Content marketing is the technique of creating and circulating relevant and informative free ontent to attract target customers and engage existing ones. With more and more consumers choosing to ignore the traditional advertising world, good content marketing strategies are key in making a potential customer take notice of a brand, product or service. The aim of content marketing is not to directly sell or advertise to your audience, but to consistently present them with useful information that will in turn reward you with profitable customer action and loyalty.
Whether in the form of a blog, article, video, podcast, image or infographic, the most important thing to remember when creating content is that it needs to be unique and valuable to the consumer, so that they will enjoy it and want to share it with others. However, producing and publishing content that builds such trust and authority among your ideal customers is no easy task.
Outlined here are a few lessons in content marketing to help you create great content that will keep readers coming back for more and ultimately generate sales without traditional ‘hard sell’ tactics.
Know your audience
In order to optimise the performance of a content marketing program, it is essential that you have carried out sufficient research into your target audience and how they discover and consume content online. What are they searching for and talking about on the Internet? What kind of content do they want to read? Knowing their habits and preferences will enable you to tailor your content to suit their needs. Creating relevant content for your target customer will make them feel like you really know them. This will then encourage customer loyalty from them and the chance that they will then share the information with other target customers.
Think like a publisher
In order to make your content marketing strategy as effective as possible, it’s important that you think like a publisher and work from a pre-planned editorial calendar. This calendar should outline the topic, the type of content, the target audience and the channels you’ll use to deliver each piece. You can also use the calendar to map out keywords for SEO and any other calls to action. The point of this calendar is to keep you regularly producing content and to help you to reach your business goals.
Think about SEO
Generating traffic for your website used to be totally reliant on how well your site was optimized for search engines. Today, the major search engines are focusing on creating the best possible user experience, which means that sites that offer relevant information stand to gain the most visibility. Investing in original, valuable content creation in the current search climate is essential to SEO success. You website will rank higher in search results due to more people reading your content for longer periods of time.
Be clear & concise
Although there’s plenty of room for creativity, don’t forget to include the key basic elements of storytelling in your content. Be sure to include the who, what, where, how, why and when of the story and ensure the story is told in a clear, easy to read format. With so much information available on the web, the average user will find pages that are most appealing to them and will ignore web pages with content that looks too difficult to absorb.
Don’t limit your content
Optimise your chances for greater exposure by opening up your content and not limiting it solely to the field within which you operate. Content marketing is about maximising conversational reach. Whilst the type of content that you share should be relevant to what you are selling, opening up your content will allow it to spread into more categories and therefore connect you to a larger audience of potential customers.
Find something new to say
No one wants to read the same regurgitated content time and time again. Instead try and take a new angle on a familiar topic. Keeping your content fresh and surprising will help to build and maintain the traffic to your company website. Content that is provocative will help you to become known as a thought leader in your space and will also generate response from you target customers.
Incorporate visuals
One way to make your content instantly richer and more appealing to the user is to use imagery and video. Adding suitable visual aids to your content will help you to communicate a message more clearly and at the same time break up large blocks of text, allowing the user to quickly access the information they require and therefore creating better usability for the user. Greater usability means a greater chance that you target customer will return to your site in the future.
Online content has never been more important for a successful business. With the right kind of content, a web business can stand out from its competitors and be rewarded with a higher volume of customers and even more importantly, loyal ones who will become repeat buyers and ambassadors for your business.
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