A website content audit is a process of assessing and analyzing the performance of your site content.

Conducting such audits is absolutely necessary.

Why?

Poor on-page search engine optimization (SEO), broken links, and disorganized posts are some of the many issues that can arise when you create content at scale. Also, with the passage of time, these issues can compound, hurting your rankings, conversion rates, audience engagement, and eventually your bottom line.

Plus, if you don’t revisit the content, it can rapidly lose its relevance, become outdated, or get outperformed by your competition.

A content audit helps you take a detailed look at your website’s content to see how it’s performing and to make sure your content is relevant, engaging, and effective.

If you want to know more about a website content audit and how to successfully perform it, read on:

What Is a Website Content Audit?

A content audit is a process in which you systematically analyze and assess all your website’s content. Regardless of a corporation or a small business, a website content audit can benefit any company irrespective of its size.

Performing a content audit is a time-taking process, but it’s an incredibly effective method that helps you understand the performance of your website to take necessary actions. The knowledge you gain during the process sheds light on your audiences, your organization, and helps elevate your content strategy.

Why Do You Need to Conduct a Content Audit?

Running content audits is important if you want to move ahead in your industry. You need to dedicate time to run such audits in order to know about any gaps and to produce better content. You can’t just keep producing content and forget about it, thinking your job is done.

Take a look at these stats that emphasize the importance of performing a content audit:

• ​​65% of companies whose content marketing is successful perform content audits more than twice annually.
• 46% of companies whose content marketing did not succeed in 2021 didn’t perform any content audits.

Here’s a closer look at the benefits of running such an audit:

• Analyzing your content’s performance helps in making data-backed decisions about the pages you should improve.
• You are able to recognize SEO opportunities and content gaps, which you can fill with fresh, interactive content.
• You get to know the pages on your site that aren’t optimized for SEO. For example, some pages may have a poor heading structure.
• You get to improve the quality of content on your site and offer an upgraded reader experience.
• It helps you check for content that you can repurpose.

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Note:

There will be times when performing a content audit becomes absolutely essential. Run a content audit if:

• You are redesigning your site.
• You created your website a few years back and haven’t performed an audit till now.
• You have inherited a content marketing strategy from another team or simply don’t have a clear strategy.
• You think you’ve produced content on all possible topics that fall in your niche.

How to Approach a Content Audit?

How you should approach a content audit depends on your goal behind conducting it. Here’s a detailed look at some possible content audit goals:

1. Improve SEO Results

If you want to conduct a content audit to improve your results from SEO, then you need to perform an SEO content audit and an overall SEO site audit. The reason you need to conduct the SEO audit is to know which pages are getting the most organic traffic and/or which pages are ranking.

Tip: Use Google Analytics to identify the pages that have garnered the most views over time. You can then use this information to recognize pages that hold the potential to rank in the top 10 search results. Also, when you conduct the SEO content audit, you would need to look at title tags, duplicate content, meta descriptions, backlinks, and alt text.

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2. Boost Audience Engagement

If you want to use a content audit to boost your audience engagement, you can focus your content audit process on recognizing what kind of content your audience loves to engage with the most. This information will help you generate that content in the future that you know is going to be popular among your audience.

3. Increase Conversion Rate

If you are looking to boost overall conversions with the insights you gain from a content audit, you need to check the pages with the best user experience and the pages that get you the most leads and sales. Doing so provides valuable information that will help you improve your other pages.

Content Audit Tools

Before we discuss how to conduct a content audit, you should know about some important tools. Certain software tools form a crucial part of the process of content auditing. You can use them to automate a greater part of the process instead of doing everything manually. Here’s a list of these tools:

1. Ubersuggest

Ubrersuggest can help you conduct a content audit to improve your SEO. All you need to do is open the tool, type in your URL, click “Search,” and then click “Site Audit.”

The result will be a snapshot of the prevalent SEO problems on your website and how critical they are. This offers a quick overall look at how your site is doing. And the best part is, it doesn’t cost anything.

2. Google Analytics

You can use Google Analytics to determine traffic data for all the pages and compare the performance of each page.

Note: In favor of Google Analytics 4, Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023. Before completing your content audit, you should make the switch to GA4 (if you haven’t already).

3. Broken Link Checkers

When you start analyzing your content, use Ahrefs, Integrity, and Dead Link Checker to search for and fix broken links.

4. Content Inventory

Use a content inventory tool such as DynoMapper or Screaming Frog instead of manually pulling each content link associated with your site. It will save tonnes of your time and you eliminate the risk of overlooking anything.

How Do You Perform a Content Audit?

If you want to know how to conduct a content audit, here is a complete list of steps:

1. Make a List of Your Content Assets

As a first step, create an inventory of your content assets.

Why, you may ask?

This is because when you see all of your assets in a single place, it’s more convenient to analyze content performance, highlight areas that need improvement, and update each content asset in a methodical way.

A tool you can use to extract content assets from your site is the Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool. When you use this tool, ensure you export the data into a spreadsheet and add relevant data points such as target keyword, meta description, number of images, word count, etc. for each content piece.

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Another thing you need to include in the spreadsheet is traffic data for each page. Take the help of Google Analytics for this. This way, you will be able to analyze content performance alongside technical SEO metrics.

Note: You can add a lot of data points and stats alongside each content piece. But you need to see what data is relevant to you according to the goals you want to achieve by performing a content audit.

2. Make a List of Content Issues to Check For

You need to analyze all your content assets after adding them in a single place.

Check each content piece to know how it’s performing. Typically, here’s a list of things you need to check for:

• Content Gaps: Go through your content assets and check whether something is missing in your content. Are there target markets you haven’t spoken to? Are there topics you haven’t produced content on yet?
• Outdated Content: You need to check for content that you need to update. Your site visitors don’t want to read outdated content. Even the search engines overlook it.
• Target Keyword: Check if a content piece targets a particular keyword and include it in the copy.
• Duplicate Content: Search engines give priority to new content. So, if you have duplicate content on your posts and pages, it’s time to remove or rewrite them.
• Metadata: See if you have meta descriptions and titles for all pages. You also need to check which of the descriptions need to be updated.
• Word Count: Check the word count of your pages to see if it needs to be cut down or updated for any of the pages. Your pages and posts should have enough words to optimize for SEO.
• Image Data: Go through the images and see if they have a descriptive title and alt tag. This helps make sure your images are accessibility-friendly and optimized for SEO.

