How to Create Greater Visibility through Content Marketing
Trends are very interesting. Today, many of the marketing strategies and techniques that worked in previous decades are not as effective as they used to be. With customer habits and preferences changing, marketers have had to change how they do things. As a result, content marketing has become more prominent than most marketing tactics that were popular in the past.
As traditional marketing strategies and techniques are becoming less effective, marketers need to be innovative and adopt a futuristic approach to content marketing. Creating content for marketing purposes should therefore be at the core of any marketer’s strategy.
One may think that this is a new concept that arrived just recently. However, content marketing has been around for many years. The only difference today is that while it was not popular in past decades, it has become a major trend in recent years. Many businesses and marketers are adopting it. You can take advantage of this great marketing tool by understanding what it is and what it entails.
Definition
Humans have always told stories. Generations and generations told stories for different reasons. The concept of creating text for marketing borrows from the human tradition of telling stories. The only difference with normal storytelling is that using this text to market creates, stories to convince people to buy products.
Content marketing is a strategic approach that focuses on creating long-term relationships with a given audience through the creation and distribution of relevant, high-quality stories on a consistent basis. The goal of creating such stories is to drive customer action, leading to increased sales and profits. It is a slight shift from pitching your products and services directly to customers. Instead, you provide relevant content that helps prospective customers solve their problems.
Adapting to the new trend adds value to your business. It creates a strong relationship with customers as it develops some level of trust. Rather than feeling coerced into buying stuff, customers can relate well to the stories that provide solutions. It attracts them to your product offering and they feel comfortable buying your products due to the trust you build using your text. Thus, your content can generate great loyalty among your audience.
Although creating and distributing content is a great way to market your business or product, not all text is effective. You need to have great stories for you to be able to succeed in your marketing endeavors. Audiences respond well to great texts. Thus, it is imperative that you invest in producing high-quality content.
Content development is the heart of most, if not all online marketing strategies. From social media marketing to SEO, to pay-per-click marketing, all these strategies rely on good content to be effective. Quality texts is what drives traffic to your business and products. You need to build anticipation with your stories so that audiences are constantly checking for new stories from you. Although you can hire someone to write your content, it is not such a hard task. All you need to know is what creating great content entails.
Creating Content for Your Marketing Strategy
Story creation is not a complex activity that you cannot accomplish. All you need is to know what matters in your stories. You may also need to employ a good content marketing tool to help you develop effective content. Three things you need to do before you start writing content include:
1. Identify your target audience/customers
2. Determine the information your audience needs
3. Identify the best way to package the information
4. Identifying the Target Audience
Stories for marketing purposes needs to be relevant and valuable. You cannot develop value and relevance in your content if you do not understand your target audience. Thus, before you can even start writing stories, you need to know whom that content targets. The target audience will define the content. Different customers have different needs and problems. You cannot aim to solve everyone’s problems at once. You need to tailor your content to fit a certain target group.
Have a specific focus group in mind as you develop your content. Research on that audience to determine key factors that will make your content effective. For instance, you need to know the trends within the target group, their needs, problems, and preferences. You also need to understand the language to use for your content to be effective. A wrong choice of tone can make a mismatch that would render your efforts unsuccessful.
You need to design a persona that resonates with your audience for them to connect. It should correspond to their culture or status.
2. Determining the Information Needs of the Audience
Once you have established your focus group, you need to research on the different aspects that define them. A clear understanding of who you are dealing with will make it easy for you to offer content that helps them solve their issues. Some background information about your focus group will guide you in the choice of the message you want to deliver.
Individual needs in a target audience define the kind of information the group needs. Different categories of audiences seek different types of texts to help them in their various endeavors. While one group may be interested in investment, another may be interested in financial management. To create effective content, find out what your audience is willing to buy into and capitalize on that.
The informational needs of your focus groups will define your content roadmap. It will guide you on how to piece together your content for optimum effect.
3. Packaging the Information
Words can have a huge effect on people. However, the same words used for the same purposes can have different outcomes depending on their framing. Presentation is key in creating stories. You may have very informative content, but if you fail to present it well, it will fail its purpose. Generally, people rarely finish reading poorly structured and phrased content.
