Content marketing is a huge component of today’s marketing strategy. It is become more difficult to connect brands with their customers. One of the best ways to break through the clutter and add value is through content marketing. Content marketing is the creation and sharing of relevant and unique content to attract consumers, promote engagement and build brands. Earlier this year, I wrote about 5 reasons why you need a content marketing strategy. If your brand / organization does not have a content marketing strategy in place, you are falling behind your competitors.
Consumers are skipping advertising that interrupts or gets in the way. You know what they’re not skipping? Great content. If it’s worth watching or reading, they’ll click it to watch or read it. Brands that provide interesting and helpful content will deliver more value and offer a better brand experience. Which will in turn generate higher awareness and purchase intent, as well as word of mouth advertising and community building. Google research has found that consumers click on twice as many sources of information before making a purchasing decision today than they did a few years ago. Of those consumers, 60 percent said that company content has helped them in making a purchasing decision on a product.
In the past year, storytelling has become a key part of content marketing, and I anticipate this trend to continue. Good storytelling is more than just a case study or review. It’s about starting the story on your inside pages of your website. For example, you are a Destination Marketing Organization and you have a dining section on your website. On that dining section, you want to separate out the dining categories so their is a paragraph or two of content on dining and then the each category has a photo and 2 sentences of text. Which then clicks through to that category page, where there is a story about that dining category. Your blog can then be utilized to write about niche content about the dining categories, etc on your site. You need to engage with your audience and tell them a story.
Here are my Content Marketing Do’s
Maximize SEO
Tell your brand’s story throughout your website, a couple paragraphs on each page. This will also help make the page a good landing page for future promotion. Be sure to include keywords through out the content on the page as well as in the blog posts. By having strong content throughout your site, you will also increase your organic search traffic.
Focus on your objective
Content marketing is about inciting your website viewers into doing something like purchasing a product, requesting a quote, making a reservation at a local restaurant or booking a hotel room.
Create Goals and Measure
When setting up your content marketing strategy, you should create goals to make sure your content is targeting the appropriate consumer. Be sure you are measuring your content’s success against things that matter to the business. To drive efficiency, marketers need to ensure they are using and measuring the right metrics like leads, page conversions, email conversions, share ratio by content, etc.
Be helpful and solve problems for your audience
If you want to stand out from the rest of the noise on the internet, you have to produce content that is both delightful and engaging. When people are reading your blog or watching your Facebook live or YouTube video, they want an answer to their question or problem so they can knowledge. Your content should be created so that it is easy for people to scan and pick up the important bits quickly.
Know your audience when crafting your content
Above I mentioned to set goals for your content marketing strategy. When you are creating your content calendar and looking for blog post topics, analyze your Google Analytics to find out what people are searching your website for, and what products / pages they are visiting most. You also want to take a look at your keywords and PPC to see what words are being clicked on most, this will help you create content that is beneficial to your audience. Crafting the appropriate content will keep consumers on your site longer and will have them viewing more pages.
Content marketing is one of the most popular marketing tools on the block. The wonderful thing about content is that it’s timeless. You can write on a certain topic today, and a few years from now it will still be shared and viewed. Content marketing also helps strengthening your social media strategy and will bring traffic back to your site, including increased organic traffic results.
