This seems like a good time to address a common misconception we see in a lot of discussions 
of content marketing: The idea that your website content should be a free-for-all, and the purpose of inbound marketing is simply to bring in as many visitors to your site as possible. Unfortunately, this point of view tends to get pushed by a lot of cut-rate online marketing firms. They like to propagate it because your pageview numbers are one of the easiest web metrics to boost.
But look, here's the thing: If you were getting 200 visitors a month and converting 20 of those into sales, is it actually an improvement to get 2,000 visitors if you still only get 20 sales?
In our view, probably not. While there's something to be said for the PR possibilities of a blog, all those visitors are still a drain on your resources. Web hosting is cheap, but data transfer still costs money. Premium content like videos and whitepapers also cost money to create, so if they aren't driving sales, that's more investment without much to show for it.
In short, you want to get website content that attracts the RIGHT customers. A targeted approach is going to be far better than a shotgun method, leading more reliably to visitor conversions and sales.
How To Get Website Content That Targets The Customers You Want
The best Internet marketing is targeted marketing. It's possible to segment your market base with extreme precision, presenting offers carefully tailored to appeal to people most likely to buy your product. So, just to start with:
I. Know Thy Customer
If you've never done it, now would be a great time to sit down with your sales department and start constructing some Buyer Personas. These are semi-fictionalized narratives that describe, essentially, who your ideal target customers are: their age, demographics, interests, and challenges they face in life. They're the stereotypical “white picket fence and 2.4 kids” sort of scenario, but crafted to match your actual audience as closely as possible.
After all, you can't get website content that targets your customers if you don't actually know who your customers are in the first place. So sit down, look at the data, and start figuring it out.
II. Speak To Your Customers' Interests
Your outreach efforts are going to look radically different depending on who it is you're targeting. This is one of the main benefits of constructing these buyer personas: you know what it is your customers want.
You should get website content that addresses real concerns or issues these people may have. Remember, in the inbound marketing funnel, people are arriving at your site because they're looking for information that's relevant to their own interests. Simply put, the better your website is at delivering relevant content, the more successful you'll be in attracting valid leads.
III. Consider a Full-Service Marketing Firm
You can, of course, continue going it alone for as long as it remains profitable. Never the less, if you want to get the most from your website, a full Internet marketing service may be your best option.
Rather than trying to learn targeted marketing from first principles, why not simply hire experts who already know exactly how to find and target your audience? No matter whether your customers are Millennials or Boomers, an inbound marketing service will put you in touch with them. You'll also get great website optimization: improved keywords, better-targeted Calls-to-Action, speedier loading times, and more.
However you go about it, your inbound marketing strategies need to be targeted. You'll never see the highest returns from your site as long as you're simply trying to get anyone and everyone into your tent. Focused methods aimed at bringing you only the best leads are the ones which will ultimately deliver the best ROI.
When did you first realize that pageviews alone really weren't a terribly important metric?
