Content marketing is a simple phrase. It involves just two key elements.
“Content” which can be articles, videos and images in all their various multi-media formats.
“Marketing” which means taking that content and letting the online
world knows it exists. In essence it is implementing strategies and
tactics of making your ideas spread.
Marketing your content though is a challenge in a world where there
are over 2 billion internet users who are bombarded with emails, streams
of tweets and banner ads.
The process of content marketing involves the creation of material
that is informative but is also written on a perspective which shows
your business in a positive light. Good content marketing will create
interest in your business, attracting traffic to your website and
hopefully, sales or conversations as well.
Great content will position your business as a thought leader in its
industry and it will also educate, inform, entertain and inspire.
There are many ways of doing content marketing but not all methods
yield the positive results! Here are six tips to get you started on
marketing your own content:
Tip 1: Drip feed your content
There is a tendency to create too much content, unleash it on the
Internet and then expect it to carry traction throughout the year but
this isn’t always a good idea. News and current events change all the
time which means your target audience may not be searching for the same
things as they were searching for two or three months ago. Publish
content consistently and persistently making your sure the content you
produce has some relevancy to current events and what your target
audience may be interested in at the present time.
Tip 2: Monitor old content
Use Analytics and visitor level call tracking software to monitor
your content. Once you find out what types of articles seem to be the
most effect, you will have a better idea as to what types of content
your target audience are interested in. The success of your content will
be measured in many ways but broadly speaking, an article that produces
a high level of the following would be considered good content:
- High Traffic
- Prompts interest and enquiries
- Generates sales
Tip 3: Make use of social media
Once your content has been published, the main objective is to get as
many people to see view it who may be interested in your business and
leveraging social media is an excellent place to start in order to
achieve this. Posting content on your social media accounts will bring
your content to those following your social media accounts. If these
people like your content, they may choose to share it with their
followers and a snowball effect is created which may possibly result in
your content going viral!
In addition to this, we already know that Google uses social media
signals when deciding your positions in the search results so an article
that gets a good number of ‘Likes’, shares, comments, tweets, +1s is
likely to improve your search engine positions as well.
Tip 4: Aim for quality not quantity
Hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of content are created every
day. A web surfer is spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing content
to read. Creating an interesting title will definitely be effective in
getting a user to click on your article rather than the next person’s
article but a poorly written, uninteresting article will just get
scanned and then discarded. This means no social love and definitely no
enquiries or sales.
Find out what your target audience are interested in and create high
quality, engaging, thought provoking content that they would be
interested in. no doubt in the time needed to create one high quality
article, you could’ve possibly created two, or maybe three low quality
articles but that one high quality article will prove more beneficial
than three lower quality ones.
Tip 5: Incorporate the right amount of SEO
Your article needs to be able to turn up in search engine results
pages (the holy grail is to be on page one at the top of the page) and
then by having the right headline and description attract the right
people. To do this, you should include some relevant keywords into your
article but don’t overdo it. Adding too many keywords may result in the
article losing its readability factor. As a general rule you should
always add keywords but the article should be written for a human, not a
search engine.
Tip 6: Inform rather than sell
People receive sales pitches all the time, be it in the electrical
store, through the post, a popup advert on the Internet or whilst
passing a billboard. They’ve become very good at noticing a blatant
attempt to make them purchase something which is why all marketing
articles should aim to inform rather than sell a product. Provide
genuinely useful information on a topic which would allow you to mention
your product or service along with some of its merits. A well written
article will make the reader come to a conclusion without sounding like a
sales pitch.
At the centre of any content marketing strategy is the creation of
high quality content. Once high quality content has been created, it
needs to be promoted and monitored using web analytics and call tracking
solutions. Do this and you will well on your way to having a successful
content marketing strategy.
