Keep Your Content Fresh
Intro to Content Marketing
Optimization and SEO tricks for your website are great. However, at the end of the day, content marketing is what really matters. If a website has awful content, then the SEO will do nothing to fix the viewership.
Website Traffic
With better content comes organic viewers and customers. Organically bringing in your customers will allow for a greater number of long-term customers. Like we discussed with pay-per-click advertising, it can be great for bringing in people initially. However, it wears off fairly quickly and doesn’t amount to long-term customers and viewers. Organic traffic comes from good content that people are interested in. So, how can you make your website more interesting?
What Is Content Marketing?
Grow Your Audience
Having good content is one of the best ways to market your product. We call this style of marketing, content marketing. It means creating different forms of content to distribute to viewers and customers to gain a following. This style of marketing is great because it leads to organic traffic to your site that’s completely free. This can help you make a strong audience that believes in your product and vision. It’s a good way to keep current customers up to date with your brand and reach out to new audiences.
Brand Voice using Content Marketing
Content marketing can be quite fun because it’s a representation of your brand. Unlike SEO and other strategies that are quite technical in nature, content marketing focuses on the creativity and appeal of the content to various audiences. This can help you find people that are like minded to you and your brand’s mission. Similar to how the video on your homepage brings a humanistic quality to your website, content marketing brings an insight into how your brand looks behind the scenes. This makes customers feel more trusting of your brand and all the new exciting things you have coming up for them.
Develop a Loyal Audience
Content marketing is different because it gives something to your audience before they even buy in to what you’re selling or promoting. This makes loyal audience members that want to be there for your company and the content you produce. Traditional marketing spreads awareness and viewership to your business, but not a consistent following. This following is what will carry your brand, as their consistent loyalty will keep your brand going and sales consistent because of the support from your base audience.
The Power of Content Marketing
Now let’s take a look at some of the benefits that come from content marketing online for your business.
Content Marketing Establishes A Brand
Identity Development
By joining in on content marketing, you establish your business as a brand. Here you can lay out all of your mission statements, information for your audience, and values you represent. You can dive deeper into these brand values through the content you produce. Videos, blog posts, images, etc. all tell your brand story and let your audience know who your business is and why they should follow along with your brand.
Organic Growth
As your audience sees your content and begins to enjoy the educational, informational, and entertaining aspects of it they will associate these qualities to your brand. This can turn your business from being unknown to traffic flowing to your site rapidly.
Gives A Clear Idea of What Your Business Is
Intriguing Content Marketing
Your business is represented through the content you produce. You aren’t directly promoting your brand through posting content, but if your content catches people’s eye they will head over to your business for more. This means you can lay out a clear idea of what your business is and what you stand for by making content relevant to it.
Captivate Audience Attention
This allows you to enlighten your already established audience base and bring in new audiences from the content you’ve created. The idea of content marketing is to spread marketing and awareness for your business through a more subtle, interesting fashion. People may not be compelled to stop and listen to what you have to say by just seeing your business advertised through a regular ad. However, if you create an interesting video or article to post, a wider audience is bound to stop and see a piece of content that’s of interest to them. This will then lead them to your site and help motivate them to support your mission and brand.
Gives You A Clear Idea Of Who Your Audience Is
Tailor to Your Target Audience
Similarly, to how content can give your audience an idea of what your brand is about, you in turn, get a better idea of who your audience is. When you know your audience demographics, you know how to tailor content to that age range, gender, etc.
Learn Demographics using Content Marketing
Through social media sites, you can see the demographics of your audience. Using these numbers can help you better tailor your organization to those who most wish to visit your site. Everything becomes clearer in terms of marketing when you have a good idea of who you’re actually marketing to.
Gives Your Audience Trust
By making your audience content that’s tailored to your business and values, you let them see a personal side of your brand. You let your audience see the people behind your business and how they can help. You aren’t forcing them to look at your content, you’re creating interesting content that they want to see. This is unlike traditional marketing where an ad would be used solely for the purpose of praising your brand without any content behind it.
Larger Web
Scalability
Compared to traditional ad or door-to-door marketing, content can circulate around the web much faster and help expand your audience much quicker. You can gain an audience of people all around the world that back your brand, rather than just people down the street. It’s important to establish a base audience, and content marketing can help with that, but it’s also important to widen your net audience. Content marketing does both, whereas traditional marketing only accomplishes the former.
Repurposing Your Original Content
Pressures of Content Marketing
It’s easy to feel stuck when you’re first diving into content marketing. It’s easy to put pressure on yourself to get everything done perfectly, and to post as much as you can. First, take that pressure off. It takes time to learn a new skill so don’t stress about it before you’ve even begun. Not every piece of content has to be at the same level of quality as your homepage promotional video.
