define Your Market Competitors

A market competitor is an organization that directly competes with you in your market or industry; your customer or clients might consistently pitch you against them.

If you’ve been in business for any amount of time, you should be familiar with your market competitors. You likely performed competitive research about your market and industry before you even started your business and incorporated it into your business plan. 

Why is it so essential to research your market competitors? There are tons of reasons, including:

• Differentiating yourself from the competition
• Replicating their strengths
• Leveraging their weaknesses to your advantage
• Honing in the market your product or service
• Staying ahead of trends in your industry

It’s also important for us at Tuff to know. It’s a foundational part of our onboarding process and helps guide our strategic recommendations. We’ll lean on you to bring us juicy information here – so if you haven’t identified these organizations yet, here’s how to get started.

Interview customers and clients

Competitive research can seem overwhelming – where do you even start? Reaching out to your clients and customers is a great first step. Interview both new and long-time customers to determine not only what brought them to your company, but what keeps them coming back. 

Phone calls and email are reliable ways to gather this type of information. You can also incorporate social media by asking your followers to fill out a survey. Both qualitative (descriptive) and quantitative (numerical) information will be useful to inform your business and marketing strategies. 

Talk to your sales and customer service teams 

You need more than external data to create a well-rounded competitive analysis. Don’t ignore your internal teams – they have a wealth of information about your competitors that you won’t be able to get anywhere else. You especially need to talk to your sales and customer service teams. 

Your sales team will have great insights from pitches and discovery calls, where they’re sure to hear a lot about what’s great and not-so-great about your competitors. And your customer service team has probably gotten an earful about what your competitors do better than you. Make sure you create an environment of trust and confidentiality so they feel comfortable being honest.

Find the right tools

There’s never a shortage of tools in the marketing industry, and that’s true of competitive research, too. Which one (or more) is right for you?

• Klue: Research and track your competitors through a combination of news tracking and internal data, then track them so you know when they change their website, update their products or get new customer reviews. 
• Crayon: Capture data from hundreds of millions of sources and use AI to filter it down into key insights. Identify and follow market trends to stay ahead of the competition. 
• FirstRain: Get high-quality and relevant information that’s categorized, prioritized and ready to be put into action. Stay up-to-date on current information like management changes, M&A and industry trends.
• Kompyte: Differentiate your product or service with information about your competition’s features, pricing and messaging, learn what works for them and discover how it all fits into a high-level view of your market.

Enlist help from the pros 

Don’t have the time to perform competitive research yourself? We’re not afraid to tell you that this isn’t necessarily our expertise. But there are companies out there that focus specifically on digging into this type of information – and hiring one can be a smart move for enterprise-level businesses.

If you have the resources to spend, getting help from the pros can actually be more efficient than doing it yourself. Just make sure the company you choose is fluent in your industry and check their references.

Step Two: Hone in On Your SEO Competitors

An SEO competitor is an organization that ranks highly on the search terms we’d like to rank for. 

Your SEO competitors are the businesses you’ll be directly competing with in order to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). While SEO competitors sometimes overlap with market competitors this list will likely shorter than the first. It could also be composed of businesses that aren’t direct competitors, for example one that is within your industry but has a different product or service than you. 

Once you identify your competitors, you can create a plan of attack to understand what content is generating their strong results, and how you can do better. 

This all starts with focused competitive research. And the benefits of doing so go far beyond the satisfaction of unseating your competitor from the number one spot.

What are the benefits of SEO competitive research? There are tons of reasons, including:

• Increasing organic website traffic
• Driving high-quality traffic to your site
• Improving conversions by providing value to potential customers
• Earning more revenue and grow your business

This is Tuff’s wheelhouse; our bread and butter. We’ll perform and leverage SEO competitive research to create content strategies that outrank your competitors and win on critical keywords. Here’s how we identify your SEO competitors. 

Identify your keywords 

Your SEO competitors are only your competitors because they have keywords you want. To identify competitors through keywords, you must know what keywords you want! What are the keywords that your best customer is most likely to use to find your service? What are related keywords and longtail keywords?

Now narrow down your list using the following criteria:

• Relevance. Will this keyword bring you the type of traffic you want? Is it highly relevant to your business goals?
• Business strength. Is your business strong in this area or topic? Will a search engine believe that you’re an expert?
• Current rankings. Are you currently ranking on page two or three for a keyword? That will make it easier for you to reach page one. 
• Volume. Monthly volume isn’t the end-all, be-all (in fact, sometimes you may want to choose lower volume keywords). But it does give you an idea of what people are searching for. 

Find your competitors

Now you can identify your competitors for your chosen keywords. You can choose the free way: manually searching Google by typing in each keyword and taking note of the businesses that show up on page one – but that can be time-consuming. It’s much more efficient to use a tool like Semrush to see who is ranking for each keyword.

The best way is to have someone do it for you. Tuff will conduct a full on-page SEO analysis, including choosing the keywords that are right for you, identifying your competitors and building you a strategy that can beat them!

Think you’re ready to fire up your content engine with Tuff? Let’s talk!

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post A Two-Step Guide to Identifying Your Competitors appeared first on Tuff.

SEO is a fast-paced world. It seems like every day there’s an update, a new best practice or a new tool to learn. As soon as you get down the basics of technical SEO, you learn there’s a whole different side to it: content strategy. 

A holistic SEO strategy that includes technical SEO as well as on-page growth content is essential to increasing organic traffic – and helping to improve lead generation, acquisition, and revenue. It’s also highly personalized to your business and involves a lot of moving pieces. Here’s how to ensure your SEO content strategy is effective and efficient.

