Your business could be about anything; but the centre point of your digital content marketing strategy has to be your target audience. If it is not so, it just won’t work.
Take for instance Hub Spot which has managed to position itself as a market leader in content marketing. It generates a million visitors and more than 60,000 leads per month, through its website.
There is now another player who has started creating waves in the world of content marketing – TED.
Although not a provider of marketing services like HubSpot, TED has still managed to achieve the leadership position by leveraging in-person events and making accessible, high-quality educational material for all.
Making its way through data collection and analytics, KISSMETRICS has also emerged as a leader that supports businesses in their content marketing systems and strategies.
Many marketers have managed to drive 7.8 times more traffic to their websites through content marketing. They have also increased their conversion rates by 6 times.
Did you know that content marketing can help you generate 3 times more leads than traditional marketing?
The best part is that it costs 62% less than any of the traditional marketing methods.
Now that should be a good reason to start developing a content marketing strategy.
Here are a few things you need to keep in mind, if you wish to make your online content marketing strategy stand out from the crowd:
Give your audience what they want
The main mantra of a successful content marketing strategy is to give your audience what they want. You can do one of the following things to find out how to go about creating a content marketing strategy:
It doesn’t matter what tool you are using, you have to aim at building something that seems useful to your audience. From active seniors, to job seekers and to health-conscious readers, every one seeks content that matters to them. So whether you are creating videos, blog articles, or a highly niche content platform, your focus has to be on giving your audience the content that they need.
Analyse your competitors’ efforts
However unethical this might seem, you won’t be able to create any unique or differentiated content if you don’t analyze the content created by your competitors.
It is not about copying their content marketing strategies. It is about learning where you are falling behind when it comes to creating engaging and differentiated content. The aim is to always stay one step ahead in content marketing by using the efforts of your competitors to your advantage.
Once you have a list of your competitors in SEO content marketing, here is what you need to do:
Brainstorm ideas and do keyword research
If you need to create fresh content you will need new content marketing ideas. The best way to do this is to brainstorm ideas related to your niche and make a note of them.
Here are a few things you may want to keep in mind while doing your keyword research:
You can check out some of the keyword research tools such as Google Adwords, Mangools, SEMrush, SECockpit, and Keyword Snatcher. Choose the tool that fits into your marketing budget; but make sure you consider the points mentioned above.
Here is a snapshot of a Keyword Research using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool:
Include a long tail keyword (that contains the medium tail keyword) in the title.
You can target any two keywords in your page or post, as per the targeted list.
Whenever possible, make sure the key phrase you include contains at least two keywords. For instance, you could include “digital content marketing strategy” in the first paragraph of your blog. This is a combination of two keywords – “content marketing strategy” and “digital content marketing.”
You can boost your LSI by including the keywords “digital content marketing” and “online content marketing.” Since the meaning of these two keywords is the same, it will increase the relevancy of your content.
Create maximum opportunities to capture more prospects and drive better sales for your business.
Come up with a strong but enticing title
The headline is the one that either draws or pushes away a reader. In fact only 2 out of every 10 readers would be interested in reading what you have written; the other 8 will just read the headline.
Here are a few things you may have to keep in mind while writing the headline of your content:
Source: Coschedule
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Make sure the content you create is unique and of high quality
Creating content just for the sake of it would do you no good. You may only end up losing your potential customers by publishing second-rate content.
Quality surely counts and if you want people to remember and recommend you, you will have to publish not just good but extraordinary content.
Copying content created by others might seem easy. But it can attract penalty from Google, thereby crushing your bottom line.
What you need to do instead is to publish original content that is accurate and trustworthy. There should be something to back up or substantiate everything that you write about. Answer the questions of your audience, but in an easy way. Organize your content and make it simpler and faster for your readers to pick up what matters to them.
Create evergreen content
The best thing about online content marketing is that once you publish content, it is going to be there forever. It can keep generating traffic for as long as it there, provided it stays relevant. Here are a few tips to make sure the content you publish remains evergreen:
Add some data to your content
Including well-researched specific data in your content is a very effective way to showcase your expertise and build your credibility in the industry. Apart from giving a unique perspective of your industry, data also offers value to your readers.
Here are a few ways to gather the data that you would need:
You can also think of including some tables and charts to make it easier for your readers to interpret the data.
Tell stories & be yourself
There is probably no one who wouldn’t like to read an interesting story. That said you will have to figure out what your readers would like to hear and share, before telling them your stories. You will have to make sure your stories make them feel connected to your brand.
Here are a few tips you can use:
Stories, if told the right way, can be very inspiring. They have the power to live on forever. If you can achieve this depth while telling stories through your content you can be sure of receiving a lot of likes and shares that can do wonders to your brand.
Source: Echostories
Make your content easy to read
Digital Content marketing is all about keeping your visitors on your page. It can do wonders to your Google Rankings. It is only a 100 words that more than 50% of your readers go through if your headline seems catchy enough to them. This has a lot to do with the readability of your content. Here are a few ways to improve the same:
Improving the readability of your content will not only make your readers go through the entire content, it also increases your search engine ranking. You can use tools such as Yoast SEO to analyze the readability of your content.
Source: Stnsvn
Use some visuals
65% of the people in this world are visual learners. They trend to process, comprehend, and retain information in a better way if it is visual. That said pulling out images from Google search may hardly work when it comes to making your content engaging, memorable, and effective. You will have to create your own diagrams and infographics to explain your theories, communicate your points, and present data in interesting formats.
Source:Business2community
Here are a few things you can do to create your own killer visual asset:
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Try out A/B testing
About 83000 blogs are published every hour. This means your target consumers would be bombarded with marketing messages from multiple sources.
Creating a content marketing strategy through effective A/B testing can help you cut through the clutter and convey your message to the right people.So, make use of A/B testing, understand what works, and take the guesswork out of your strategy.
Source: Softwaretestinghelp
The elements that you will have to test include:
You will have to interpret the results of your A/B testing through the likes, shares, responses, and the other actions that your readers take after reading your content. These things would give you an insight into the type of content you should be creating in the future.
Share images on Pinterest or Flickr
Sharing your images on sites like Pinterest or Flickr can help you achieve some quick conversions, without having to put in much of efforts. They can drive tons of traffic to your website.
You can go in for paid account options if you wish to use some of their more sophisticated functions.
You can embed the links in the images that you have used on your posts and then share them on your social media sites. If you wish to draw people from third-party sites you can do so by connecting with other Pinterest or Flickr accounts.
Go through answers to questions on Reddit and Quora
Going through the questions and answers onQuora and Reddit can help you recognize trends that you can incorporate while developing a content marketing strategy.
With tons of user-generated content, these sites are gold mines that you can use for your SEO content marketing. You can use these sites for:
Used well, Quora and Reddit can become excellent digital content marketing tools that can boost your productivity.
Promote your epic content
Creating epic content and publishing your blog will not drive the desired traffic to your website. You will have to promote your post. And to promote your content you will need to adopt a few SEO content marketing techniques that can help you build long-lasting lucrative backlinks to your site. A few such techniques are explained below:
Ideally, you need to spend the same amount of time that you spent creating your post on promoting it. After all what is the use of creating such an epic content if you cannot show it to the world.
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