Note: When you check for content issues, ensure you write a note next to every asset stating why it needs improvement, if any.

3. Resolve Content Issues

The last step in our list of content audit steps is resolving content issues.

As you can’t address all your content issues in one go, you need to prioritize which ones to tackle first. One strategy you can follow is group to each optimization issue and resolve them together. For instance, you can fix all the image issues, then update meta data on every page, and so on.

Another route that you can take to prioritize which content issues you should tackle first is to use the tool Ubersuggest. All you need to do is perform an SEO audit on this tool, and you will get recommendations on the basis of an issue’s difficulty as well as SEO impact.

To get a number of quick wins, consider tackling tasks with a high SEO impact and low difficulty first.

Note: At the time of addressing content issues, don’t be afraid to ask for help to split up the work. You and your colleagues can work on different issues instead of one person handling all the work. This will help save tremendous time and improve overall efficiency.

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Wrapping It Up

You may get overwhelmed by looking at all the content audit steps at first. But this shouldn’t stop you from conducting an effective content audit. Performing content audits helps you move in the right direction when it comes to improving your content marketing strategy.

Sure, performing a content audit will take up your resources and time, but it will also help you gain some extremely valuable insights. So, it will be worth it in the end! Perform a new audit at least once a year to check for gaps in your content and to know what and what isn’t working. All the best!

When you think about SEO and content, there is a high chance that you may end up focusing on just one thing – producing fresh content.

But it’s equally important to focus on your “existing content.” This means, removing low-performing and outdated content from your site.

Now, you may wonder, what’s the point of focusing on content that’s already present on your site?

This is because your old content can be negatively affecting your company’s growth. It can be the reason for some of your lagging traffic.

A process called “content pruning” helps remove low-performing and outdated content from your site.

It involves getting rid of content that has no value or usefulness and contains potentially harmful advice. It lets other content, which has potential, to flourish. The content pruning process also helps ensure that your link authority flows only to relevant pages.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the full benefits of content pruning and the steps involved in this process. Let’s begin.

What Is Content Pruning?

Let’s discuss what content pruning is before we move on to discussing its benefits.

Content pruning involves removing or updating content which weighs down a site and hampers its performance. When this dead weight is removed, the website’s overall health increases.

Chances are, you may have heard of the term “pruning.” It is a gardening term that means trimming or cutting back. If you think about it, content pruning is almost the same as pruning a tree. When you prune a tree, you remove the dead leaves and branches. All the tree’s resources then start to go to the parts that you want to grow. This helps increase the overall health of the tree.

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Now, you may be wondering, what kind of content is typically pruned? Here is a list:

• Pages with thin content or duplicate content.
• Pages with outdated information.
• Pages that are not or won’t ever get engagement or traffic.

Why Is Content Pruning Important?

Now, coming to the benefits of content pruning. Here’s a closer look:

1. Better User Experience

Content pruning provides an improved user experience to your site visitors. This is because this process lowers the risk of your site visitors finding any confusing or outdated information on your site.

2. Better Content Quality

Content pruning boosts the overall quality of your content by ‘pruning’ the content that doesn’t add any value.

3. Improves Metrics

Because pruning content leads to enhanced overall content quality, it improves metrics such as conversion rate, time on page, and bounce rate.

4. Speeds Up Indexing of Your Best Content

Another major benefit of content pruning is that it results in faster indexing of your best content.

Now, how is this possible?

This is because content pruning ensures that search engines no longer have to sift through old content pages.

Is Content Pruning Required Only for Large Websites?

Regardless of your website size, you would want your site visitors to find useful and updated information, right? Hence, content pruning is recommended both for large (10,000 pages) and small websites.

When Should You Prune Your Content?

Content pruning is not a one-time process. You need to do it continuously.

We recommend that you do it on a monthly basis. Whenever you create a new piece of content, keep an eye on its performance and state.

The reason we suggest you do regular pruning is because you have a lot to gain from pruning content. You must also go for massive pruning exercises once or twice a year.

To do content pruning on a monthly basis, you need to first complete one full content pruning cycle (talked about in the next section).

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Content Pruning Process

The content pruning process involves the following three steps:

• Content Inventory: Create an overview of your entire content
• Content Audit: Assess your content’s performance
• Decide the Fate of Your Content: Determine what you need to do with the underperforming content. In this step, you will decide whether to remove it or go for an alternate option.

Step 1: Content Inventory

Make a list of all your content.

Also include PDF files, images, and videos.

Next, supplement this list with an export from your CMS and backlink data from a tool (we recommend Ahrefs). Also include data from Google Search Console, your web analytics tool, and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Note: Ensure you eliminate any duplicates.

After you follow all these steps, you will be left with a list of unique URLs. This is the overview of your content.

Now, for every content piece in your list, add the following information:

• Its target audience
• The goal(s) you aim to achieve with it
• The search queries it should be ranking for

Step 2: Content Audit

You need to carry out a content audit to score how well your content is performing.

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Take the final list you have created from the previous step and add:

1. General Performance (visits and conversions in the last 6 months)

For pages, you will find the amount of traffic and conversions in your web analytics tool. For embedded videos, you will find this information in the platform you use to embed the videos. And for downloadable images and PDFs, you will get to know the amount of traffic and conversions if you are tracking clicks on links.

2. Organic Performance (visits and conversions from the last 6 months)

You can find the conversion numbers and the number of visits for all your content types (pages, videos, PDFs, and images) in Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and your web analytics tool.

