The internet is overwhelmed with millions of new blog posts all of the time. In simple words, there are approximately five billion active internet users and over four billion active social media users worldwide, which means your brand has a huge opportunity to engage with an audience and develop massively. With the world going crazy with digital marketing how can you effectively market your content to make sure your website and blog rise above the noise and gain legitimate traffic consistently?
Content marketing is a marketing approach that focuses on generating, publishing, and distributing valuable and relevant content online in order to reach a targeted audience and encourage profitable customer action. Finally, content marketing is an important part of achieving long-term, sustainable growth.
And yet, despite its immense impact, many marketers don’t know how to implement a successful content marketing strategy.
We’ve put up this list of content marketing strategies to help you develop a truly valuable marketing plan. Continue reading to learn how to become a true content marketing pro.
1. Content has a purpose
Content marketers are creatives at their heart, and we may easily fall in love with our own creations. We’ll team up with brilliant designers to create something that we’re confident will win accolades. We waste time and money when we lose sight of the business goal — when we forget that our content serves a purpose.
Our content should have a clear, measurable business aim, whether it’s brand awareness, prospect engagement, or customer education. Keep that in mind.
2. Content is about the customer, not the business
Ever find yourself talking with someone who wants to tell you every detail about his trip to see Walt Disney?
Mind-numbing, right?
Our customers feel the same way when we only tell stories about our business and product.
How should they feel? Like they’re conversing with someone who listens and asks questions while they tell their story.
Prospects and customers want to work with companies that understand their problems and can assist them to reach their objectives. Make your material responsive to the reader’s needs.
3. 90% of content marketing has nothing to do with creating content
Yes, believe us when we say “Ninety per cent of content marketing has nothing to do with creating content, According to Robert Rose, chief strategy advisor at the Content Marketing Institute, “ninety per cent of content marketing has nothing to do with providing the content. “Great internal communication and collaboration are the foundations of successful content marketing operations.” Researching the audience and what they require, developing products for our owned media outlets, and putting in the hard work of establishing workflows, schedules, and technology to help material flow through the organization’s ‘pipes.”
It’s all the work you do before you sit down at a computer or stand behind a camera – and all the work you do after – that makes great content shine.
4. SEO is collaborative
We often see search engine optimization through the prism of yesterday’s black hat SEO – keyword stuffing, content farms, and covert redirection – and miss the true art and science that our modern SEO competitors possess.
You want your content to appear first when customers ask Google to help them find a product like yours, whether it’s a sports car or an enterprise software solution. Your website and its fantastic content could spend a long time on page 10 if you don’t use SEO. That is something that no one wants.
Collaborate with your search counterparts and let your SEO team elevate what you do.
5. Emotional Engagement
Emotional engagement is at top of the strategy. We must tap into consumers’ emotions and drive engagement because humans make decisions most often based on emotion rather than facts and figures.
From the start, make your material emotionally relatable. When your prospects and consumers engage with you, give them statistics to help them make a decision.
6. Be original
Try to be original with your content, the content you produce will often rely on the same industry insights your competition is talking about. Before long, everyone is saying the same thing. It seems impossible to stand out.
Consider the world of ice creams. If you’re creating content to sell your own ice cream concoction, you might decide to write about picking the right flavour or debating how natural it is. Or you could interview a celebrity guest while they eat your chocolate brownie flavour. You could even call it I see cream – but chances are, I see cream the successful YouTube program that relies on that format, might have something to say about that.
Take time to consider the content, then use your own unique vision to mix something new and different.
7. Funny sells
Inspirational, educational, and entertaining content should all be included. It’s a refrain that many greying content marketers are all too familiar with. However, we frequently focus all of our attention on the informative and motivating while ignoring the fun. There are several reasons for this, the most important of which is whether or not customers will take the client less seriously.
Except for funny sales.
Humour is attention-grabbing, relatable and linked to the higher recall, making it an excellent choice for brand awareness. It can be gold on social media, too. More than 70% of consumers watch videos on social media to laugh, says a Sprout Social Media survey, and Americans are 43% more likely to share “funny” content than “important” content, according to an Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange survey. A brand has to entertain and connect the joke to its brand image. They’re using laughter to leverage brand familiarity.
When done right, do we get content that’s actively consumed, remembered and shared?
8. Go with your gut
In an ideal world, content marketers would have plenty of time to brainstorm, develop, revise, shape, rework, chew over, modify… you get the picture. Simply said, business often outpaces creativity. So, when you don’t have time to think, what do you do?
What’s so amazing about following your gut instinct? It ensures that you have a better than 50/50 chance of succeeding.
Start listening to your instincts by realising that “trusting your gut” entails drawing on your own knowledge and experience. “Practice makes perfect,” as well as muscle memory, are important factors to consider. When your favourite Cavs player hits a game-winning three-pointer at the buzzer, they’re relying on the same instincts you use as a content marketer and trusting their gut.
9. Keep hydrating your content
We produce so much, the best pieces are buried under the average and forgotten. Take time to conduct an audit of your existing content to determine what should stay, what should go and what needs a bit of hydrating. Keeping content consistent and up-to-date will not only help you surface great content for your customer and client but could also help your website’s search rank and inspire creators to build even better stories.
10. Be true to yourself
We’re tasked with producing stories to promote products and services as content marketers. Almost often, there is a commodity involved, as well as a philosophy for marketing that commodity. That philosophy may or may not align with yours.
“If we haven’t already, we should all learn the necessity of understanding how the firm or client produces money.” Understanding the business model of a firm or a client has two benefits: first, it allows you to determine what actually represents value for your organisation. If that’s something you can get behind, you’ll be able to perform a better job of adding value to it.
And two, if it’s not something you agree with, you can take action, such as exploring other options or lobbying for a change in the model.
Summing-up
Want to improve your company’s content marketing strategy?
If your company isn’t seeing the results you want from content marketing, Shergroup can help you. Our talented team of writers and designers has years of experience creating and promoting successful content for our clients, and we can do the same for you.
Contact us today to speak to our friendly business solutions advisors about how your business can get more customers with content!
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