Content is King
What do we mean by content marketing? We are going to set out our stall by guiding you through what content marketing is and ways of improving it. Internet content isn’t just for businesses and broadcasters, it is also for the individual sitting at home with their laptop, with an interest in writing. The internet opens up a huge opportunity to get your voice and key messages heard and content can be published for little cost, or even free of charge.
Content can be business-related, educational or written for entertainment purposes. Content might include the information you host on your website, blogs, videos, live in-person events such as networking events or virtual webinars, social media posts, e-newsletters, brochures and flyers. Larger organisations would incorporate TV adverts and PR stunts into their content strategy for example.
Content such as blogs are a fantastic way to get your brand’s voice heard. When your content is shared the better your website will rank in the google search engines and the more traffic will find its way to you. Creating content across a number of platforms is key to driving more traffic to your website and gaining more clients and business leads. It also needs to be relevant and tailor-made to your audience as they come first.
Here are our top five tips to improving your content marketing
1. First step towards improving your content – Write a content strategy
In order to improve your content marketing it is essential to have a strategy in place. Content marketing and content strategy are linked but they are different. Content strategy is all about content management and governance. Write down and map out what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for. Who’s your audience? Your plan should incorporate your writing style and the frequency to which you plan to share your content. What visuals will you use such as videos and images?
What’s the one thing that makes you stand out from your competitors? What are your objectives? You also need to think about measuring the success of your content marketing. A successful content strategy relies on using pillars and clusters. A pillar page is a central topic or broad subject. The cluster topics surround it such as blogging, email newsletters and analytics. Add hyperlinks to your pillar page to make your content more accessible. If you haven’t added pillars and clusters to your strategy do so immediately.
2. Getting the right message out to the right person at the right time
Marketing isn’t just about sending out blogs, posting up videos and sending out e-newsletters in the hope that more traffic to your website will come. It’s all about timing and being strategic – getting the message out to the right person at the right time. To do that you need to customise each stage of your marketing plan.
3. Incorporate social sharing into your content and blogs
Always aim to produce inspiring content that is shareable.
Blogs and other website content become infinitely more powerful with the installation of social sharing widgets that allow users to share content to the biggest social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and pinterest. Visitors to your website need to feel empowered to share your blogs or articles to their social connections. One example of good practice would be to encourage people to hit ‘like’, ‘tweet’ or ‘share’ at the bottom of your blog as a call to action.
Reshare content using an important tool called Buffer. Buffer allows you to bulk upload and organise content to be posted to Facebook, twitter, google plus and linked in at a date and time of your choosing.
Another method of sharing your material is to convert blogs into slideshare presentations. www.slideshare.net helps to drive traffic to your website. Convert your text into a pdf to post on slideshare. Once published, slideshare presentations can be read and re-shared by the slideshare audience or shared onwards to facebook, twitter, pinterest and more – and can even be added to the news section of your website.
How to add share buttons to your website
One of the easiest ways of installing the social media buttons on your page is through the plugin AddThis (www.addthis.com) As well as the social media sharing options add a ‘Subscribe via RSS’ button in a prominent place on your page so that your posts appear on your audience’s Google Reader or RSS feed as soon as they are published.
4. Handy hints to think about when blogging …
When writing a blog, write keyword headlines that create solutions to problems such as …’How to potty train your child.’ ‘List’ posts are extremely popular in almost any industry such as 10 top marketing tips for your blog. Be sure to revisit your posts from time to time to keep them up-to-date.
Write blogs about breaking news within your sector as this positions you as an authority figure in your readers’ eyes. Try and encourage the reader to respond and engage with your content. For example, what do you think? Tell us in the comments below.
One of the biggest challenges when writing blogs is creating fresh content week in, week out. One technique to use is called ‘spinning.’ In summary, it involves taking an important topic and writing about it from a variety of standpoints. A blog entitled ‘10 top tips when marketing your business’ could become ‘what not to do when marketing your business.’
5. Don’t rely on just one type of content marketing
It’s easy to fall into the trap of relying on one type of content marketing such as blogs for example, and expect positive results to fly in. This is in spite of the latest statistics that demonstrate how blog output has increased by 800% in the past five years whereas organic social share of blogs has decreased by 89%.
Don’t heavily rely on one type of content. Think about using podcasts, videos, Instagram and white papers to get your key messages out across.
Before you go…
Hit like tweet or share below today and get your social media connections talking about ways to improve your content marketing.