3. Social Performance (visits, shares, and conversions from the last 6 months)

You can know the number of likes and shares in a tool called BuzzSumo. For conversions and visits, you can get to know it from your web analytics tool.

4. If It Contains Outdated Information or Not

Use smart search queries in Google to check for mentions of any previous years in your site. This will help you know if your content contains outdated information.

5. If It Has Thin Content or Not

As per Google, thin content is content with “little or no added value.”

You can check for such content with the help of Screaming Frog.

6. If It’s Cannibalizing Other Content or Not

You can find cannibalizing content by looking for pages that don’t have unique H1 headings, meta descriptions, and title tags. Also look at pages that are ranking for the same queries.

7. The Numbers of External Domains Linking to Your Pages, and Internal Links

To find the number of external domains linking to a URL, you can use Ahrefs.

And to find the number of internal links to a URL, you can use Google Search Console. Open it, click on “links,” and choose “Top linked pages — internally.”

After you add all this information, you may find certain content that doesn’t cater to any purpose. For instance, you may get to know that there are different pages that are telling the same story. You may also find pages over-optimized to the point where people can barely read them!

Step 3: Determining Your Content’s Fate

In this step, you need to mark all the content in a spreadsheet that:

• Isn’t getting any organic traffic
• Offers old information
• Is cannibalizing other content
• Shows poor social media performance
• Has thin content
• Isn’t getting any traffic in general
• Has few external and internal links

You can call all of the above “potential pruning candidates.” But instead of going ahead and removing this kind of content, you can also consider making it non-indexable or improving it.

Improving the Content

Check which content you can get back in shape by carrying out some basic on-page SEO. See if you can rework the title, headings, and/or meta descriptions. Also check if you can get rid of outdated sections and add a few sections that are based on recent developments.

Trimming, Updating, and Moving the Content

You can also think about repurposing certain content. All you need to do is trim it, update it, and move it to an FAQ section, for example. Also, if you have a lot of weak pages on the same topic, you can merge their content to make a single, strong page.

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Note: In case you have outdated content that you think will still be useful, you can do the following:

• Ensure you let the visitors know the date on which it was last updated.
• Include links of any up-to-date resources you may have.
• Add a disclaimer stating that it may contain outdated information.

Making Content Non-Indexable

There can be cases where the content is useful for visitors, but not for search engines. For example blog tags. When used the right way, they are helpful for visitors to navigate around a site. But the pages themselves offer zero value from an SEO point of view.

Removing Content

A word of caution here. When you decide to get rid of low-performing content, your organic traffic can get impacted. Also, when you disavow links, we recommend that you don’t remove all of them at once.

Wrapping It Up

All set and done, you are now in a more informed position to do content pruning. Carefully follow the steps we listed above (creating a content inventory list, conducting a content audit, and deciding your content’s fate and what to do with it) and you are set to reap the benefits of content pruning!

Content pruning is a process that helps maintain your website and boosts the overall quality of your content. It not only improves user experience but also speeds up the indexing of your best content. Ensure you don’t keep putting it off for later as it can negatively impact your SEO strategy’s success.

A word of advice: Always think ahead and carefully plan your content marketing efforts. This will help limit the need for content pruning.

User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most potent tools marketers can use to promote their brand.

But what really is user-generated content?

It can be any content, such as videos, reviews, images, text, etc. that people create rather than brands.

As compared to brand-pushed marketing content, UGC is regarded as the most trustworthy, authentic, and reliable form of content. If you see the latest statistics, 92% of customers trust the recommendations and reviews shared by individuals and not advertisements.

You can imagine UGC as a vote of confidence. If you observe the current scenario, any brand's biggest fans can be seen writing reviews, snapping pictures, and publishing blog posts promoting its services and products, many a time without any prompting.

In all, user-generated content is a killer asset, and can completely change the game for your business. In this post, we unearth the benefits of this kind of content and how your business can leverage it for successful growth. Let's begin:

What is User-Generated Content and Why Is it Important?

User-generated content is any content users create and share based on their opinions, feedback, ideas, or experiences. Different social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook are the hub of this kind of content. Also, with comments sections on blogs, the ability to publish content for free with a single click, and digital forums, UGC is at an all-time high.

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Now that we are done with the definition, let's look at why user-generated content is important:

UGC simply boosts your credibility by outsourcing content creation to users.

It is effective content that builds authenticity and trust in your brand, further saving your financial resources and organization time!

Owing to its many benefits, 86% of companies have added UGC to their marketing strategy.

Here's more on why businesses are increasingly focusing on displaying user-generated content on different platforms:

1. A Win-Win Situation for Both You and Your Fans

User-generated content puts your customers front and center, while benefiting your brand as well.

When you use UGC in your marketing, this is what happens:

• You let your fans tell your story.
• You market “with” your audience and not “at” them.
• Your marketing messages come from your customers.
• You spotlight individuals who are helping shape your brand!

2. UGC Indicates That Your Brand Is Open to Conversation

In this day and age, people look for different ways to share their opinions about different brands. When you share UGC on branded social channels or simply use it in your marketing, it can make your audience feel seen and heard. It also shows that you are open to conversation.

3. You Get To Cut Through the Noise

UGC content marketing offers a way to cut through the various ads and promoted content your customers are bombarded with on a daily basis.

UGC is genuine and not salesy. It instantly grabs the attention of your audience and works to engage them because it is created by a member of your target audience only.

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4. UGC Provides Social Proof

Another reason why user-generated content is important is because it provides social proof.

Social proof is the validation you get from your customers about the authenticity, trust, and reliability of your activities and products. In this digital age, a brand needs to have social proof. This is because social proof can influence the buying decisions of a brand's customers.

5. Unlimited Flow of Content

As creating marketing campaigns is a constant process, there will always be a requirement for trendy, authentic content.

UGC helps you receive an unlimited flow of such content from your users.

It eliminates the need to spend money on constant idea generation and content creation!