What is growth content?

Growth content includes landing pages, blogs, product pages, and so on that are designed to rank in Google. When you appear at the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages), people who are searching for the particular topics you are targeting will discover your brand, click through to your website, and – if your growth content strategy does its job – stay there and make a purchase.

So how do you make a successful growth content strategy? At Tuff, we use site traffic analysis, competitive review, and keyword gap analysis to create a strategy for building content that’s always helpful, engaging, informative, and that gives you a timeline and projections that put the future in focus. 

Do I need a growth content strategy?

Got your eye on long-term growth? Chances are you need a content strategy. True, paid ads drive quick wins, but real staying power and long-term revenue growth comes from a content strategy designed to drive (and keep!) stronger, more engaged traffic over time. 

Some content strategies work more quickly than others – for example, refreshing existing content and filling gaps in your buyer funnel are both “low-hanging fruit.” But overall, a holistic SEO content strategy isn’t meant to be a quick fix. It’s a series of actions and content pieces that build up your credibility over time until you’re outranking your competition and bringing more customers to your site.

Step 1: Do your research

Before you dive in, take a step back and do your research. A truly holistic strategy includes elements of content analysis, audience research, and SEO analysis. 

• Who are my competitors? You can’t outrank your competitors without identifying them first. We think of competitors in two different ways. One type of competitor is an organization that directly competes with you; agents or sellers might consistently pitch you against them. The other is the competitor that ranks high on the search terms we’d like to rank for. 
• What are my competitors doing? In addition to performing an SEO competitive analysis, we also take a deep dive into our competitors’ existing content. What does their content look like? How regularly are they publishing? You’ll want to stand out just enough in terms of tone of voice and imagery, while also following established best practices.
• Who is my target audience? Defining your target audience helps you choose your content topics and build a strategy that answers their questions. That’s why we work so hard to define and understand a target audience for your growth content strategy.
• What tools do I use? There are many SEO tools out there. We use SEMRush to perform a keyword gap analysis to glean important takeaways.

Step 2: Define your strategy

All that research you did in step 1 will reveal the content strategy that will benefit you the most – but you must know where to look. Research will reveal different gaps and goals for everyone, so there’s no real blueprint here. This is where it’s super helpful to have the guidance of an expert that can spot opportunities and overlay a strategy designed to be efficient, effective, and keep goals in sight. 

We have tons of examples of growth marketing strategies we can share with you. Here’s one we compiled for a client with a relatively new business and a site that didn’t have much content:

• Create content to capture searches that are at the top of the funnel. This means focusing on long-term keywords to grab impressions and clicks at the beginning of the customer journey.
• Ensure all pieces of content are rich with keywords and, more importantly, that those keywords are followed by useful information for SMEs.
• Target high-traffic keywords and create content that will capture traffic. We want to go after industry-specific terms that the customers you want are searching for.
• Ensure your landing pages are working for you. We’ll test your landing pages to ensure they’re answering audience questions and helping to initiate action.
• Creating guides, how-tos, and informational content for your blog. This will help us construct pillars that we can back link to creating a content web.

Step 3: Determine your focus keywords

No SEO strategy is complete without keywords. As part of on-page SEO, they’re vital to ensuring that whatever is produced is targeted and strategic. Google is clear on how to get your content to rank: Answer your audience’s questions in a concise, authoritative way. But what should your keywords be?

After you perform a keyword gap analysis among your competitors look for opportunities in the 10,000+ keywords where the competition is lower (<75) – lower competition means you’ll have a better chance to rank. Then whittle those down to a more manageable number.

Next hone in on projections. If you start with a pillar piece, you can estimate that if you get on page 1 you can get a piece of the total keyword traffic volume. Do this by taking the total volume of keywords for that piece of content and estimating around 15% of that total.

Sound complicated? It’s just another day on the job for our SEO experts.  

Step 4: Set traffic targets

Growth marketing always comes back to one thing: your goals. And when it comes to SEO content strategy, one of the most important growth marketing metrics is traffic: 60% of marketers say that inbound – which includes SEO and blog content – is their highest quality source of leads. When your traffic goes up, your leads and revenue should follow.

In most cases, you’ll want to see key indicators of growth such as higher search rankings and new traffic within 60–90 days of publishing. Then, within four to five months you’ll want to see significant traction toward your client acquisition goals. 

Based on your existing organic growth and your growth content plan, benchmark what your organic traffic is like now and set a goal for how much you want it to increase. Then, take the CVR of your current organic traffic and use it to make a projection about how many new customers/clients your new strategy will drive. 

Step 5: Execute and report

It’s go time. Content is most effective when it’s published consistently over time, so put together your content calendar and get writing. If you’re overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content, enlist help. You can find freelance writers on Upwork, LinkedIn, Fiverr, and more. 

Provide them with an outline of the topic and keywords, plus guidelines on your brand identity and style. Even though this is performance content designed to generate traffic, it will also serve as an introduction to your brand for many people, so make sure your tone of voice is consistent and on point. 

Creating and managing a holistic SEO content strategy is pretty involved. Use a project management software to stay organized (we use Trello). You’ll also want to keep a simple spreadsheet that showcases performance and helps you understand what’s generating the most traction over time. SEO content strategy is an ongoing process that is always being updated, refined, and improved to get the best results. 

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post What Does a Holistic SEO Content Strategy Look Like? appeared first on Tuff.