When it comes to the internet, there is one reigning champion: content. After all, you cannot feel products through your screen. You cannot be sure that a service is going to be good if you don’t trust the brand. The online world is all about the content that you can digest and enjoy through a screen, and creating a stunning content marketing strategy is how you can connect with potential customers online.
A great content strategy gives people a reason to return. This could be a reason to follow you on social media, to sign up for your newsletter, or to simply visit your website again and again. Trust is built through repeat introductions online. If you can showcase your quality and reputation to them every time they see you, they will come to trust you and your online platforms.
Building that trust is one of the most important steps to succeeding online, and so to get started, you will need to follow these steps:
Understand Your Demographic
To get started with content marketing, you first need to understand your demographic. Know things like:
- Gender
- Age
- Location
- Interests
- Income
- Common problems
- Preferred social sites
- Top influencers
- Trending topics
Create High-Quality Content
Using what you know about your demographic and the type of content they are looking for, start making content. There are two main branches of content you will need to focus on. The first is blog content or other similar content you will publish online. This is more long-form content intent on building brand reputation.
The second type of content is content for social media posts or other short-form content. It works to help keep customers engaged over longer periods of time and is great for building up a community.
Optimize Content
All content, both long-form and short-form, must be optimized. This means it should be free of errors, optimized for the platform, and optimized for search engines. Always look at:
- Keywords
- Internal links
- External links
- Formatting
- Readability
- Shareability
Remember, you can always re-optimize any existing content too!
Market Content
Having great content is the first step. Marketing is the second. After all, the best article in the world is worthless if it lives in a sealed box that no one reads. If you are not confident in marketing or don’t have the manpower to properly invest in marketing efforts, then using the services of a digital marketing agency is the best solution forward. Marketing is a 24/7 effort, and creating great content is a huge responsibility on its own. By working with a company like www.clickintelligence.co to improve your marketing and SEO, you can see your content reach greater heights and provide a better ROI than your efforts every did.
Here are some ways to market your content:
Paid Search
The first option to market your content is paid search. Search engines are still the main tool that people use to find the information that they are looking for. Getting to the top of any search result, however – even niche ones – is massively difficult. It requires a comprehensive SEO strategy that you won’t see the payoff for months, even years.
Paid social allows you to bypass the difficulty of building up your ranking. With a Pay-Per-Click, you simply choose the keywords you want your link to show up at the top of the results for. You only pay when a user clicks on your site. The more popular and in-demand keywords are more expensive, but to get a good ROI with any type of keyword, you need to be smart about your PPC strategy and the content you are directing users towards.
Paid Social
Paid social is similar to traditional advertising. You create a post or series of posts and then pay to get these advertisements up in the line of sight of your demographic. Unlike traditional advertising, you can be very specific about who sees your ads. On Facebook, you can narrow down the demographic to the exact group that you focus on, whereas on other sites that don’t offer the same level of demographic detail, it will allow you to showcase your ads based on user activity. In both cases, you can advertise more accurately to people most interested in your content.
Newsletters
The soft sell refers to getting permission to stay in touch with customers. In most cases, this will be via newsletter. Newsletters can help keep customers returning to your site. Produce great content that they will enjoy to get them back on your website. When customers see a brand often, they will automatically start to trust that brand more. Provide them every reason to trust your brand and your team so that they will hire you or buy from you on repeat occasions.
PR Marketing
PR marketing is a very powerful tool. It takes a long time to properly build up the right reputation and to figure out what works and what doesn’t, but once you do, there is so much possibility. You can have your business advertised by a local newspaper, or featured on a niche website. PR marketing is a mixture of guest posting and PR strategies to get bigger names and influencers to talk about your brand.
SEO
If you can rank organically on a search, the traffic to your site will simply explode. It is, however, very difficult to reach that top position. It is easier to rank on niche keywords, which is why local SEO is a much better and more economical approach for small businesses.
Regardless of what search terms are best for your site, you will need to create a comprehensive strategy to see results. This means both on-site optimization and off-site optimization. Due to the sheer number of recommendations and the fact that Google updates its algorithm at least once, but sometimes multiple times a day, it is best to outsource these efforts.
Analyze, Regroup, Retry
Finally, use analytics. Every social platform and website has its own analytics information. Use this data to improve your content and digital marketing strategies. This will benefit you when it comes to reassessing the content marketing strategy you are using further down the line. You can see what is working and what isn’t; there’s no point putting effort into something that isn’t bringing back the results, after all.