Types of User-Generated Content

UGC comes in many formats and styles. Let’s take a look at the different types of user-generated content:

• Videos
• Testimonials
• Images
• Social media content (e.g., a Tweet about your brand)
• Blog posts
• Live streams
• Product reviews (learn how to get customer reviews)
• YouTube content

Top User-Generated Content Examples

Irrespective of their size, brands use UGC to boost social engagement, expand their reach, drive awareness, increase conversions, and cost effectively scale their business.

Here are some of the best user-generated content examples out there:

1. LuluLemon

LuluLemon is a Canadian athleisure brand offering leggings and yoga clothing to its customers. To increase their reach on social media platforms, they asked their followers to share the photos in which they are wearing LuluLemon's garments. They also had to use this hashtag:

#thesweatlife

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This benefited the brand in two ways:

• It got tonnes of easily searchable UGC content for repurposing.
• Sharing content from brand ambassadors increased its reach across social media.

2. GoPro

GoPro is a popular video equipment company that uses UGC for its YouTube channel.

If you check their top three videos, they are actually filmed by customers. These videos had 400 million views in total (as of December 2021).

The best thing is this content didn't cost the brand anything.

3. La Croix

La Croix is a sparkling water brand that also uses a hashtag (#LiveLaCroix), similar to the strategy that LuluLemon used. The hashtag helps the brand mine for UGC on their social media networks.

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The best thing about the brand is that it shares content produced by anyone and not just brand loyalists with higher follower counts. This makes their UGC super relatable to their followers.

User-Generated Content Tips

It's now time we discuss some important user-generated content tips. Let's begin:

1. Requesting Permission Is Mandatory

Always ask for your customer's consent before using or republishing their content. It keeps you out of hot waters regarding copyright concerns.

Asking for consent is also important because a lot of times individuals can use your branded hashtags without even knowing that you have tied them to a UGC campaign.

2. Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

Ensure you give proper credit to the original creator when you share UGC on your social media networks. What we mean is, directly tag them in the post and indicate if you are using their visuals and/or words.

Note: You may also want to share UGC across social media networks. For instance, you may want to share a picture from Instagram on your Facebook page. In this case, you can always ask the original creator how they want to be credited on the other platform.

Why is giving credit so important anyway?

Giving credit not only recognizes the work of content creators but also encourages them to use and post more about your brand.

3. Provide Clear Guidelines

If you observe the current scenario, only some businesses provide clear guidelines on the kind of UGC they want followers to create and share. UGC creators want to share their content, but they also want to know exactly what to do when it comes to UGC.

Don't be afraid to share specific requirements and tell the creators what kind of content fits your needs.

Tip: To determine the kind of content you should feature, ensure you follow these two steps:

• Sit with your social media strategy document to look for ways user-generated content aligns with your current marketing goals.
• Use this information to create a statement that tells users what type of content you will most likely feature.

Share your UGC task at places you know individuals will interact with your brand, such as your website, your social channel bios, your product packaging, or in other UGC social media posts.

4. Make UGC Entertaining

UGC should be entertaining for your followers. Sometimes it doesn't have to be product-related at all!

For instance, one of the best UGC trends you can see out there is:

Brands reposting their follower's tweets on their Instagram feed.

How to Get More UGC for Your Brand?

Apart from creating a unique hashtag, here are some ideas on how to get more UGC for your brand:

• Ask for feedback from users.
• Launch a contest on Instagram.
• Create a compelling challenge that pushes users creatively or physically. For instance, a fitness content creator can design a multi-day fitness challenge in which users can participate and share their progress on social media.

The Bottom Line

From helping you increase your reach to providing social proof, it's easy to see why user-generated content is important for brands in this digital age. It is a complete game-changer for businesses because it increases user engagement, which in turn boosts conversions and revenue.

All in all, UGC is a secret ingredient for successful marketing, and brands and marketers should definitely leverage it in their marketing activities. Just ensure you follow important user-generated content tips like always asking the customer's consent before you republish or use their content.

Do you want people to take a specific action after they find and consume your content?

The action is the thing you want them to do next. For instance, it could be making a purchase, reading another blog post, or downloading something.

If your answer is yes, you require a call-to-action (CTA) to convince them to take that action.

Essentially, a CTA is a piece of content intended to prompt users to carry out a particular action. It can be a line of text, a button, or an image. It usually takes the form of a directive or instruction and uses action verbs like “register”, “buy”, “follow”, “sign up”, etc.

You need to create a precise and effective CTA if you want customers to take a specific action when they land on your website.

Want to know more about what is a call-to-action, its importance, and how to craft the perfect CTA? Keep reading.

What Do Calls-To-Action Mean?

Put simply, a CTA is a marketing term referring to a prompt on a site that asks users to carry out an action. For example, you can ask them to download a demo, sign up for a newsletter, or purchase a product.

A CTA can appear in different places on a website, such as:

• Checkout pages or purchase pages
• Side panels
• Ads
• Pop-ups and slide-in content
• End-of-page for landing pages or articles
• Persistent headers

You can see a CTA as a hyperlink text or a clickable button. When potential customers click on it, they move a step closer to conversion.

Now, let’s discuss the types of CTAs.

The CTA types you will find on any professional website include:

• Newsletter subscription CTAs
• Social sharing
• Purchase CTAs
• In-line content upgrades
• Learn more
• Contact form submissions

Common Call-To-Action Examples

You may have seen or clicked on CTA buttons such as:

1. Buy now
2. Sign up today
3. Learn more
4. Download template now
5. Get 25% off your first order
6. Add to cart
7. Follow us on Instagram
8. Schedule a free consultation
9. Add to wishlist
10. Get your free ebook
11. Register for free webinar
12. Share on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn
13. Try a 15-day free trial!

You can also view CTAs as hyperlink texts in action phrases like:

Wish to know more? Read our post on XYZ!

Here are some top CTA examples ‌you can use in 2022:

1. Take a peek

Use “take a peek” on your CTA button when you want to give a tour of your platform. Using it can be a great substitute to “Learn more” as well. Here’s how thryv.com have used it:

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2. Try It

You can consider replacing “Sign Up” with “Try it” on your CTA button (if the context fits).

