Creating content and promotion is an important part of every successful online marketing strategy. Both are essential in achieving the target audience in the cheapest and efficient way possible.
Content Marketing is a tricky marketing procedure which focuses on distributing and creating relevant, valuable, and consistent content to draw and retain a target audience, and most especially, to drive profitable customer action.
Many entrepreneurs thought that content marketing is an expensive strategy which is only successful if there are much more exciting brands, because they think that every cents that they will spend will be worth it.
However, they also believed that it is stopping a lot of businesses from providing meaningful content that’s why they are using the strategy to grow their business. There are some business to business collection agencies which help with the financial status of some firms.
On the other side, there are still many content advocates who hit ‘publish’ who are not necessarily getting it correctly and just throwing away money, not seeing any physical results from their content marketing efforts.
A successful content marketing is not just about developing excellent content. Great content is simply a prerequisite to increase in online competition. Here are five essential tips on how to maximize your content marketing.
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Start with a complete strategy in place
Preparing for a plan might be the least exciting part of content marketing since it is just about writing down things that needs to be done. However, establishing complete objectives is a significant step in planning how to attract your audience and what kind of content that needs to be produced to get their attention.
A clear strategy can help the business to remain committed to an activity that is still ongoing. The content strategy should focus on these three areas:
- Know the target audience or who are the specific readers. The sort of content that they will be looking, the tactics on how to target them with relevant content, and the different stages that the customers may be at in the sales funnel should be all included.
- The company’s wider strategy and marketing goals should be indicated. It explains the things that the entrepreneur wants to achieve with the content marketing, why is he or she generating more leads and sales, and boosting brand awareness.
- It is necessary to designate appropriate roles for the people within the content marketing system to know who will write or create the content, who will edit the content to sustain quality, who will publish it, who will promote it, and what type of channels that is useful to improve the content.
An objective, detailed strategy document will give a significant advantage to share with stakeholders who will be quite far removed from the content side of the business.
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Planning for the content should be continuous
Once the strategy is outlined, it is important that planning for the content is sustained. Considerations like topics, workflow process, procedural guidelines, customer journey, and channel priorities should be pointed before creating begins or else there will be no real purpose of setting up a content.
An essential tool in planning for the content is by using an editorial schedule that indicates:
- Author
- The author’s email address
- Publication date
- Copy date
- Whether if it is an internal piece of content
- Whether it will be published to a different site
- The content type
- The content image
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Setting up a content hub
Having a particular place on the website to put the content is useful and what most visitors have come to expect are usually a blog that serves as the hub for business content.
However, as the content marketing efforts increase, the type of content also stretches beyond incorporating downloadable guides, simple blog posts, videos, and infographics. Once the content starts to expand, that is also the time that there is a need to add a resource section on the website.
It is also where the content will be shared, and the SEO efforts get focused, like links that will route back to the site. The links that come back to the articles will help the site’s overall link profile.
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Placing the creative data
Creating the content is pretty important, but in making sure that it will be successful, the right people that should work on a particular project should be listed.
Having excellent writers is not the only asset of every business anymore, but also having good visuals should be a priority considering that most senior marketers believe that visual content is the center on how to communicate their brand story. Articles which have visuals get 94% more reviews than those who don’t have.
If there is no in-house designer, most marketers take advantage of external resources because they don’t want to leave their plans at the first problem. It is essential to have the best people for the job to find cheap solutions to fulfill a skills gap.
If budget is standing in the way for all the plans, it is also possible to generate excellent content on a shoestring. This multi-channel triumph is the best example of getting the most out of the content and making sure that it drives many exposure and engagement for the business.
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Promoting through SEO and Email
It is important to remember the “marketing” factor within content marketing. The content is created to be viewed after all.
Most marketers promote content as soon as it goes live and also endorses this strategy to all clients. But various types of content might demand different kinds of sharing. For example, a blog must be shared on social media and promoted to the newsletter. However, a huge piece of industry research or white paper could take advantage in the form of paid advertisement.
Here are just some ways to promote content, from paid advertising to SEO, for wider views and engagement.
- Taking advantage of social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter’s paid advertising in targeting a particular audience who are probably getting interested in new guide’s content.
- Promoting a new downloadable white paper could produce a display campaign which advertises the guide to re-engage and re-target applicable website visitors who abandoned an inquiry or a sale.
- Whether publishing an eBook, a new article, or infographic, it is important to make sure that the subscribers are aware of it. Email subscribers have interested already in the business and thus great promoters who might share the content with their following.
- It is crucial to break up the bigger pieces of content into smaller pieces for the external websites. Create an infographic or series of articles to place a link that will point back to a download page or to the appropriate services or products you offer.
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Getting the attention of the influencers
Influencer marketing has been enormous in the last couple of years, and will still continue to become the fastest way to reach a bigger audience. However, it is important to remember the basic concept which is the context.
The first step to getting their attention is to define the blog’s brand and its target audience. With a full understanding of the reason why people read the blog can start others who are in the same field to research as well. Preferably, it is essential to create a shortlist of influencers who also writes about topics that belong to the same subject.
The second step is to start reaching out to those influencers and bloggers and start building a relationship with them. It is a daunting task that need to be continued to invest time.
Once there is already a list of influencers that can promote the business, there is also a need to start following them on social media sites and through their blogs.
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Keeping track of everything
Trying something small and giving a little attention, just to find that the tactics and ideas can change the understanding of the niche and the reader’s needs. It is important to recognize these trends and expand winning strategies while reducing losing ones in order to use the available resources most efficiently.
Aside from those things, it is also essential to keep a note of the goals that needs to be achieved and then analyzing the metrics that are most relevant. Find the most suitable figures for what is required to track and use them to get an understanding of how useful the content marketing strategy is.
Everyone should keep in mind that checking a single statistics in isolation is hardly helpful. If someone is aiming to increase the traffic figures, only looking at raw traffic numbers is not useful. Untargeted traffic that does not convert into a sale, a contact, or a subscriber also means nothing.
It would be better to have a lower traffic number but there’s an increase in conversions, because it suggests that someone wins more of the correct type of visitors with their efforts.
Takeaway
Content marketing is an advantage for the brand and should be tightly managed and considered an article strategy. If completed efficiently, it can generate both sales for the business and traffic to the site, so things such as any perceived skills gaps and budget should not hinder.