Content marketing is the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers. A user will only stay on a website if the matter is relevant to his interests. Hence, the content written should be useful, easy to understand and unique. You can share your content-videos, images, text, articles, etc. on resources like social media, bloggers, and Wikipedia and link it to your website to drive traffic to it.
What are the Different Types of Content Marketing?
There are many different initiatives that your brand can implement – from blog posts and guest posting to infographics, ebook and white papers. Some people often include social media marketing under the content umbrella, however, as it is such a huge topic on its own, we like to imagine social media marketing as a different pillar of the complete digital strategy.
How to Get Started!
Starting a content marketing strategy is more simple than you might first think. For instance, starting a blog on your website and work on creating weekly content is the perfect starting point.
Check What Others are Doing
When figuring out how to get started with content marketing might surprise you: It’s a good idea to take a look at what your competitors are doing in terms of content marketing.
Find Your Audience
You need to know who you’re addressing, and what audience like . Having that information will, at the very least, help you figure out what type of content to create, where to post it, and how to promote it.
Identify Your Goals
What do you want the content to do? Knowing who your audience is and what it wants will help you in some ways, as you’ll be able to shape your goals to match the needs of the audience.
How Much Content Is Enough?
While the strategy “more is better” certainly applies here, “more” also takes a lot of time. So the best thing to do is to focus on quality over quantity.
If given the choice, I would have to choose: Longer and less frequent content Over… Shorter and more frequent content.
There are obviously massive exceptions to this rule, but the takeaway point is this: People, social media, and search engines tend to prefer longer-form content, which usually provides more value. Also, once a week posting is a great strategy to shoot for. The most important point is to pick a publishing date and then stick to it.
Just like compound interest, the sooner you start creating content the sooner you’ll start benefiting from the power of compounding value. As you create and build up content over time, you’re building a valuable and powerful asset of knowledge, information, resources, and material, which you can mine and extract from in the future. Once you create content, it’s yours forever and it works around the clock to build your business.
6 practical content marketing strategy steps that apply whether you’re in small business marketing, or you’re on an enterprise marketing team.
- Find your sweet spot: choose your niche and focus on the conversation you want to own.
- Discover your content: take that niche and establish a unique angle that helps you cut through the clutter and differentiate you from your content marketing competitors.
- Build the base: combine content type + platform + consistent delivery + time to create your base of content.
- Harvest your audience: build your own subscribers so that you have control over your content marketing audience base.
- Diversify: aim to engage your audience on at least 3 different content touchpoints.
- Monetize: use your data to understand the difference between those who convert and those who do not.
Why it is so Important and How Content Marketing Can Support Your Business Goals
Optimized Content Helps with Organic Search (SEO)
With organic search engine optimization (as opposed to pay-per-click ads) people will more easily find your website on the search engines while they are looking for a product or service you provide. Making it more likely that they will convert from visitor to customer. Results don’t happen overnight – organic search engine optimization takes time, patience, and consistency.
Great Content Will Generate Lots of Backlinks / Traffic
Backlinks are links that travel from another website to your website. They can come from social media sites and directories, but they most often come from blog posts and the content of other websites.
One of the other side effects of great content is that people love to share great content to make them look smarter, they can do this on social media. They can do it in their own articles, citing you as sources for various things in your niche.
High-quality backlinks are good for an obvious reason. They are… well, they’re high-quality. That means they are intrinsically beneficial for domain authority and SEO rankings.
Give People a Reason to Keep on Coming Back to Your Website
The moment you start helping your audience solve their problems via your content, you’re starting to develop a relationship with your audience. You will turn into a trusted source, and if you keep on delivering these kinds of content, your leads will know that they have to come back.