Here’s an example:

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3. Sure

“Sure” is a great way to replace the “yes” CTA button. Check out this image:

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4. I’m In

You can also use “I’m In” on your CTA button if it fits the context. Here’s a great example of a fact-based, amusing CTA that incorporates it:

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Why is a CTA Important?

Strategic CTAs effectively assist your visitors through the buying journey. They affect your conversion rates in a direct manner. A compelling and powerful CTA will grab the visitor’s attention, pique their interest, and encourage them to take action.

Let’s take a look at the importance of CTAs in closer detail:

1. The Next Step Becomes Easy and Obvious: When you make the next step easy and obvious with the help of a CTA, people are more likely to continue through your sales funnel and convert.
2. CTAs Encourage Interactions With Your Website: Let’s understand this point with the help of an example. If you add a CTA at the end of a blog post to provide links to the readers to read more information on a subject, you can convince them to stay on your site. This way, they interact more with your site. As a result of these interactions, they start to familiarize with your business and develop trust in your brand.
3. Visitors Don’t Have to Struggle: A CTA is an important aspect of the pages of your site. CTA links or buttons double up as signposts, signaling visitors about the next step they need to take. This way, they never have to struggle to find the route to sign up for a service or purchase a product.
4. CTAs Eliminate Decision Fatigue: Simple instructions or directive statements tell your clients what to do next and where to go, making the user journey simpler and time-efficient.

How to Write a CTA?

There’s not one defined formula to follow when it comes to writing the perfect CTA.

Here’s an example formula for crafting a CTA:

problem + solution + action

Take a look at this image that implements this formula:

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Listen Up: Consider these two key things when you write a CTA:

1. It should be impactful and catch your audience’s attention
2. It should convince your audience to take the required action

How to Create an Effective CTA?

Today, people expect to see a CTA in a prominent position on your landing page and website. Even if you place it correctly, you need to craft an outstanding CTA to convert your potential customers. Without a clear and effective CTA, site visitors may click away after feeling overwhelmed or confused.

To get your CTA right, you can take the help of some proven techniques. Here is a list of steps you can follow to create a tantalizing call-to-action:

1. Go for an Eye-Catching Design

Your CTA image or button should stand out from the design of your landing page. It needs to make a solid impact. Create it in a way that it pops out, combining brand colors and fonts that match your style.

Here are some helpful pointers on creating a powerful CTA button design:

• Size

Your site visitor is more likely to notice and click on a large CTA button. However, don’t create an oversized button as it may create a feeling of pressure on the visitor.

• Color

You can make your CTA buttons more noticeable with the help of color as well. Colors can cause a shift in emotions and mood, so use them accordingly. Here’s a complete list of color meanings for your ready reference:

• White: Clean, calm, and simple.
• Red: Confidence, power, and youth.
• Green: Peace, health, and growth.
• Orange: Friendly, energetic, and warm.
• Purple: Luxurious, wise, and creative.
• Yellow: Happiness, warmth, and optimism.
• Black: Reliable, experienced, and sophisticated.
• Blue: Security, trust, and stability.

Note: Bold colors such as red, black, and orange can instantly grab attention.

• Shape

The shape of your CTA button also plays a key role in making it noticeable to the site visitors. Refer to these shape meanings when you decide to design your CTA button:

• Rectangles and Squares: discipline, courage, reliability, strength, and security.
• Triangles: risk, excitement, danger, stability, and balance.
• Circles, Ellipses, and Ovals: eternity, magic, and universe.
• Abstract Shapes: uniqueness and elaborate.

Conventionally, CTA buttons are given the shape of horizontal rectangles, giving them the appeal of clickable buttons.

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Listen Up: We suggest you design your CTAs with rounded corners as they draw attention to the copy.

2. Create an Actionable Copy

Channel your inner copywriter and craft an action-focused copy.

Ensure you strike a balance between clear, simple instruction and jargon-free, compelling copy.

Also, don’t forget to use action words such as “start”, “register”, “download”, etc. in your copy.

Listen Up: You can always take inspiration from major brand websites to get creative while crafting your copy.

3. Make It Sound Urgent

You can also add a sense of urgency to your CTA to keep your visitors focused on the action you want them to take. Are there only a few items left in the stock? Is it a limited offer? Adding the element of urgency will let the visitors know that they need to take an action at that point in time instead of putting it off for a later stage.

4. Keep Your CTA Short in Length

For a CTA to fit into a button format, it needs to be short in length. A longer length of CTA can fail to grab attention in such a format. We recommend you keep the words to five or even less.

5. Tell Your Customers What They Should Expect

No one wants to get tricked or deceived into clicking on something that offers no value to them. Ensure you craft a copy that clearly communicates to your customers what they should expect if they click the CTA. We recommend you create an informative CTA that explains the benefits of clicking on it. For instance, you can tell your customers if they will be taken to a new page to complete an order or will they be signed to a newsletter.

Tip: If you incorporate target-audience-specific language in your CTA, you get to increase the conversion potential.

Bonus tip: You can consider using SEMrush’s Keyword Gap tool to search for keywords to use in your CTA. This will help you craft some unique CTAs (that your competition isn’t using) and assist you in your SEO ranking.

6. Ensure a Smooth and Logical Flow

It’s crucial that you align your CTAs with specific stages in the buyer’s journey so that you can make relevant offers. Let’s understand this with the help of an example. Promoting a full-year premier delivery subscription to a new visitor will be futile as it will be too early in their buying journey.

Call-To-Action Strategy

You can always use some effective CTA strategies to increase inquiries and customer data capture, which will in turn help you increase your sales. Here are some of these strategies:

1. Include More Than One CTA

The most common way you see a CTA appear is in a sentence, placed at the end of a blog, email, or website. However, you must incorporate more than one CTA in your blog to prompt the reader about what they should do next.

