Turn Your Website into an Inbound Marketing Tool

Does content marketing drive visitors to your website? Does your website contain a blog, videos, or white papers? Is it a destination for your visitors? Hopefully, your answer is yes to all the above. If not, that’s what we're here for. According to Hubspot, businesses with websites containing 401 – 1000 pages get six times more leads than those with only 51-100 pages. This is achieved by providing visitors with valuable content and a call to action when visiting your site. The key with content marketing is to provide a variety of options for your visitors. These can include blog posts, white papers, and even videos. By casting a wide net, and providing your readers different types of valuable content, your website can be used as an inbound marketing destination. Here, we will walk you through two elements that can transform your website through content marketing.

Curated Content Through Blogging

A blog can provide valuable information to your visitors. By creating content related to your industry, you can become a resource. A well-curated blog can quickly become the leading driver of traffic to your website. Blogs are great because they allow you to post a vast amount of information and help to organize your content. You have the ability to add metadata to your posts, which allows search engines to find your content and help increase your organic rankings. Blogs can give you a platform to share a variety of content like industry articles and how-to guides for your visitors, who will hopefully share across their social media channels. Be sure you aren’t losing potential traffic and include a social sharing mechanism like social media widgets to your site. This will allow readers to easily share your content and create connections with others who visit your site. Visitors can also engage with each post by providing commentary with their feedback and ideas for future posts. As a best practice, it’s best to post consistently with six to 15 blog posts per month. One easy tip to keep your readers on your blog for a longer period of time is to interlink your posts, so readers can move freely from one post to the next. This can also help lower your bounce rate and increase the average number of page views per visitor.

White Papers That Speak Volumes About Your Knowledge

Including white papers in your content marketing strategy can benefit your organization in a number of ways by:

• allowing you to share industry and technical knowledge,
• distributing your organization’s information,
• attracting potential prospects,
• increasing your newsletter signups
• generating publicity, especially across your social media channels.

The key to creating a successful white paper is to provide valuable solutions to problems shared by the readers or visitors to your site. By providing solutions to your readers, you are sharing your expert knowledge, which will entice them to return to your site for more valuable information. Building this trust with your readers can lead to becoming a valued resource, which could eventually lead to long-term prospects. A couple of other things to note are to provide a couple of top industry insights that will grab your readers. It will also help to separate your content with others in the industry. Be wary of people’s attention spans by keeping all documents to 12-14 pages. Lastly, be sure to include a call to action. Most commonly, you’ll see companies requiring a form submission in order to download the free white paper. This allows you the opportunity to reach out to your most engaged readers in the future. Look at your website as a valuable marketing component to your overall business. By incorporating a blog and white papers into your content marketing strategy, you will see huge gains in 2015 with your overall traffic and leads. If you are considering this strategy or need help with generating content, contact us at Forthea, to see how we can help turn your website into an inbound marketing destination.