Six Simple Content Marketing Strategies
Producing your content is only the first step
A successful content marketing strategy includes the regular posting of online materials such as educational articles, blog posts, videos and images. The idea behind any marketing campaign is to raise awareness and bring a new audience to your brand – content marketing isn’t any different. Becoming an authoritative force in your niche doesn’t happen overnight and requires meticulous planning and research. If you’ve started the content marketing process but haven’t noticed any tangible results, here are six strategies you can implement to turn that around.
Keep Length in Mind
The oversaturation of online content means that visitors can hop from blog post to blog post if it doesn’t instantly capture their attention. Studies have shown that a potential reader spends less than 15 seconds looking for an interesting blog post or article. Keep this in mind when you’re writing your content. Readers will immediately leave if it appears too long or contains too many technical terms.
Use High-Quality Visuals
This is related to the first point regarding the need to quickly the attention of a potential visitor. Visual content could be high-quality images, Infographics, videos, gifs, graphs and charts. Visual content has a number of uses including consolidating large amounts of data into something readable, or simply brightening up the page and breaking up the blocks of text. They also contribute to SEO, but we’ll look at that further in the next section.
Optimize Content for Search
Writing the text and adding images is only the first step of your content marketing journey. Most people will find your content through a search engine; this is where keywords will play a big role in your strategic marketing approach to ensure your content appears in the relevant search queries. Keywords should be included in the title, the body of the text and the meta tag descriptions. It’s important to remember that Google’s algorithm can detect those who stockpile and overuse keywords in an attempt to beat the system.
Focus on your niche
You need to create content that caters to a specific target audience. Trying to consistently produce quality content that isn’t oriented towards a location or demographic is a tough ask, and will result in an unfocused content marketing strategy. Instead, produce something that is related to the products or services in your niche. Your niche is your area of expertise, so producing content that’s accurate, up-to-date and interesting shouldn’t be an issue.
Use Freelancers and Influencers
The digital age has created a successful industry of social media influencers who can be paid to leverage their huge popularity to promote a product or service. This is increasingly common and you won’t go far on a social media platform without seeing a company's name associated with popular influencers. Influencers with large followings can command a hefty fee; so think carefully about whom you decide to partner with. Freelancers are also effective at producing high-quality content that isn’t in your specialist area in a short turnaround.
Quality over Quantity
Great content should always be well-researched, up-to-date, accurate and thoroughly proofread. You need to consider producing a single piece of content per week, or two at the most. This will give you the time you need to keep your ideas fresh and current. Focussing on quantity over quality and overindulging in your content plan can fatigue both your audience and your content writers. The last thing you want is for your audience to think it’s a chore to read or interact with content, knowing that something new will arrive shortly afterwards.
Wrap-Up
Businesses big and small should always be ready to implement an active content marketing strategy – the issue with the process is knowing what to do after the content has been produced. With this post, we hope you’ll have gained a valuable insight into the multifaceted practice and can take the steps required to achieve results with content marketing
