Now that your website is set up and you’re publishing amazing content, it’s time to start using it to generate more business; this is called content marketing. Content marketing accomplishes several things:
- Attracts inbound links to your website, strengthening your domain authority and improving your search engine rankings.
- Adds to the wealth of content on your website, effectively dropping another “hook in the water” every time you publish a new page of content, which increases the likelihood of being found by potential customers in the search engines.
- Establishes your brand as a thought-leader and industry authority, building trust with your readers and resulting in increased conversion rates, leads, and sales. Every link pointing to your website does more than just improve your search engine rankings; they can also become a free, long-term, passive source of highly targeted referral traffic– the best kind.
GETTING STARTED WITH CONTENT MARKETING
Before you can get started with content marketing, you need a plan, and before you can create a plan you need to understand your audience. Here are a few things to ask yourself when beginning your content marketing strategy:
- Do you have true thought leaders that have original insights or opinions?
- Do you have unique research on new industry trends you can share?
- Do you have services or products unique to your industry?
- Who are you trying to reach through content marketing?
- What challenges are they trying to overcome?
FREQUENCY AND VOLUME
How dedicated are you going to be to content marketing? Some companies prefer to do a few in-depth, industry-leading white papers each year and focus all their efforts on them. Other companies will choose an ongoing flow of consistent content marketing in the form of videos, blog posts, infographics and more. The more the merrier, so long as the quality of the content doesn’t suffer.
CAPABILITIES
If you’re going to focus on white papers, articles, blog posts and other types of content that are text-based, you’ll need a strong writer on your team with subject matter expertise. If you’d like to focus your effort on videos, do you have professional recording equipment or someone who can create professional animations? If not, please realize that sub-par content will do you no good. In fact, it will reflect poorly on your company, potentially harming your brand and conversion rates.
THE 3 C’S OF CONTENT MARKETING
There are three big factors that you need to keep in mind while creating your content marketing plan. They’ve become known as the three C’s of content marketing:
• Creativity
• Consistency
• Capturing
CREATIVITY
Create content that’s unique and memorable, and you’ll
receive more recognition. Be creative and leave room for flexibility. You never know when something might come up in the news you could put a spin on or a new trend might emerge. One of my favorite ways to be creative is to tie in popular holiday themes with content when those holidays are near.
CONSISTENCY
If you want your content marketing strategy to yield
maximum benefit, it’s important to be consistent. Whether you maintain 4 blog posts per month or 4 blog posts per week, stay consistent so customers and followers learn what they can expect.
CAPTURING
I’m not sure why this term has been coined, as I would
have called it ‘optimization’. ‘Capturing’ simply refers to measuring
and understanding information with regard to how well your content is performing. Measuring allows you to track which efforts tend to drive the most traffic, and attract the most interest, leads, and sales. As you start to narrow down the best-performing content types, then you’ll know where to focus for future content to achieve the best ROI.