Marketing is about convincing people and attracting them to an idea, concept, product, service or brand. It uses flowery language to entice the target audience. As such, content for marketing purposes should have some artistic flair. It should have some easy flow so that the consumer of such content is engaged throughout.
Story creation is about telling stories with the aim of convincing people to consider certain products. To communicate to your audience, you will need to understand how to tell your stories to them. Get to understand what gets their attention. Package the message in the most effective way for optimum outcomes.
In packaging your content, you need to select a voice or tone that resonates well with the target audience. The persona you adopt should be able to carry your message across as effortlessly as possible. Let the audience enjoy what you are giving them without any hassle to relate.
The ability to create relevant, valuable, and consistent text will help you build relationships with your audience. By creating value and equipping your content consumers, you will succeed in creating a strong loyal following. They will always be eager to consume your content and will be looking forward to new content from you. When you achieve such levels of success, you can then work on converting that into sales. You will need some content marketing tool to convert your readers and followers into lifetime customers.
Different Ways You Can Use Content for Marketing
Written content is the most popular form of content creation for marketing. You can use written content in different forms or platforms.
i.
Blogging
Blogging is perhaps the most popular choice for content marketers. It involves writing content on a given subject matter regularly to a given audience. If you are using blogging for your content, it should be domiciled on your website. It should form part of your website either as a section or as a subdomain. Today, most websites incorporate blog features to allow you update and publish content.
The basic components of a blog include:
• Posts
• Tags
• Categories
Posts refer to the actual content that you create and publish. Each text explores a given topic. You may explore a topic through a series of posts, each touching on an aspect of the topic. The length of each text depends on your content goals. To tailor the length of your posts to meet your goals, you need to pay attention to your audience and their habits. Some prefer short posts while others do not mind long posts as long as they are relevant, objective and informative.
There are several ways you can use blogging to great effect. Techniques such as native advertising and affiliate marketing can help push your rankings greatly. Under native marketing, you provide a list of articles that readers can consult on a given topic. This comes at the end of your text and most of the links provided would link to your other posts. It is a good way to drive traffic to your content while increasing loyalty.
Affiliate marketing uses the services of affiliate websites to market your content and products. You submit your content on these websites and provide links that redirect back to your site. Readers clicking on any of the content you have submitted on these websites will end up on your web pages, giving you a chance to convert such visits into sales.
ii.
Although email marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing, it remains relevant even in this era of online marketing. However, unlike other uses of content for marketing purposes, this method is highly targeted. It targets a specific audience that is in the marketer’s email list. As such, the content creator has a very good idea of the needs of the audience. It is therefore easy to create content for email marketing.
Email marketing involves a level of trust. You can build your mailing list by providing an option for readers to subscribe to your content. They may provide their email address, through which you will be sending them new content regularly. It gives you a more customized approach since there is some kind of relationship already established. Businesses can bank on this relationship to promote products and services.
You can use tools such as nurture sequence to manage how content is sent to your prospects via email. It sends different content to different recipients depending on the level of knowledge they have about you. It helps build relationships with your readers gradually, helping you build your brand.
iii.
Social Media
The growth of social media has unlocked so much potential in marketing. A big number of people globally use one form of social media or the other. It has offered marketers a great opportunity to tap into a global market by creating content and publishing it on social media platforms. While some of the platforms such as Facebook allow for lengthy content, others like Twitter limit the length of your content.
Businesses can use their social media accounts or handles to submitting relevant organic content. The content will then attract the attention of users who may seek more. They may like or follow you, meaning they will get updates every time you post content. Consistency builds curiosity, which may eventually lead them to your website.
Other than the free option of posting content on your account pages on social media, you can also pay for advertisements on social media. For instance, Facebook Ads allows marketers to show content that will be accessible to a wider pool of users than the normal posts through your account. It exposes you to an audience that may not have an inkling about your existence.
iv.
Video
Video marketing has existed for a long time. However, modern trends have revolutionized video content creation and presentation. As a marketing tool, video gives you an effective way to pass your message across. It uses visuals that create an impression on people’s minds and can influence how people feel easily.