Repurpose Existing Content
A great way to post a lot of great content is by repurposing original content. This can allow you to get your mission and value of your company out to many audiences through multiple sites.
Why Repurpose?
Some may think that it would get boring for an audience to listen to the same type of content in different ways. However, this type of marketing allows you to appeal to various ways of learning for your audience’s benefit. For instance, some people are visual learners. For them, a video or a blog post may get your message to them. However, others are auditory learners and need to hear the information to understand. Videos could also work for this person, but so could podcasts. This also makes your website more accessible to the blind and deaf community, bringing in a whole other group of customers.
Expand Your Clientele
You’ll most likely reach a new audience through doing this and will help your loyal customers stay informed as you update your content. Remember, it’s important to keep those original customers still loyal to your brand. Another great part of repurposing content is that you re-establish your values and mission as a company. You make your audience feel like they have an inside scoop into your business and can see all your humanistic qualities through many different forms of media. This can also help the information stay in the minds of your consumers if they hear it discussed multiple times.
Use Blog Posts For Video And Podcast Content
Audience Convenience
Turning your blog posts into videos and podcasts is quite simple. You talk about the topics in the blog posts through writing, so now just speak on it out loud. This is great for accessibility, learning differences, and convenience. Someone may not have time to sit and read a blog post but they can put on a podcast as they take their dog on a walk, drive to work, or during their daily tasks.
Gather Data And Content And Produce A Course Or eBook
Consolidate Content
You most likely already have tons written if you’ve been producing content like blogs for your business for a while now. Once you have enough data and content turn it into a course or an eBook. This will allow your audience to receive all the information they need in one place. Also, you can add more activities and practical tips so that your audience has practical steps they could take to make the change they want to see and be a part of.
Testimonials For Social Media Content
Share Your Company's Praise
Audience reviews and stories that align and resonate with your mission can be used for social media content. You can add them into existing or new blog posts. You can also put small testimonials in captions on your pictures, post the plain text, or even make a digital art picture that states the testimonial on it in eye-catching font and colors. This is still original content and you’re using your resources and the good praise people have given your business. These can also give you more authority and trustworthiness on social media because you are showing that you have supporters.
Statistics For Social Media Content
Content Marketing to Display Growth
Similarly, to using testimonials, use statistics as content for social media. Make sure to not use statistics as bragging about the positive flow of audience traffic you had or to complain about a drought in likes. Instead use the researched statistics you’ve found that relate to a topic that you focus on or a piece of content you’ve already created.
Update Old Blog Posts With New Information
Resurface Blog Traffic
One of the easiest ways to pack new information and expand on a blog post is to simply add to it with new content. This new information can even be things we’ve listed above. You can also just go back into old blogs and read through to see if you can update any information and add to it.
Add Additional Information
After a blog has sat away from you for a bit of time it can be easier to come back to it and see what you can add to it and what you can change within it. This adds to the length of your content and the credibility since you’re letting your audience know that you don’t just write about blogs and then forget about them. You come back and work on them again for further research and up to date information.
How To Deal With What You Can’t Plan
Date Management
We can plan our content out perfectly and mistakes will still be made. One of the joys of content marketing is that you can always catch back up. If you forget a day that you were supposed to post, try not to stress about it and instead do better in the future and turn back to your editorial calendar to make sure you know the upcoming dates.
Handling Cancellations
Cancellations of posts will happen. Maybe you had an event scheduled, but due to circumstances out of your hands it was cancelled. Ask yourself: how do I alert my followers of the change? And what’s the next step for the business? Take a breath and know that some things you can’t plan and that’s okay.
Another great thing about creating content is that it can come from outside sources, these outside sources need to be cited.
Five Things to Properly Develop Content Marketing Strategy
1. Post other’s research and apply it to your brand.
Find research like statistics, graphs etc. that other researchers and companies have produced and apply them to your brand’s mission. Add commentary about the findings so your audience knows how you are relating it to your business and to personalize the post a little more.
2. Engage with Graphics
Use other’s images to draw in your viewers to a blog post or other piece of content you created. Have it be related to and enhance your content.
3. Create Humor using a Brand Voice
Use gifs to add a funny twist to your content and engage readers for longer to your posts.
4. Measure Your Following
Create polls about what your audience wants to see from you. Post the responses your viewers send as content to your page.
5. Share Expertise
Take what you’ve learned from a course or lecture and share pieces of information or summaries from the lesson with your community.