2. Don’t Go Overboard

While we recommend that you have more than one CTA in your marketing material, you must know how much is too much. Don’t include too many CTAs and overwhelm the readers. They may find you insincere or simply desperate if you go overboard with CTAs.

3. Placement Is Important

A difficult-to-find or hidden CTA doesn’t benefit both you or your audience. Ensure your page layout is such that your potential customer can easily find a CTA.

Here’s what you can keep in mind while deciding the placement of your CTA:

A simple offer that doesn’t need a lot of thinking to make a buying decision can use a CTA that’s placed above the fold. But if you think your readers need to digest all the information they have got and then make a decision, you should place the CTA at the end.

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4. Prioritize Your CTAs

It’s important to note that not every CTA of yours will carry the same priority. For instance, a CTA prompting a customer to “buy now” will be of greater priority as compared to the one that offers a white paper to read. Ensure the CTAs with the most priority are the easiest to locate.

5. Conduct A/B Testing

A/B testing compares two versions of a CTA to check which one performs better. The performance is checked based on real-time data and statistics.

Why do this kind of testing?

This is because it will let you know if you have the right message, placement, and design.

Now, when you create A/B test versions, ensure you change only a single detail so that you know what impacted the results.

Here’s an example of A/B test variations:

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Wrapping It Up

Used in marketing campaigns, a call-to-action is a written directive that encourages visitors to take the desired action. From eliminating the decision fatigue of your site visitors to increasing the number of interactions with your website, the importance of using CTAs cannot be emphasized enough. A persuasive CTA can help you gain subscribers, shares, likes, and customers. If you follow the tips and strategies we have discussed above, you will be able to create a CTA that's powerful enough to encourage your site visitors to take the desired action.

Content marketing has truly reached its peak, and brands can no longer attract and engage customers with only content in their campaigns. Customers are looking for more in terms of value addition, which has given rise to branded content in marketing. However, branded content is not as new as you might think. It has been around since the late 1940s, but has become more mainstream recently. If your business hasn't jumped on the branded content bandwagon yet, it is high time to do so.

Read on to know more about branded content and incorporating it into your business.

What Is Branded Content?

Before we move on to how and when to use branded content, it is critical to understand what it means. Many people confuse branded content with adding logos and images of their brand to showcase their content. However, branded content goes far beyond that. Branded content is about sharing your company's value and vision with your customers through your content.

Branded content is not simply about generating sales or revenue, but eliciting an emotional response from your customers so that they feel connected to your brand.

How Is Branded Content Different From Content Marketing?

Content marketing is using your content to achieve your marketing goals. It is created with the audience as the focus in mind. However, branded content is more about showcasing what your brand stands for to attract people who share similar ethics and values.

Branded content usually generates relatively quick and effective actions from the customer, whereas content marketing produces more gradual results.

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Why Does Your Business Need Branded Content?

If your content marketing strategies are doing well, you may wonder why you even need branded content. There are several advantages to introducing branded content to your marketing roster. The major ones include:

1. It Helps Build an Emotional Connection

Humans are emotional beings who listen to their emotions more than anything else. By creating branded content that speaks to people's emotions, you can build a solid and lasting connection with people and turn them into loyal customers. It is seen that users who feel an emotional connection to a brand spend 2x more on that brand than those who don't. Therefore, it can significantly impact your business if you build that emotional connection with your audience.

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2. It Acts as a Reminder

In this age where competition is remarkably stiff, leaving your mark is one of the most challenging things to do. Market monopoly is not something brands achieve easily, so you have to rely on standing out from the crowd to be memorable to your audience. Branded content has 59% more recall than other digital ads. It leaves an imprint on people's minds that makes you unforgettable long after a specific ad campaign is over.

3. It Helps Improve Your Branding

Today, almost everything is digital and competition is cut-throat. Hence, the customer must be aware enough of your brand so that they pick you over your competitors in a flash. Branded content helps you frame your brand identity and makes your business recognizable to people quickly. Studies show that people support brands that take a stand for social causes.

4. It Creates Engagement and Loyalty

If you are tired of making posts after posts and running campaigns after campaigns with no real attention from people, it is time to switch to branded content. 27.5% of millennials block ads, and your audience often won't even see your ad. However, branded content is created in such a way that it pushes the consumers to give a response. People are more likely to support a brand after consuming its branded content through purchases, social media promotions, and other forums.

5. It Can Go Viral

In this age of digitization, becoming ‘viral’ is one of the easiest ways to capture market and audience attention. Branded content can easily make your brand go viral on social media platforms and snowball your popularity in a short amount of time.

6. Promotes Traffic and Leads

Getting traffic and leads for your website from various sources is critical to achieving business goals. They help you generate sales and revenue for your business. Branded content, although not created to generate leads and traffic, can produce enough curiosity among people to visit your website and even convert to your customers.

How to Create Branded Content for Your Business?

There's no one-size-fits-all rule when it comes to creating branded content, as no two businesses are alike. It is all about connecting with your audience at an emotional level. However, there are some specific tips you can implement to create the perfect branded content. These are:

1. Create Meaningful Content

When talking about branded content, quality will always overrule quantity. You need to focus on creating content that touches the minds of your audience so they remember you for a long time. That can only happen when you incorporate emotions, values, and knowledge into the content, no matter the format. Taking a social stance over an issue is one of the most common ways brands try to create branded content.

Here are some must-haves to create meaningful branded content:

• A unique and original concept.
• An emotional facet that connects with the audience.
• A gripping story.
• A big NO to sales pitches.
• A focus on current social and cultural issues.
• A drive to engage the audience.

2. Choose Your Platforms Correctly

Your platform also plays a vital role in establishing your brand identity. Creating excellent content isn't enough to reach your audience. You also need to find them at the right place to send your message. Be strategic about choosing your platform and ensure you have the right audience group on your chosen forum.

