Content marketing is an amazingly effective strategy to gain more online business, if you get it right. Here are some great tips to help you ensure you do so.
1) Have a strategy
Creating a plan or strategy isn’t exactly exciting since it involves documenting everything that has to be completed.
With that said, it is essential in order to determine your objectives and figure out ways to get the attention of your audience. This includes figuring out the best type of content for your audience to draw their attention.
When you have a good strategy in place it will remind you of your objectives, activities and keep everything on track. Some of the areas you should focus on include:
Figuring out your particular readers. The type of content that they enjoy looking at and how to get the correct content to them. This has to be done while keeping in mind the different stages different customers would be in within your sales funnel.
The overall business’s marketing and strategy goals also need to be kept in mind. This would include all the goals of content marketing, how more sales and leads are generated as well as increasing brand awareness.
There is a need for specific roles to be allocated to specific people for the content marketing system to work. This will allow you to know exactly who has to create the content, edit it as well as publish and promote it. Attention also has to be paid to the particular channels used in order to improve it.
When there is a highly detailed strategy document, this will give the business an advantage that they can show to stakeholders since they wouldn’t be involved in this aspect of the business.
2) Continuous content planning
After the strategy document has been created or outlined, the content still needs to be continuously planned and created.
This means that particular considerations such as the customer journey, workflow, guidelines and procedures need to be identified before any type of content creation is started. If this isn’t done, there won’t be any purpose behind the content.
When planning content it is best to utilize an editorial schedule. It should include things such as:
– The email address of the author
– The author’s name
– The date of the publication
– Content-type
– Images for the content
– Designation of the content being either internal or external content
– Copy date
3) Building the content hub
It is quite useful to have a website or particular space to post content. The vast majority of consumers and visitors typically expect a blog as the main area for business-related content.
With that said, as your content marketing expands, then the actual type of content you create would also change and become much more than the typical videos, guidelines, photos, infographics etc. Content marketing matters and should always evolve.
When the content you create starts to expand, you should place a resource section on your business’s website or blog.
This would become a place where you can share content as well as use it for SEO purposes. For example, you can use it to place links that direct viewers back onto important pages on your site. This will go a long way in improving your site’s link profile.
4) Adding creative data
Content creation is extremely important and in order to ensure it will be well received, the correct people should be involved in each project. These people should be listed.
When you have great writers, they will be an asset and you also need to have great visuals. Visual content should be a huge priority since most marketers strongly believe that visual content is critical to the brand’s story.
It’s a fact that posts that contain visuals get 94% more attention and reviews as oppose to articles without visuals.
So, if you have an in-house graphic designer, then you can use them to create stunning visuals. If not, then there are lots of external resources that you can make use of.
You will need to get the best persons for the job and thankfully, there are many affordable solutions to solve these issues.
If the budget is on the lower end, do know that you can still create amazing content with a low budget.
By having a multi-channel approach, you’ll make the best use of your content and ensure it creates the maximum amount of engagement and exposure for the company.
5) Email marketing and SEO
When doing content marketing it is critical to keep in mind marketing. After all, the content that you create actually needs to be viewed by your audience.
The most well-known and experienced marketers typically promote any content that they create as quickly as possible. In most cases, they do so once the content is posted. This is a strategy that is highly recommended.
With that said, there are different types of content and each different type would be shared in its own way.
One example of this is if you have a new blog post on your website then you’d want to share it on your email newsletter and social media pages.
On the other hand, if you have a new white paper or another type of industry research, then you should market it by using paid advertising.
There are many ways to promote content and some of them are paid whereas others as free.
You should take full advantage of popular social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc since they all have paid advertising platforms that allow you to show your content or ads to specific audiences that would want to see your content.
A white paper can be shown as a retargeting ad to persons who visited your website or even those that messaged your company or abandoned cart before purchasing.
Whatever type of content that you publish such as an infographic, e-book etc, you need to ensure that your audience and people subscribed to your list are informed of it. People who have subscribed to your email list are already engaged and interested in your business and it is a great idea to promote to them since they will likely share your content.
Lastly, you should strive to break down large pieces of content into smaller forms for sharing with other websites. For example, you can create a set of articles that link back to your original post or products or even an infographic that does the same.
