Never Heard of Content Marketing?
Never Heard of Content Marketing? Well, Jump on Board!
You may already provide plenty of information online about your business’s products or services but is that information customer centred? The practice known today as content marketing enhances your customer’s experience about your products.
This practice, by providing content specifically created to help your customers or clients understand your business or brand, enables you to engage more easily with them and acquire new leads and customers. The content is created according to:
- The needs of a targeted audience
- In alignment with predefined marketing goals
- Made available to all areas of marketing to serve both business and customers objectives through integration
The best thing about content marketing is that it works for both the smallest and the largest of companies, equally well. Sharing good, engaging and relevant content will bring more traffic and social activity and conversions through your blog and ultimately, more clients and customers to your business. Good, audience centered content can improve your search engine ranking too, as well as actually help your customers.
The two main goals that content marketing can serve are brand awareness and lead generation. Other include:
- Increasing website traffic
- Customer engagement
- Increasing sales revenue
What are the Advantages of Content Marketing Over Traditional Advertising Methods?
- It attracts a targeted audience
- People are more numb to advertising today
- It gets people’s attention without over selling
- Good information that is useful builds trust
- It’s more memorable than advertising
I’m Onboard! How do I get Started?
After determining your objectives as per the goals above, consider your audience.
- Who are the people most likely to buy your products or services?
- What does this audience need to know?
- What social platforms do they use?
- Where else can you promote your marketing content to them?
- Can your audience be broken down into groups or personas such as couples or families?
The answers to the above questions will provide you with information about your unique audience. Your content should be created specifically for each of these personas or groups. Write relevant content for each persona.
When creating your content, remember to include a key phrase within it for SEO purposes and include highly shareable headlines. Include too, some shareable resources that your audience can link to.
Make maximum use of the content you have created by reusing and transforming parts of it, for example, for:
- Email marketing
- Breaking into small tweets
- Changing into an info graphic
- Reposting on industry websites
- Rewriting as part of an eBook
Content Formats
Your unique and informative content can be created in many formats, including:
- As blog articles
- As case study stories
- As info graphs
- As video demonstrations
- As podcasts
Calls to Action
You may wish to incorporate a takeaway for visitors in to your content, depending on your products or services. Takeaways can include:
- Recipes
- Informative eBooks
- Special Reports
- How-to downloads
- Product catalogues
Takeaways can provide you with new email addresses to add to your list.
Audience Participation
Many companies encourage customer participation and involvement in their content marketing strategies, (as McDonald’s enjoyed with their customizing menu items campaign recently), and include ideas from this when considering their content marketing plans.
Your customers can provide you with content you can incorporate in your campaigns such as questions and answers, photographs of themselves using your products, or testimonials about it. Include them and encourage them to share your content whenever possible by, not only providing giveaways or downloads, but perhaps by running a competition that they can share with others. By putting your customer or client’s needs at the center of your marketing efforts, you are essentially making your marketing a service.
Promoting Your Content
Whether you’re providing excellent content filled with tips, how-to’s or competitions, or promoting brand awareness, you will be wasting your time if no-one knows about it. Get your customers onboard through good content marketing promotion.
Having identified your goals, and created your best content, as soon as it’s live on your website you must begin the vital task of promotion to the groups of people you wanted to reach. Promotion is vital if you wish your content marketing strategy to succeed and to generate a favorable ROI return to your business. Promotion should include:
- Sharing your content on social media
- Reaching out to influential others
- Optimizing your content for search engine traffic
- Email campaigns
There are programs that can help you automate the above tasks and make life a little easier for you that are available online. Hootsuite is one who can provide you with a tool to automatically find and share content with your audiences and publish content to your social networks. Buffer is another whose social media tool plans begin with a free plan for individuals, to larger plans for teams and agencies.
Use your brand’s own social accounts to promote your latest content and mention new content in your blog posts. Use onsite links providing downloads available to your visitors on your website such as links to catalogues, help resources, eBooks etc.
Further Resources
If you’re worried about re-arranging your website to make it more content marketing friendly or you wish to create and design a new content marketing website for your products or services, finding a competent content marketing agency is the first step!
You can find a lot more general information about content marketing online at the following expert’s websites:
Christopher Dill is the lead SEO ninja at The Dill Design. He has a passion for helping businesses grow through digital inbound marketing and increasing organic sales and conversions. Chris also manages responsive web design projects for SMB’s.
