Why Content Marketing?
Visitors on WWW relate to content more than visuals albeit both are important promotional elements. Content is King may sound cliche but remember it is here to stay.
“Content is king, but distribution is queen. And she wears the pants.” ~ Jonathan Perelman
In the case of online marketing, things need to move and hit the target. Content is king but it becomes effective when skillfully conceived and distributed as mentioned in the quote above.
According to a survey the preferred goal conversions according to respondents were:
- Brand Awareness 45%
- Website Traffic 37%
- Lead Generation 36%
- Increase in Sales 26%
- Customer Loyalty 23%
According to Statista 91% B2B and 86% of B2C marketers use this strategy worldwide to reach business associates, clients, and customers.
Successful Types & Formats
This is one of the best strategies, and a powerful method for brand promotion, creating awareness, enhancing sales, and achieving high traffic goals whatever the purpose may be. The strategy is based on promotional content as the title suggests but then the approach is complex and requires ingenuity, intuition, experience, and familiarity with diverse platforms on the World Wide Web. The write-ups could be long form, short form, or even tag lines, comments, messages, and tweets that draw attention and eventually end up creating awareness on a mass scale.
The write-ups should carry all the nitty-gritty of writing and weave an emotional story to hook the visitors and indulge in constant engagement. The readers should be incited to know more, fall into the riddles, or become desperate to seek the final denouement. Depending upon the marketer's ingenuity anything works even thoughtful leadership expressions, carefully crafted influencer blogs, and authoritative articles - all work. It may be the tag lines or titles that attract but it is the crux that leads to the ultimate success.
Content Marketer Inspiration & Team Effort
As a content marketer one has to be on the alert even during the off time. Inspiration may dawn in a bathtub. Remember Archimedes! An energized and motivated team deals with the diversity of paid and organic mediums since it is not possible to overcome the challenges singlehandedly.
After a successful awareness campaign, the visitors often leave behind various social signals, especially on social media. A like, subscription, following, comment, or a mail of appreciation indicates that visitors are turning into prospective customers and are ripe for the next stage which is consideration. Usually, visitors that are not interested leave behind a bounce rate metric that is a warning to the creators to up their efforts enough to leave a deep impact on the readers.
Goal Conversions: Creatives and Quality Contents
Engaging attributes are a must for consideration however small they may be even in a terribly constricted space in terms of weight, dimensions, or characters. A trendy slogan, spectacular image or infographic a promotional video all work fine in order to hook the prospective customer in a post.
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Attributes plus quality contents complement each other and are pummeled by CMS, dynamic websites, and anecdotal or informative blogs. There is no shortage of popular media it could be news sites, press releases, white paper publications, annual or quarterly company performance reports, and customer testimonials highlighting product experience and features. These are effective goal conversion tools when utilized as a final follow on the customer journey pathway.
The objective could be attained on social media, by website visits, videos, or webinars all of which are good enough to engage prospective customers. Creativity plays a major role in empowering content that eventually strikes the target.
Remember customer journey is rarely short and simple, it is a complex process, and conviction and final conversion can be time-consuming in the case of the major campaign the exercise becomes a team effort. These strategic efforts are applicable to both organic and paid media and should be well planned.
Bottoms Up Approach
Once you have undergone the Content Creation process and ended up with a good blog post you need to sit down with an in-house editor, and SEO for a final review and editing and proofreading of the content before it is eventually published. Immense importance has to be given to relevancy and intent when creating posts.
In the first step during the review the following steps are involved:
- Relevance is Utmost Important
- Check for Grammatical Errors
- Check for Story Gaps
- Verify Facts
- Wordsmithing
- Include SEO Elements
- Add Scannable Inputs
In crafting killer content during the pre-publishing stage one needs to check the grammar to increase readability and engagement. Check for excessive use of passive voice, check for punctuation marks, etc.
Content Audit: Analytics & Reporting
Analytics are provided by search engine companies and some social media platforms also provide insights and statistics on the performance of your posts. Besides ranking, the statistics, and traffic, it is important to pay attention to the demographics and audience profiles. Keep a tap on where you are heading. Are you moving in the right direction to influence the target audience or going wayward?
Story Gaps
Check for story gaps and the flow, especially for time jumps. If you recall a TV series you will notice that the episode ends whence something is about to happen and the mystery remains unsolved. You are bound to watch the next episode out of intense curiosity. This is how the film companies keep their TRP high. By keeping us engaged in the serial one episode after another.
We can follow the same strategy in our blog posts. Why Not? Leave an answered but related question at the end of the post.
The blog posts should make the readers go for a related post or a post on the same topic with advance discussions.
Get to Know Target Personae
Well, an effective content marketing strategy will begin with getting to know the Target Personae and the Objective. What do you wish to do? Whom do you target?
Getting to know the brand, the company, and the products and services if you are a service provider is a must.