3. Have a Definitive Tone and Voice

When creating branded content, it is essential to set the tone of your content, as it will reflect your brand values. You need to follow a consistent style in all of your branded content, so be careful about what you want to depict and ensure that the message you're conveying is clear.

4. Have a Deeper Understanding of Your Target Audience

For your branded content strategies to work, you need a deeper understanding of your target audience's psyche. Consider their opinions on various social and intellectual issues and find out what would resonate with them the most to capture their attention.

5. Ensure the Content Has Visibility

Creating a single video or blog post on your website may not gather enough attention to achieve the desired results. You must build your branded content frequency across various platforms to ensure it receives ample visibility.

6. Diversify Your Content

Although your brand values and ideologies remain the same, giving your audience similar content will reduce its impact. You must find diversified and unique ways to send your message to your audience. Think out of the box and create innovative ideas for your content.

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7. Look Out for Your Competitors

Your competitors play a vital role in the effectiveness of your branding strategies. You must ensure that your branded content is different and better than your competition's. If all of your competitors are saying the same thing, you won't be able to capture the attention of your audience. Studying your competitors' branded content helps you determine what to do and what not to do.

8. Monitor and Measure Your Content

Like every other marketing strategy, having measurement mechanisms in place is also critical for branded content strategy. You need to determine the effectiveness of your branded content campaigns. For this, you can utilize various social media listening and other digital tools to monitor your progress.

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How to Create Branded Content for Different Platforms?

Branded Content on Instagram

Instagram is the choice of platform for many brands to showcase branded content, and not without good reasons. It is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms, with over 1 billion monthly users!

Branded content on Instagram is often created with the help of social media influencers. These influencers have many millions of followers who place a certain amount of trust in them.

By collaborating with these influencers, you can post videos of them using your products/services to capture the attention of their follower base. The influencer can tag your brand in their posts and share links to your products/website to promote your brand.

A great example of branded content on Instagram is the #meetanowner campaign run by the high-end automobile brand Subaru. For the campaign, Subaru found a few existing customers who had an influence on Instagram and asked them to post pictures with their Subaru vehicle and hashtags of the brand. The campaign was intended to show people that Subaru vehicles are designed for adventures and are reliable partners to take on your thrilling off-road travels. The fact that the people who owned the vehicle championed it made the claims much more reliable and realistic among adventure seekers.

Branded Content on Facebook

Right behind Instagram is another social media platform that rules the branded content forum. Facebook is one of the most influential social media platforms, with over 2.934 billion active users globally.

Creating branded content on Facebook is different from Instagram. Facebook requires you to get permission to become a sponsor or creator of branded content. The influencer who uses your content or products and tags your brand must also announce their partnership with the brand before they post your branded content.

We can see one of the best examples of using Facebook for creating branded content with Nike, one of the most popular sports brands in the world. If you check out the Nike Facebook page, you’ll ‌see that there is a great balance of product launches, scientific research around their products, charitable events that they are a part of, and sports personalities who wear their brand as they cross milestones in their career. Their page shows ‌they are reliable and way ahead of time than their competitors with the efforts they put into each product, all without even directly promoting any product through over-the-top sales pitches.

Wrapping up

Branded content is one of the most prominent ways to leave a mark on your customers in today's times. It shows the customer who you are and what you believe in, creating bonds far deeper than a high-quality product shoot or an engaging sales pitch could ever do.

You can get started with simple yet effective forms of branded content “ such as videos and banner ads “ before building up toward other forms of content gradually.

Ultimately, it is all about what you want your customers to believe about you.

Whether you are a small business, startup, or a multi-national corporation, branded content is effective for all.

A robust digital marketing strategy requires several components - from social media to email to search engines and much more. While each competent is equally important to advertise your business online, content is unarguably the most important part of these efforts.

Are you a small business owner wishing to increase your audience and boost your brand recognition? If yes, then you must try content marketing.

Content marketing involves the creation and dissemination of online materials such as blogs, videos, infographics, whitepapers, and social media posts with the purpose of stimulating interest in the services or products of a business. It helps grow traffic to your website.

In this blog, we will discuss why small business owners should build a powerful content marketing strategy and how to craft one.

The Importance of Content Marketing For Small Business

Content marketing enables you to create and share timely and useful content. It allows you to build loyalty and respect among consumers and become a thought leader in your industry.

You may wonder how. Content marketing offers your audience something that has value, developing trust among your prospects and customers.

Another way content marketing aids you is by recognizing the pain points of your customers. It also helps build a customer base you can engage with for the purpose of driving sales.

Additionally, another benefit of content marketing includes the evergreen content you produce. For instance, a blog post that talks about the history of your industry. Such an asset will not become outdated.

Businesses today have recognized the importance of content marketing. As per the latest marketing stats for 2022, 70% of marketers are active investors in content marketing.

All in all, with the help of content marketing, you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors who are not using content marketing. You also get a chance to grow your brand awareness and establish and maintain a successful brand identity.

Content Marketing For A Small Business: 7 Tips For Success

Let's discuss the tips every business owner should follow to build a successful content marketing strategy for their small business.

1) Start a Blog

Companies that consistently write blogs get 67% more leads per month on average.

Blogging is a free way of marketing your capabilities and services. So, if you want to know how to market a small business, blogging is a route that you can opt for. It also helps you become an industry expert.

Blogs help in different ways, such as:

• Boost your SEO rankings
• Drive traffic to your website
• Provide increased value to your consumers
• Add to your brand’s exposure
• Get leads and increase the likelihood of conversion

2) Stay Active on Social Platforms Your Audience Uses

You may have a social media presence if you are actively involved in selling a service or a product. However, simply being present on social channels is not enough. You are required to stay active on all the social media channels your audience spends their time on.

Now you may wonder how to select the right social media channels for your business. For this, you are required to identify your target audience. On social media platforms, you are speaking to a set of consumers who have specific interests and not everyone. After you learn about the individuals you are speaking to, figure out how to reach them.

Tip: To check where your audience is active, you can do the following:

• Use existing consumer data to determine where your audience hangs out online.
• Check out the social profiles of your competitors to know where their most active users are.

