1. Bounce Rate
For those that don't know, your bounce rate is the percentage of people that visit your website and leave before navigating to a page other than your homepage. What a high bounce rate tells us is that you're simply not engaging your visitors. They're not feeling compelled to visit additional pages on your site. Improve this with great calls-to-action, links to your blog posts, highly visible navigation, and by teasing content on other pages.
2. Competition
What is it that truly separates you from your competitors? It's likely that you and your competitors are selling very similar products or services. Sure, you may have a different take, special feature, or better endorsements, but what is really going to communicate your competitive advantage is your content. Your customers (or potential customers) should be able to tell very quickly that you're better than your competition, communicate that through great content creation services.
3. Because Shiny Things Distract Us
There's a good chance that you're already distracted. Come on man! You're only to #3! You can do it, push through. ;) Did you know that the average human attention span is less than that of a goldfish? No joke. You have 8 seconds to grab someone or they're out.
Thanks to the emergence of social media, DVR's, sattelite radio, microwaves, smart phones, Apple Watches, and pretty much everything else we use in our day to day lives, we have learned that we really don't have to wait for anything. Great content is the only chance you have to attract attention. People will read a great blog post (like this one ;) ) as long as you give them a reason to.
4. Engagement
We place a lot of emphasis on retweets, followers, likes, shares, favorites, comments, repins, +1's, visits, views, etc. today, but many businesses are still only talking about themselves. Treating social media like a megaphone for your sales pitch is a sure fire way to fail.
Facebook has implemented an algorythm to determine interest which has somewhat handcuffed business pages, but like on all social networks, great content is key. If you're pushing out great content on Facebook, you'll still get it seen. Great content gets people to engage and the more engagement you get, the more it's seen - I know this sounds very obvious, but it's often neglected. Being part of the community that you're trying to build is important. You have to understand what your followers want to see - and deliver that consistently.
5. Because Google Says So
Make no mistake about it, Google runs the world. Can you imagine what the world would look like without it? Well...I guess it would look a lot like 1997 - a great year for the Denver Broncos, but not for technology.
None of us actually have to wonder about anything anymore. Google it. One of the most important marketing tactics that you can implement is an SEO strategy. Everyone wants to be on the first page of Google, and even more at the #1 spot. Those rankings don't happen by accident. Google has very complex algorythms that determine how useful your information is for each search and one of the biggest factors is...you guessed it...content. New and interesting content to Google is like honey to a bee (in the HIVE). It's the definition of love. <3
So now for 2016, you're probably figuring out your marketing budget (check out our FREE Marketing Budget Templates) and trying to decide where your money is going to be best spent. It's time to put your money where your visitors eyes are...on great content.
Take this strategy with all of your marketing initiatives and you'll be successful. This means great content on your website, social media, blog, as well as radio commercials, billboards, direct mail, magazine ads, and anywhere else you're marketing.
Content truly is King.
Now that we've got you thinking about your own content, here is a FREE resource to improve your website content!
