What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
“Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants”
Traditional advertising has saturated the marketplace, and consumers are sick and tired of seeing the same types of advertisements over and over. With content marketing, instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your target customers to help them solve their issues.
Shake up your content marketing
Content marketing nowadays involves much more than writing. It includes infographics, infomercials, videos, podcasts, etc. Shake up your content marketing by using different mediums to engage different learning styles among your audience!
You get only one chance to make a good first impression!
Consequently you must aim at creating quality content:
-Content that attracts the right people to your website
-Content that wows them when they get there
-Content that establishes your expertise, your personality and your appeal
-Content that keeps them on the page, consuming your ideas and engaging with your brand
-Content that invites them to stay connected so they can become customers
Important: Keep your purpose top of mind as you create your content!
Create search engine optimized content
One of the best ways to grow your audience is through online and social media channels.
But remember: Videos, articles, white papers and other strong types of content are great, but they are worthless if your target customers can’t find them.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as “organic” results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.
Search engine optimized content is content that anyone in the world can find. Optimize your content so it’s easy to find. Well built high quality content will also help your website rank in Google!
Here are some precious tips:
-Find keyword phrases to target
-Use your target keyword phrase in the headline, first paragraph, and in at least one subhead
-Use your alternate keyword phrases into the rest of your content
-Insert internal links
-Get external links
-Optimize your images (rename your image files to include your target keyword phrase before uploading them)
Of course, the above checklist may not include everything an expert could tell you about SEO, but simply following these tips, you will likely see your website get significant SEO traffic.
What is high quality content?
Aspire to create the kind of content your target customers want to have and share.
-Don’t serve a monolithic wall of unbroken tekst.
-Use short paragraphs
-Add frequent subheads to divide your content into logical sections
-Add simple formatting like bold and italic
-Add big beautiful image to the top to draw in readers and add meaning to your words
-Entertain! try to make your readers smile, engage with your examples and relate to your story
Did you know?
When people spend time reading, listening to, or watching your content on your page, search engine algorithms interpret that as a sign of quality. A video or an infographic will keep people engaged on your page and will tell search engines that your content is answering their needs.
Let’s be very clear: E-mail marketing is not dead!
Email marketing is affordable and often offers the best return on investment. Leverage your content to grow your list of subscribers by asking people to share their e-mail addresses with you.
Publish and promote your content
When you publish new content, people won’t automatically appear to read, listen, or watch. If you want your content to be found and used, you must advocate for it like you’re its biggest fan.
In order to drive the maximum number of people to your new piece of content, make sure you set up posts on the social media platforms they use most. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself on social media. Let people know several times on the day of publication that you have a new piece of content for them to take a look at. Over the next few days, continue to invite people to consume your new content. As the weeks go on, keep this content in rotation on your social media platforms. Continue to mention it, even if it’s just once a week.
Content amplification matters
The internet is a noisy place, think about repurposing content (using a wide range of formats) to get it in front of more people and in more places so you can driver traffic back to your website. You may even want to consider paying to promote your strategically important content. SEA, or “search-engine-advertising,” refers to a form of paid marketing that helps businesses get their ads in front of searchers by paying to have their ad copy at the top of search results. For example, to do SEA marketing with Google, you need to use Google Ads (formerly called AdWords)
Content amplification matters, so make it part of your routine!
Make your content plan, and work that plan!
Committing your content strategy to a visible calendar you can easily follow means you can avoid sitting in front of your screen wondering what content you need to create this week.
You don’t have to have your editorial calendar completely decided at the beginning of the year. However at a minimum, be sure your content strategy includes your publishing frequency, content topics, and publishing dates.
What gets measured, gets managed
When the budget is small, you should have as much as knowledge as possible before making spending decisions. It takes time, but the more you know about measurement, the more informed your decisions will be. Most content creators rely on Google Analytics for that. Look at your data and measure everything!
If you like to discuss the specific challenges of your own business then please don’t hesitate to get in touch!