3) Deliver Content as per the Stage of Your Customer Within the Marketing Funnel

To reach the conversion phase, individuals go through a process called the marketing funnel. From learning about your business to conversion, this funnel includes everything. These are the four steps most marketing funnels have:

• Attention: Consumer views your social media post, ads, or learns about you via word-of-mouth
• Interest: Consumer is interested and wants to learn more
• Desire: Consumer is at a stage where they want to convert
• Action: Consumer takes action (for e.g.- subscribing to your email newsletter or purchasing your product)

To align this process with your creation, ensure you provide relevant content to the target customers present at the different stages of the funnel. For instance, an in-depth asset can overburden a potential customer who is currently at the attention stage of the funnel.

4) Conduct Keyword Research to Find Great Topics

An important step is to optimize your blog for SEO. You must conduct keyword research as a part of SEO. Keyword research is a crucial part of content marketing because:

• It helps identify trending topics individuals are interested to know more about.
• It helps improve your search engine rankings.

Watch this video to know how to do SEO keyword research -

Note: The keyword strategy for your business is the most critical part that determines your ranking on the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). However, you must also know that SEO-friendly websites rank higher on the SERPs, too. If you do not have an SEO-friendly website, it is time to build one for your business.

If you need an SEO-friendly, professional, niche-based website, you should know that it takes many days to build one. We recommend that you use DashClicks' Sites tool that helps you make an SEO-friendly, custom-branded agency website in just a few seconds.

5) Create a Content Calendar

Monthly content calendars include blog posts, emails, social posts, and any other content you wish to produce in that particular month. It helps you stay organized. Also, with the help of a content schedule, your readers get comfortable as it increases familiarity and trust for your business.

A content calendar is important because:

• It ensures that every content-related task is actually taking place
• It makes it convenient to collaborate with outside partners as well as your team
• It provides you a big picture of the upcoming stuff

Let’s discuss the steps that help you create your own content calendar:

• Decide the types of content you wish to publish, such as case studies, landing pages, e-books, opinion pieces, blog posts, etc.
• Discuss with your customer service and sales team to know the most asked questions by your potential customers. Then sit and brainstorm with your marketing team to determine different content strategies and more topics that you need to cover.
• Use the SEMRush Content Audit tool to analyze the current pages on your website and check what you should update, remove, or rewrite. Use this tool to analyze your competitors as well.
• Choose social media channels by checking the platforms your target audience uses. For instance, Facebook typically works great for B2C audiences.
• Before a type of content reaches production, define every step of the content process. Then, decide on a publishing schedule as per your content auditing and analytics data.
• Schedule evergreen content and publish them at a time when there are content delays.
• Don’t forget to add guest content to your content calendar.

6) Bring Your Reviews to Life

You may be surprised to know that 91% of people in the age group of 18-34 trust reviews published online as much as personal recommendations.

Also, a majority of consumers (58%) would pay more or travel farther to support a business that has positive reviews.

What's even more important is that 83% of consumers only trust relevant and recent reviews.

With these stats, you can definitely see the power of reviews. They help in driving a business, especially one that is both local and small.

Keeping this information in mind, we recommend you bring your reviews to life via social posts and testimonials that you can post on your website and blog.

Testimonials are considered one of the most effective content marketing tactics. Let's discuss how you can convert your blog post readers into buyers with the help of customer testimonials:

• Use screenshots of your client’s statements and place them within your blog posts.
• Use these statements as quotes in your blog posts.

Tip: To know how to get reviews and leverage them in your content marketing, read this blog.

7) Find a Unique Angle

Your competitors can indeed provide you with a lot of topic ideas, but avoid producing content that is too similar to the content created by others. The goal of content marketing is to provide information that is useful and adds value to your customers, not something that is already available to them on the web.

If you find a great idea, do not replicate it with tiny alterations. What you can do instead is to see it as a starting point and search for ways to incorporate your own unique angle. Doing so will only help you provide interesting content to your readers.

Bonus Tips:

• Start an email newsletter to let your readers know about an upcoming event, a new product, industry-related news, and much more.
• See what is resonating with your audience and create a variety of content types. Think about content repurposing as well.

How to Craft a Small Business Marketing Strategy?

Let's discuss what you need to do to craft a marketing strategy for your small business:

1. Build Your Buyer Personas and Fine - Tune Them

Create buyer personas to better understand your audience and their respective pain points. When you determine who is buying your products, you get to know the kind of content they need and when.

2. Solve a Problem

Consumers look for information that provides a solution to their problems. Identify the content assets that can fulfill the unique needs of your buyers. Do this after you have identified buyer personas.

3. Set Business Goals

Set business goals that align with the strategy. The principle of SMART goals makes your benchmarks attainable and reasonable, so do use the principle during this time.

4. Determine Distribution Channels

When it is time to share your content, determine which content piece is right for which channel. This is because not every content piece does well on every channel. Hence, to achieve success and reach, this step is important.

Check the image below to see how the three distribution channels - owned media channels, paid media channels, and earned media channels - overlap and the way in which you can combine them:

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Also, take a note of how you can distribute different content types:

• Distribute your interview content or podcasts through Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts.
• Distribute your infographic content through your blog and Pinterest.
• Distribute success stories and case studies through a dedicated website page.
• You can distribute your video content through YouTube.

Conclusion

Even though you run a small business, there is a high chance that you have huge competition. To grow your audience and help your business stand out, you require a content marketing strategy that will help you showcase your value to your current and future consumers.

When you build your buyer personas, you take a step forward towards building a winning content marketing strategy. After you do so, ensure you create content centered around your buyers' pain points and the stage they are at within the marketing funnel. Stay active on social platforms your audience uses and bring your reviews to life through testimonials and social posts.

Bottom line: Try implementing most of the above-mentioned tips for your business.

Now, it is our turn to ask you a question. Which of the above-mentioned tips do you think will be the most beneficial for your business?