Welcome to the age of technology, where people just stick to their screens to get their daily fix of useful, fun and engaging content. It’s prime time for a content creator, because as they say “content is king” and it truly is.
Many companies know this, and they invest more and more into creating high-quality content. Because good, thoughtful content will keep people coming back for more and more. Once that happens, that content can easily be used for the company to achieve their preset goals. The amount of time, money and energy invested into creating said content has to pay off. Otherwise, the content they created is useless.
To make sure that a high-quality content piece will reach the people it’s made for, it’s necessary to employ the right content marketing strategies. You want to catch the attention of your target audience and use it to drive your company’s success. We have created this content ourselves, to help entrepreneurs and marketers, such as yourself, to kick start this process. We share actionable content marketing tips that you can and should use right from the get go and the benefits of having a content marketing strategy. So, without further ado, let’s get down to business!
The Core Benefits of Using Content Marketing
Here are some of the benefits your business will reap if you employ a good content marketing strategy or implement at least a few of our tips.
Increased Search Engine Traffic
They say “content is king” because Google loves it and nobody is bigger on the internet than Google. The search engine’s goal is to provide it’s users with the most high-quality content, according to their search. Thus, if you produce content and place it on your website, Google will index it and award your website with a higher rank. Though you’ll have to optimize that content’s page too, to get the maximum benefit Google has a fetish for good content.
Better Reputation and Relationship With Your Audience
Aside from the technical factors, this is the core, most human benefit of using content as a marketing too. It not only establishes your online presence, but also helps you cultivate a solid reputation and a productive relationship with your customers. You provide them with your expertise, insight or just something that is of benefit for them and they’ll remember it. One of the most valuable payoff of this process, is your customer’s trust. And trust leads to more sales.
A More Popular Website
With more to look at, your visitors have all the more reason to stay on your website and browse through it. They will stick to it and you as well. In the process, they’re bound to stumble across your offerings and will also have a reason to come back and visit you again.
More Traffic From Social Media
Once you have something to share on social media, you instantly took a step towards building a more successful brand. If you have something interesting to show, people will want to see it and more followers means more traffic on your website. If you included your link of course, so make sure you do that. By producing useful, thoughtful or fun content, you also drive people to share it with their friends and others around them.
Thought Leadership
It’s time consuming process, but once you have established yourself as an expert or a professional in a certain field or niche, you also have your visitors trust. Which means, the more thought leadership and domain authority you have built, the more valuable your voice is.
The Take Away..
In short, the main benefit of producing and marketing content, is “putting yourself out there”. It’s a way of establishing who you are, how you can help and what people should know about you. Content marketing is one of the prime ways of establishing presence and visibility on the web.
The Most Useful Content Marketing Tips
Now, on we go to the main course. Here are some of our top recommendations and tips from experts, that will kick start a successful marketing campaign if acted upon. So, be sure to put at least some of these into action and instead of just reading through them while drinking your coffee.
Always Conduct Keyword Research Before You Produce Content
Useful content is a content piece that provides information that helps users solve a specific problem or answers a specific question (or questions). It’s a technical way of understanding what’s currently on demand. To know what people are asking for, you’ll have to look at Google’s statistics and look at how many people search for specific keywords on a monthly basis. I can’t tell you what keywords you should look for, but with a bit of brainstorming, it’s easy to come up with some. Just base your keyword research around topics in your industry or the topics your ideal customer would be interested in.
The first steps of keyword research are simple. You can either start with MOZ’s Keyword Explorer or Google Adword’s Keyword Planner. But there are plenty of other SEO tools that you can and should leverage. Look at the data each of these tools provide. They’ll at least give you the number of monthly average search queries conducted for the keyword you’re testing.
Determining the value of a keyword isn’t always a straight forward process. The most important things to remember are, to make sure that you satisfy the user’s search intent. That’s the only way you make use of any content you produce.
To gain more confidence and more exact data on how well your site will perform with your chosen keyword, you can buy test traffic from Google, through Google AdWords. You’ll get the traffic and will be able to test how well it converts on your site.
In order to maximize your success with the keywords you chose, use long tail keywords. Don’t optimize your site for a single keyword, like football, cars, investment opportunities, or anything else that has too much competition. You want to make your job as easy as possible and be a big fish in a small pond, instead a small fish in a big pond. So instead, go for keywords like, fresh football news and luxurious sports cars.
Describe Your Exact Target Audience Before You Start Production
Producing great content is useless if you don’t know who you’re doing it for. You’ll want to know who are you writing for and what they have going on in their lives. What they want, what kind of challenges they face, what problems do they have, what their goals and dreams are, even what they ate for breakfast yesterday. The more well-established personas you can come up with, and the more you understand your target audience, the more useful information you can provide them with.
Also, if you know who you’re talking to, it will influence your tone of voice and help you to cultivate a friendly relationship. So go out and be their friend! Talk to your audience in a friendly way that they understand and can identify with.
