Content marketing has never been a “create them, and people will come to know” thing. It’s a huge process starting from creating content to winning your audience’s heart and trust. Rand Fishkin from Moz very aptly described the process with his usual sense of humor.
In this article, we’re going to show you how an effective content marketing strategy should look like.
Create content with a goal:
What is your content marketing goal? Try to come down to a satisfactory answer to this question. It shouldn’t be, “We’ll do it because everyone is doing it”. First analyze what you want to achieve from content marketing. The goal can be multi-faced from lead generation to traffic to branding.
It varies from one business to another.
Focus on your audience:
Audience plays a pivotal role in content marketing, as they’re the people who'll consume your content. So, it’s very important to create content that your audience would love. For example, the content, created for the people aged between 18 to 25, must be different from the content, made for parents. Think of your audience first beforehand.
Optimize your content for search and social:
What do you do after you post a new content? If you think that your job is done there, you’re wrong. Effective content marketing starts only after you hit the publish button. The responsibility of a true content marketer is huge, as he needs to make sure that the content is searchable as well as shareable.
Make sure the content is social media and search engine ready. If you need to re-design your content for searches, do that. Social platforms give you options to customize the content for search. And ensure that your content is easily shareable on social media.
Boost content reach; spend some money:
Sometimes, it’s necessary to push your content with ads, be it on search engines or social media. On social media, running ads for increasing content reach is nothing new. But have you tried boosting your content's reach via Google ads and social media ads?
Take a real-life situation.
Let’s assume that you own a beauty salon in Perth and have a blog. You want to use your blog posts for lead generation. Can PPC help you? Yes, it can. All you need to do is, strategize with keeping ROI in mind. Here are a couple of tips.
- Create a great blog post after researching on the keywords and searching behavior of your audience.
- Set PPC ads for it.
- Once the users click on the ad, they land on the blog post page.
- While they’re done with reading, show them a pop-up for registration or sign-up.
- Each sign-up adds up to your user database and sales funnel.
Apart from Google ads, Facebook ads will also work for this business conversion rate, if strategized correctly.
They will not only increase traffic to your website, but will also help you generate leads for your business.
Create structured content consistently:
Content can be either consolidated or unconsolidated. Blog posts, Facebook updates, tweets are unconsolidated content. User consumes them, takes a action, and that’s it. They don’t create any further engagement.
But a business must invest in creating consolidated content to help their audience offer bigger and better services. Content like eBooks, Whitepapers, Case studies, Webinars, Guides would offer structured information to your audience. Moreover, they’re excellent resources to prove your industry thought leadership. Apart from that, these content would engage your audience more on your website.
Your turn:
Whatever you do on your website, blog or social media pages, is content marketing. And it’s the center of all your marketing efforts. Analyze your content formulation with these five tips to see where you stand on a scale of 10. And don’t forget to share your observation with us.
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