Today, many marketers are using modern video sharing platforms such as YouTube to publish their video content. You can create your own YouTube channel, through which you will be disseminating your content.
There are various ways you can create and use video content. Some of them include vlogging, whiteboard videos and product reviews.
Vlogging uses the same concept as blogging. The main difference is that vlogging uses a series of videos to discuss different topics. This method allows you to create a special bond with your viewers, especially if you appear in your vlogs. It builds trust, which can translate into loyalty. Viewers can easily be convinced to try something by vloggers they trust.
Whiteboard videos use animations or sketches to pass a message. Rather than have a normal video, you create animations that relate to the content you want your viewers to consume. You can still use your voice in the narrations.
v.
Podcasts
Sometimes, you may opt for audio content instead of written content. Podcasts are an excellent way to create and distribute content to audiences that don not prefer written content. You can create podcasts that focus on different topics that are of interest to your target audience.
Unlike video and written content, podcasts allow the consumer to listen while doing other things. They do not need to have their eyes glued to a screen. Podcasts are also easy on the consumer as the presentation is in a fun way.
Podcasts create strong relationships with consumers. The people listening to your podcasts get to listen to your voice and conversations. It creates a level of intimacy that perhaps may be lacking in written content. Although not as widely popular as written content, it is an effective method to distribute your content for marketing purposes.
Creating content will only benefit your business if you publish the content. You can publish your content on many platforms. You can use your own blog, or social media account such as Facebook. You can also publish on your website or even publish on online content websites. Each channel has its pros and cons as well as cost implications. Social media platforms are free if you are posting on your personal account feeds or your page. However, you can also use paid social media ads to show your content.
Publishing on websites can offer you a more targeted audience. If you are posting on your own website, the cost will be minimal. Other than the cost of hosting and maintaining the website, you will incur no extra cost to publish. The same applies to publishing on your blog.
Another effective publishing alternative is using content websites. You can show your content on websites dedicated for content that aims to drive traffic to your website. Some of the websites charge a fee for the services. Online content websites offer you a broad audience for your content. If you are consistent with your content quality, you can amass massive following that can translate into impressive outcomes for your business.
A content website like Blogger Web Service can help propel your content to great heights. It will help you reach a wider audience that you website may not be able to access. Although it may cost you a little fee, the outcomes will be worth the investment.
The ultimate goal of creating content is to help you convert content consumers into customers. Thus, consistently creating and publishing high quality content will help your business increase its conversion rates. You can use any or a combination of the different channels to release your content. However, content websites may have an edge over other channels as they attract a wider readership. They are also more reputable and thereby command some authority. A business would therefore benefit immensely by publishing on these platforms even for a small fee.
Trends in Content Creation for Marketing in 2022
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Having great content for your marketing strategy is never enough to increase your sales. You may have a lot of traffic on your website but few purchases. That means that you are not converting the visits into purchases. To achieve impressive outcomes from your marketing strategies, you need to optimize both your content and website for conversion.
A key aspect of conversion is usability. You need to optimize your website to make it user-friendly to enhance the experiences of the users. Things like speed matter to consumers. A fast and effective website would convert at a higher rate than a slow, frustrating website. Thus, ensure you optimize the speed of your website.
Another way to optimize conversion rates is using email signups. Provide an option for consumers of your content to opt in to a mailing list, where they will be receiving alerts on new content. The email option deepens your relationship with your prospects, increasing the probability of conversion.
A call to action is a great strategy to increase conversion from your content. It is a way of nudging your readers towards buying certain products without being salesy of pushy.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is all about making your content to rank well on search engine result pages. With creative content, you also need to optimize your keywords so that when people search for content on the topics you write on, your content appears among the top results. SEO increases your visibility and attracts traffic to your content.
Creating content for your marketing strategy requires a good understanding of your target audience. You need to create content that creates value to the recipient in order to increase your chances of success. Different audiences have different needs, so your content should tap into the specific needs of your target audience.
For effectiveness, you need to publish your content on different platforms. Online content websites like Blogger Web Service increase your chances of succeeding with your online marketing strategy. Although you will pay for the services, the outcomes will be good for your business.