HOW DOES CONTENT MARKETING WORK?

So, exactly how does content marketing work? What are the benefits of building and executing a content marketing strategy?

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing program that centres on creating, publishing, and distributing content for your target audience — usually online — the goal of which is to attract new customer.

One important way is to keep your marketing strategy current, if not ahead of the curve.

Why Businesses Need a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is more than a buzzword—it’s a vital part of a successful marketing strategy. Today’s buyers demand creative, relevant and compelling content from the brands that are important to them.

Content marketing fills this need by creating impactful content and optimizing its distribution across a wide range of channels and customer touch points, engaging specific market segments at precise points in the buying process.

Producing good content on a consistent basis is the best marketing strategy for businesses in this generation. Content marketing is smart because the content is the currency of the internet.

Why Content Is the Most Important Part of  Your Digital Marketing Strategy

3. Content Drives Social Media Strategies

Your social media platforms are one of the best ways to connect with your target audience. As a powerful tool for establishing genuine relationships with your customer base, social media gives you a direct pathway to have conversations, get feedback, and push new leads to your website. However, this is all fueled by strong content creation.

1.  Have a plan.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but having a plan before you do anything else in your content marketing will make your content more targeted and its production more consistent.

Know what your company’s overall objective is for the content, know what the purpose of each kind of content will be and its value to readers. After researching your target audiences, you’ll have a clearer picture of what content to write, the tone of the content, and when and where it should be posted.

When distributing content, different platforms require different frequency of posting. Twitter, for instance requires multiple posts a day while with Facebook, you can get away with once a day. Building an editorial content calendar will be an important part of this pre-content plan.

|Get a free website report and use it as the foundation of your plan.|

2.  Know your audience.

You won’t get many sales and conversions if the content you share with your customers are on subjects they could care less about or identify with.

When writing for your audience, keep your content relevant to the industry you’re in and focus on how your company’s products or services can help solve a consumer’s problem. You can use different analysis tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to get an idea of the demographics of your website visitors.

Armed with an idea of the people who visit your company’s website, you can better judge what kinds of topics and what style you can use in blog posts, social media posts, and website content.

Going a step further, you can create consumer personas that represent each of your company’s demographic groups. Write content pieces addressing the questions and concerns and interests of each persona. Your personas will also help you identify what tone and messaging in the content will most resound with them.

3.  Know when and where to post.

You can write the best blog post of your life, but if it is posted on a site or social media platform your audience doesn’t use or at a time when most of your audience is offline, it will likely disappear into the noise and information of the Internet.

Your social media manager should know, for instance, that most of your company’s Facebook fans are online Friday afternoons from 2-4pm. If your company doesn’t have a dedicated social media manager or department, most website and social media analytics tools will have a feature where you can see the most and least popular time’s people visit your site and social media channels and where people are coming from to get your site.

Knowing your audience will also give you an idea as to what websites and industry/business blogs they regularly visit and what social media channels they utilize to engage with each other on.

4.  Quality over quantity.

It can be tempting to continuously pump out content. Your audience, however, doesn’t want more content, they want quality content that is interesting, valuable and informative.

Visitors to your site come because they trust you and believe you’ll answer their question or address their concerns. An abundance of low-quality content will only take up space and viewers won’t bother reading it.

Nobody doesn’t want their content not read. High-quality posts will get more attention, engagement and shares which should be the goals of a solid content strategy.

5.  Mix up content.

There are many ways you can share content online. The text is the most popular and most expected form of content, but there are a lot of things you can do with images and video.

Video is becoming a popular content medium that companies are starting to utilize more. By having a variety of content, you increase your company’s chances of reaching more people in your diverse target audiences.

6.  Experiment.

What type of content gives you the most traffic? Again, you can use an analytics program to determine which type and subject of content get the most attention.

Does your audience love “how-to” articles, inspirational stories, videos? Focus on producing content that draws the most eyeballs. Don’t forget to still vary the content.

7.  Focus on people, not search engines.

Answering your readers’ questions needs to be the goal of everything you write.

When you take the time to craft quality content that is of value to the reader, your audience will appreciate it and share it with others. They’ll also be more likely to trust your company and take the desired actions.

While implementing keywords into content is still an essential part of getting your website some online exposure, they should be used appropriately. Keyword-stuffed content will do you no good. Not only will your audience see right through your promotional plug, but search engines will also be on the look-out for such content and will penalize you.

8.  Optimize your content.

As the previous point brought up, it would be amiss to not discuss using keywords to optimize your company’s content.

Content, like other aspects of internet marketing, is enhanced when it is correctly optimized for search engines. To make your content more effective, try to target one or two keywords in a piece of content.

For text content, this is easy to do. For images and videos, however, more work is involved. For posts with videos and images, use keywords in the title, headings and topic introduction or summary. Keywords should also be inserted into the ALT tags, file names and meta descriptions.

9.  Test, analyze and improve.

As mentioned earlier, it is important to experiment and test which content gets you the most traffic and generates the most conversions.

Regular analysis of your content will enable you to see the patterns in what content clicks with your audience. You can then use this as inspiration for additional content ideas. Then, when you see what works, you will also see the kind of content that doesn’t work.

If your content isn’t as effective as you’d like it to be, some revamping and revising of your content strategy may be in order. Knowing where your content is falling short will equip you to make the necessary improvements.

Your content marketing strategy can take many forms, and your company goals and your audience will play the biggest parts in dictating your tactics.

A strong content marketing strategy is a long-term process that involves much hard work and time to properly implement. At Audio Visual Lab, we have a team of content specialists and social media managers who can write and distribute effective content for your organization. We have experience in website content creation, SEO blogging, business blogging, social media content distribution, Facebook advertising and content optimization. Give us a call today to learn how we can take the burden of creating effective content off your hands so your business can keep running.

Why?

Because content marketing is all about storytelling, and humans have told stories for as long as they could speak. Our attention will always go to those who tell great stories

But content marketing been around far longer than the Internet.

Conclusion

I know that was a lot to take in and you might feel a bit overwhelmed at this point.

All you have to worry about for now is mastering the fundamentals of content marketing — you can always refer back to this article for guidance.