Brand Promotion: Create Authencity & Connection & Touch Points
Content marketing strategy accords room for a wide spectrum of activities. When you create awareness and engage the audience with a great degree of consistency you are bound to create a connection with the brand and for that matter the services in another case.
Constant endeavors create brand authenticity and connection with prospective customers, and it is a well-known fact that shoppers prefer to buy branded products that have found a space in their minds. As many as 59% of shoppers buy branded products that are known to them.
Frequent encounters through well-formed content and visuals are vital touchpoints that make customers loyal and create an inclination to buy. Trust is an important factor and those prospects who are not convinced or do not relate to the brand are definitely going to move away. Remember brand identity must be well aligned with offerings
Content Creation for Publishing
It is essential to create exhaustive keyword research for content creation.
Content creation is based on defining the objectives and creating a campaign for the following.
- Awareness
- Consideration or Engagement
- Goal Conversion
The purpose of content creation is to focus on creating awareness followed by the consistent engagement that will make the prospective customer consider possible goal conversion.
SEO Content Creation
Finalizing keywords used by prospective customers throughout their buyer journey is important hence the research precedes the other steps. It is important to understand keyword optimizing and semantic inclusions naturally. The basic principle of using terms in title/meta, headings, and subheadings of the posts should be followed. The body should not be overoptimized as it is written for the readers and not for search engines hence. keep the term saturation to 4 or 5 % strictly so that search engines do not label the posts as spam.
Retargeting a Crucial Marketing Strategy
Constant engagement creates trust, highlights products or services, and helps in retargeting, thanks to the visible appreciation signals that are added. The third stage is creating content that highlights the brand or services such that the customer makes a purchase or subscribes to services as a client.
Online community building is the key focus of social media networking sites. A large base of followers/subscribers relates to greater response and aids in the success of marketing campaigns.
Marketers should be prepared to create diverse write-ups that cater to all the stages of marketing and resonates with the customer journey funnel. Be mindful of seasons, events, and occasions when purchasing level peaks. Depending upon the products and services the peak time may differ so be on the alert.
Invaluable Data Acquisition
The marketing campaigns should not focus only on goal conversion, since the engagements help in the acquisition of invaluable data based on the target personae. Data acquisition is a collateral benefit that accrues due to constant interaction with interesting profiles that can help in achieving the goals in the future. Another benefit that accrues as you overcome the social media challenge is greater success in organic campaigns and less reliance on paid media.
Multipronged Marketing Strategy: Taking the Platforms by Storm
Since the arrival of social media, a number of stable platforms have emerged for marketers to test their ability to utilize them for promoting their campaigns using quality content and attributes. Social media is quick to judge promotional content, and this manifests as high traffic, a great number of followers, engagement, and often conversions.
There are a number of ways that social media manifests appreciation of the posts. The signals usually like, follows, comments, shares, and offers of friendship. Though not confirmed yet, that these signals aid in ranking high on SERPs or act as search engine optimization metrics, they are nevertheless a signal for the likelihood of a post going viral on the medium. The viral impact though rare multiplies visibility by leaps and bounds. A post going viral is a rare phenomenon, and hence the efforts call for consistency in promotional activities online.
All elements of online communication are included in the awareness campaign at the start.
- Email Marketing
- SMS Marketing
- Direct Calls
- Networking of Social Media
The most important part is networking on social media and online publication platforms. These are best for content publishing. Content marketing strategy includes ungated content like blog posts, article publishing, press releases, and creating ebooks. The ungated contents including posts on social media and networking sites accord dual benefits besides the fruits of a winning piece they are best for authoritative link building a crucial part of SEO in digital marketing.
Guest posting and outreach to relevant influencers besides enhancing traffic are good for lead generation and search engine optimization.
For organic success there is no holds barred policy. Greater efforts are carried on for organic gains that come for free by the team involved. Paid media inclusion would depend on the budget and company policy.
Some of the major publishing platforms are:
- Facebook
- Instagram
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Wizzley
- Hub Pages
- Adobe
- Medium
- Wakelet
- Bebee
- Abilogic
- Sooperarticles
- Ezine Articles
- WP Blogs
- TypePad Blog
- Blogger
- New Sites
- Reddit
- Quora
Each platform works fine if properly scaled by publishing informative relevant posts with visual attributes. Publishers (Team) have to create authoritative and popular accounts in order to avail maximum gains.
The platforms are good for SEO although some of them are nofollow they nevertheless help in creating referrals and add to authoritative factors that search engines value.
Company websites and blogs add immense value to this holistic exercise. These two are factors very much in our control hence greater attention should be paid to them.
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Uday provides a search engine optimization service for digital marketing. He provides website content and content for authoritative links. He also works as SEO Content Writer for digital companies on a remote WFH basis.
He also teaches digital marketing in his home town Jabalpur. He can be contacted at:
pateluday90@hotmail.com
09755089323
