“Content marketing is the only marketing left”- Seth Godin
Content marketing is the use of content to market your business. Anything that you create that users interact with like blogs, videos, infographics, social media posts and so on. It is the way people get to know your business in a non-invasive way.
Here are some of the best approaches for content marketing to boom up your business:
1.Find a proven topic
The very first thing to do is to find a topic. It must be atopic with a proven track record. To find it check out content from one of your competitors. Or you can also go to a competing blog and keep an eye out for posts that have lots of social shares, comments or both.
2.Understand your Audience
This kind of marketing is very customer-centric. It’s less selling, more educating and entertaining your readers with the aim of gaining their trust in the process. To do this, you need to know who your audience are, and what their need is from you. This provides you an idea of how much useful content you have now and what content you need.
This includes two key actions:
- Developing customer persona
- Mapping your content to your customer’s journey
Any content growth plan begins with developing customer persona. It unveils who your target audience are, which then helps you find the most appropriate topics to cover.
3.Choose a content format
It is not just blog posts but besides that there are YouTube videos, native videos, lead magnets, eBooks, infographics, podcasts, quizzes and more. The need for you here is to choose a format that works best for you. If you are an excellent writer, focus on blog posts. Do you love facing the camera, then make a video. Or, are you an amazing designer, in that case, you want to create a piece of visual content. In fact, you don’t even need to stick to one format.
4.Repurposing content
Taking one giant piece of content, splicing and carving it out for all of the different social networks or all sorts of different content users. The key with content repurposing is to start with that one epic killer piece of content. It is better to have a massive long-form piece of content that you can actually carve out smaller pieces from.
The best thing to do this is with video. Video is going to give you the most flexibility and freedom. For example you can take a video and strip out the audio to get the podcast. Now you can take that podcast and transcribe it into text where you get a blog post. So like this you get all kinds of social media posts or tweets.
5.Integrate with your SEO Campaign
Content marketing usually goes with SEO, which – now more than ever – functions on the mantra “Content is King”. Quality content delivers demand, and good content is linkable. These are the two of the most important qualities Google is looking for.
Creating high-quality content may seem like an exaggerated, common advice, but Google’s Panda algorithm makes it realer than ever. For many years now, the union of UX and Content Strategy has been proceeding since Google made it clear that content quality would play a crucial role in matching your links with search queries.
“When crafting your content, answer as many questions as you can. Good content answers questions, and semantically relevant content reflects this,” says Mark Munroe in From SEO To SXO: Search Experience Optimization.
If you rank high for any search query Google believes your content has one of the best answers for the search query.
Google advises to focus on providing the best possible user experience on their website and to not aim too much on what they believe are Google’s current ranking signals.
6.Optimise your content to Mobile
Developing mobile-friendly content today is a need and not an option. If you are not able to reach your audience through mobile search or display, you will miss an opportunity to engage, especially since nearly two billion internet users browse through their smartphones and tablets.
You will face two challenges while optimising for mobile. The first challenge is speed and the second challenge is engagement. To create a first good impression, you have 15 seconds or fewer before your potential customer moves on to a competitor.
The second is your content should be created for mobile devices and provide a touch-ready experience. To drive deeper levels of engagement, take advantage of these mobile moments.
7.Track your performance
You have just published an amazing piece of content, which is based on a proven topic, has great content UX, and you promoted it. But there still lies a question, how do you know if all that stuff actually worked? It is better to focus on these 2 metrics
Traffic
Ultimately, the whole point of this content marketing thing is to get more traffic. It’s probably time to switch things up, if your content isn’t bringing in more traffic. Content marketing and SEO can take time to get successful, sometimes months.
Conversions
You can measure conversions in Google analytics. If you see conversions moving up along with traffic, that’s a sign that your content marketing is really working.
As the approaches used to deliver content to prospects are continuously changing, the main principles stay the same, creating a top-notch Content Marketing strategy based on trustworthy data.
