There has for some time been much hype around the emerging methods of advertising developed by digital marketing executives across the world. It’s true – the internet has opened up a near-infinite playing field of opportunities for your business to channel traffic, and therefore sales, through your website.
This article acknowledges the incredible power of digital marketing by drawing attention to one of the key fundamental ways to market your company online: through content creation. By examining the multiple opportunities presented to you in this online space, this article will provide a wealth of hints and tips for your new content creation strategy.
Host Content
The first point of order is to underline the importance of posting your content on your own website – i.e., on your unique business URL. If you’re hosting content on a blogging platform that merely links to your site, you’re going to be missing out on all the traffic that could be arriving directly onto your site, where web users can explore your other content, but most importantly your store or services.
It’s best to set up a kind of company blog from which to post articles. They should be relevant to your business so that those searching for your posts will also be interested in engaging with your company. Article themes include:
- News stories and analysis related to your industry
- Advisory articles that recommend your product or service
- Marketing videos, images,and infographics
- Press coverage and relevant media shares that mention your company
- Press releases when you release a new product, service or branch to your brand
The list goes on – just ensure you’re following the two key rules:
- Keep it informative (related to your business)
- Keep it entertaining (something web users will enjoy consuming)
SEO and Keywords
Anyone who knows anything in the sphere of digital marketing is going to recommend you read into the three-letter acronym: SEO. ‘Search Engine Optimization’is a marketing strategy that’s responsive to the algorithms that Google uses to rank its search results. If your content is highly relevant and well-worded, Google will place it high up on each results, and as the infamous modern-day proverb puts it:
“The best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of Google search results.”
Think yourself to the last time you ventured off the first page of Google’s results to understand the validity of this claim. Google’s algorithms are so good at providing you with exactly what you’re looking for that you’re rarely forced to navigate deeper into its results.
From the reflected perspective – that of the publisher – you need to latch on to the potential searches that people looking for your content, your business and your products will type into the Google search bar. That’s where keywords come in. Let’s look at an example of keywords that’ll draw web users on to your site.
You’re a construction materials company, and you’re posting written content about how to build your own home. Inside the article, you link to your own supplies, tools and other content to help web users in their ambition. Your keywords should concentrate on what people are typing into Google if they’re truly interested in building their own homes. That’s where ‘intent’comes in.
Understanding Intent
Put simply, intent is what you’re trying to work towards when you’re trying to understand how and why people are searching for your company, your products,and your content. Find out how intent works in search bars online by reading up from the experts. But if you’re looking for a succinct breakdown of intent, it can roughly be separated into three different categories:
- Informational – web users trying to know something
- Transactional – web users trying to buy something
- Navigational – web users trying to find something
Having broken web searches down into these three distinct categories, you’ll be better able to tackle the variety of searches that web users will input into the search engines that’ll hopefully guide them to your site.
In content creation terms, you’re trying to draw in custom by angling towards informational intent. This means you’re trying to tack yourself on to consumer searches that are asking for knowledge. As an expert in your field, you should have plenty of knowledge to share, and your blog is the perfect place to do this.
Multimedia Content
As well as the written word, you should maintain a keen awareness that the currents of content marketing are shifting towards videographer content – usually explaining some theory or idea with the help of animations or moving image alongside narrated text.
Multimedia content is also particularly effective when you share it via your social media channels. In case your company is bereft of a social media presence, the advice here is to create social media pages as soon as possible. Social media use was once a way of getting in touch with the younger generation, but nowadays, with so many age groups engaged with the likes of Facebook, you’ll have a broad spectrum to market to on these platforms.
Bearing in mind the way users interact with online content on social media platforms – scrolling through content quickly, with short attention spans – you’re unlikely to draw in traffic through text alone. Each article should, at the very least, come with a curiosity-peaking headline and a stimulating cover image. On top of that, recall Facebook’s ‘autoplay’feature – if you’ve produced a video, merely by scrolling past it, social media users will find themselves watching the videographer content that you create.
Regular and Consistent Posting
A small but important note on your content marketing strategy: make sure you stagger your published content so that your posts are regular and consistent. Posting five articles in one week and one in the following week is less effective than posting three a week at regular intervals.
To keep your company blog active and attracting repeat visitors, you should focus your energies on posting at least once a week. In this way, you may build a subscriber base that visits your site specifically to consume the content that you create – and, maybe, to engage further with your company. Share your content across social media to improve visibility.
The above should demonstrate to you the value of content marketing in the modern era; set up a blog, get posting, and monitor your traffic and sales as you draw more web users to your website.