Use Every Tool That’s Available To You
You wouldn’t believe how much a few tools can boost your writing capabilities. When it comes to content creationthey’ll help you write more powerful headlines, more readable text, eliminate spelling errors, write in an active voice and so much more. When it comes to content marketing they’ll help you schedule your post and get your content in front of eyes that are interested in your topic. Here are a few of these tools:
Content Creation
- Cliché Finder, to help you mix up your articles and make them more unique.
- Hemingway for better text structures.
- Blog Post Headline Analyzer and Emotional Marketing Value Analyzer for creating more powerful headlines.
- Grammarly, the best tool for eliminating typos, confused words and spelling errors.
- Canva for designing great infographics and memes.
Content Marketing
- Tiberr, to help you get your content in front of interested blog readers.
- Buffer, to help you keep track of your social media posting schedule.
- Google Trends to find hot things that people are looking for.
Start The Process With Cornerstone Content
Cornerstone content is the first brick in your fortress of content. It is the foundation that you can base the rest of your content from. It is the spine of your content production. You can build all of your future content from this content piece.
Think of it as the stump of a tree. It should be an extensive article that shares the most information about the topic you’ve built your site around. If it only fits in a 15,000 word article, than by all means, write that article.
Always Aim For Quality Above Quantity
Use every tool, every bit of information and talent you have to ensure that the quality of your content reaches its maximum. You don’t want people to just run through your empty text, you want them to stick to you and see what else you have in store for them. In order for that to happen, do the following:
- Have a unique writing style and eliminate all writing errors.
- Use as much relevant, high-quality images and infographics as you can.
- Use interactive content if you can. ThingLink is a tool that can help you create interactive and clickable images. Try it out!
- Add videos to your posts if possible or even better, create them yourself. Video is the most powerful marketing material. Even if it’s not your video, it will keep your visitor engaged and on your website.
- Use a readability checker to ensure people can read your content with maximum fluidity. For that, you can either use the Flesch Reading Ease tester or a tool called Readable.
- Write about what you know. Make the ordinary extraordinary, instead of starting with the extraordinary, mind blowing stuff.
- Take the time required for producing quality. One high-quality content piece will get more done than 10 low-quality ones.
Answer Complex Questions
People are on the internet to have fun and to find answers to their questions. If you have already built a company, there are plenty of topics floating around your industry and the product or service you’re providing. Users are constantly searching for answers, and the one who helps them find the answer, are the ones who take the cake. If they find your site as a source for a solution, you’ll be getting all that valuable traffic that comes with it.
Use Measurements and Specific Data Within Your Content
People are looking to go the “no bullshit” route every time they are interested in a certain topic and especially when they’re looking to spend their money. So, don’t just present your statements as ancient wisdom, use data that you have collected instead. Do case studies, do measurements, ask questions and study whatever your visitors wouldn’t have time to study. Once you’re done, provide them with the fruit of your labor, the all so valuable numbers and conclusions.
Repurpose and Reuse Already Existing Content
Producing high-quality web content takes time, energy and resources that should never be wasted. So, making the most out of them is important. Learn how to repurpose and reuse content, adopt it to other formats and use them multiple times.
Look at the information within a content piece, like it were clay that doesn’t dry out. You can mold it and shape it into different forms. Make a video or infographic out of your recent post or create an article about your video or any other video regarding the topic you’re working on.
Double Down On Content Remarketing
A good rule of the thumb is spending just as much time on marketing a content piece as the amount you’ve spent on creating it. Put it in front of your social media following and especially the visitors who keep coming back. Remarketing content means, giving more to those who already like your page and have been consuming your content. Tag them in your social media posts and tell them about what’s new on your website.
Always Do Good SEO
Your SEO, efforts is one of the wheels that your marketing efforts roll on. You have to do at least the basic SEO for your content and the webpage it’s kept on. Google understands more than you would expect, and it can even determine the quality of what you have produced to some extent. That’s especially true with more of their AI on the loose. But to keep it simple, just follow these simple SEO practices:
- Include the keyword in your post’s title.
- Include your keyword in the meta description.
- Include your keyword in the first paragraph of the text.
- Make sure 80% of your text is written in an active voice, so it is more powerful and Google will like it better as well.
- Make sure your sentences are always less than 20 words.
- Include your keyword in the alt-text and title of your images.
Go With Evergreen Content
Short term content, such as news articles are only good for so much time. You’ll want to have content that you can use long after you’ve created it. So, it’s best to choose creating evergreen content whenever you can. It’s the kind of content with the longest shelf life. Useful tips, that help a user accomplish certain goals, software lists and anything that will be considered valid for more than a year, can be considered as evergreen content.
Be Truly Original
Originality is what makes you you and it’s the only way you’ll manage to stand out in a world that has so many copies of everything. Making copies of someone else’s content won’t get you far. Always write your own original copy, with your opinions, views and unique style. The best content is the one that has high-quality and can’t be found anywhere else.
Conclusion
There you have it. These are some of the most important tips that will take you a long way, once you launch your content marketing campaign. Always measure your results as accurately as possible, to ensure that it does actually help you to accomplish the goals you have set out for yourself.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading through this article and that you’ve found it useful!
Sign up here with your email
EmoticonEmoticon