Content Marketing

Perusal Tech Pvt Ltd

21 Jul, 2021

Content Marketing has been around for over 100 years. In the online world, customers are consuming various content on different types of devices. It is about creating content that consumers will engage with and act upon, not just read or listen to or watch.

Content Marketing refers to a form of marketing that simulates interest in a brand's products or services by creating and sharing online material. Content Marketing is a form of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online content to help generate audience interest in a brand's product or services. This means providing information that the audience considers Valuable and Relevant in a consistent manner, so that it drives some sort of profitable customer action. The content that falls under content marketing are Blogs, Videos, Infographics, Case Studies, White Papers and Ebooks.

DEFINITION OF CONTENT MARKETING: Content Marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing Relevant and Valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience -- with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

IMPORTANCE OF CONTENT MARKETING:

(1) It helps build awareness, trust and loyalty in your brand. The more your brand provides accurate and well-researched content, the more people learn about and trust your brand, the more the audience trusts in you, the more they're likely to buy from you.

(2) Creating the content is relatively inexpensive and can be done in-house.

(3) Content Marketing will also enable your brand to increase traffic to your site and get more conversions.

(4) It also helps improve other marketing tactics like SEO, social media and public relations.

CONTENT MARKETING PROCESS:

STEP 1: Determine what goals to achieve with your marketing campaign. It could be increased conversions, website sign-ups, etc.

STEP 2: Set up buyer personas from audiences that will enjoy your content. can buy your content. Buyer personas are research-based profiles that describe your ideal customers.

STEP 3: Set up content audits to determine content that works for you. You also need to set up a content management system like HubSpot, Squarespace, WiX and WordPress, they'll help you with increased collaboration, greater support, run A/B test and much more.

STEP 4: Brainstorm for new forms of content that your audience can enjoy.

STEP 5: You can publish and manage your content.

CONTENT MARKETING TIPS:

(1) REMARKET YOUR CONTENT: Content Marketing is one of the many ways you can spread your content to a wider audience. You can define the audience you want to market to and then tag visitors who come to your site. Using Google's Display Network, you can strategically position your ads in front of people on Google or it's partner websites who previously interacted with your website and advertise to them. Through this you can build awareness and engagement with your audience.

(2) ANSWER COMPLEX QUESTIONS WITH YOUR CONTENT: Targeting specific keywords is extremely helpful with your content. This is why you need to focus on Google's featured snippet, this position is also known as 'Position 0' which enhances and draws user attention on the search engine's result page through the featured snippet. You can drive a large amount of traffic to your website while cementing your position as an expert in your industry. You can have different forms of snippets like:.

• DEFINITION BOXES, where a snippet of text gives researchers direct and concise definitions and descriptions.

• You could have TABLES, where data is taken from the page and displayed in a table.

• You could have ORDERED LISTS, where items are presented in specific order and you can also have UNORDERED LISTS.

(3) CREATE A PERSONALITY FOR YOUR BRAND: If you're looking to grow a following for your content, try not to copy how already established and successful corporate blogs do things. Nowadays, audiences tend to prefer content that has a certain humanness about it, tend to follow solo influencers who advertise their brand by being themselves. You need to analyze what these popular and influential blogs are doing and incorporate into your brand's website.

(4) ENSURE YOUR CONTENT MATCHES YOUR BRAND'S VOICE: To make sure of this you need to constantly review your editorial standards and make sure your tone and quality remain consistent. You need to ask your audience questions about how you can develop and refine your brand's voice. By answering these questions, you can provide your audience with a more cohesive and helpful experience. Your tone of your brand can vary on the basis of what type of content you are planning to post and what the goal you want to achieve from the campaign.

(5) BACK UP YOUR ARGUMENTS WITH DATA: Using statistics and facts to make a point by including a link to the original source makes it extremely credible. This data can help the audience grow trust in your brand to persuade them, that your content is valid and valuable. This will also help your brand grow as an industry expert.

(6) USE SPECIFIC KEYWORDS: Make sure you use specific keywords in your content. This takes care of the SEO aspect behind your content. This will also help your content have a greater chance of being found, indexed and ranked. It could also help your content rank for niche topics within your industry.

(7) EVALUATE THE SUCCESS OF YOUR CONTENT WITH DATA: Analytics tools will help you learn more about how well your content is doing, the age demographics of the people enjoying it and who doesn't, their locations, the best time to post much more. With this data you can make sure that your time and money are being used in the best possible way. Some of the most popular tools in the market are BuzzSumo, Evernote, HubSpot, Trello and WordPress. These will help you find topics and influencers within your industry, you can capture, organize and share notes, collaborate with team members, create sales funnels and much more.

(8) BE CONSISTENT WITH YOUR CONTENT: Post your best performing content and make sure they follow a consistent schedule. Finding a balance of the different types of content to be posted with the help of a content calendar, will show your audience that you're committed to providing them helpful and informative content. This will also establish your brand as an authority and thought leader within your niche. It will help your audience depend on you for quality content and give them a reason to return.

(9) MAKE YOUR CONTENT ACTIONABLE: Providing actionable steps or information in your content will coerce your audience to take a particular action quickly. It can help you create value-built content and fix pain points faced by your audience, build a strong relationship with them and earn their trust. It also leads to increased engagement and a positive brand experience. It provides users with real value and solutions leading them to take action. Content like Images, Infographics, Videos and other forms of rich media will help you enhance the message of your brand and reach a wider audience.

(11) CREATE TRENDING AND EVERGREEN CONTENT: Creating content that's evergreen and trending with your own unique angle, statistics and research, will be a huge advantage since you'll have to update it every now and then. You'll get a great deal out of the work without having to do a lot of work.

(12) UNDERSTAND CONTENT THAT WORKS FOR YOU: You need to analyze what content works on different social media platforms. For example, you all know YouTube is the best place for video content, Instagram and Pinterest for visual content, Twitter for smaller snappy content and so on. Understanding what works and what doesn't will help you better spread your content across the internet.

(13) UNDERSTAND YOUR TARGET TARGET AUDIENCE: Your marketing campaign isn't going to bear fruit without targeting a specific audience. Understanding who your audience is, is one of the most important steps. For this, you can find this out by asking questions like who you're engaging with online, their age, location, language, etc. By using social listening to find out what audiences are talking about your brand, using tools to research what social channels your audience is using and so on. After understanding them, you can set up buyer personas for your audience.

(14) PERFORM A/B TESTING: A/B testing will help you understand what your audience likes or doesn't, what content works for you and much more. You can do A/B testing on headlines and title tags, call-to-actions, content formats, image types, content length and much more. It can also help you make better decisions in the future.

(15) REACH OUT TO PEOPLE SHARING SIMILAR CONTENT: One of the best ways to build your audience is to get people or influencers who already share content within your niche to share your content. Now, since these people already have a trusting audience, they would be a lot more likely to enjoy your content.

CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY:

(1) KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: Content is all about writing for a particular audience. Collect demographics of your target audience based on your website visitors, e-mail subscribers and social media followers. For a successful Content Marketing strategy, you need to know your audience and segment them based on their interest. Segment your audience based on their age, gender, education, income, interest, etc. For example, you can get demographic information using Google Analytics, Facebook page insights and Twitter Analytics.

(2) CREATE HIGH-QUALITY CONTENT: Always create high-quality content, as it results in increasing your brand awareness, traffic and social media shares, improves website ranking and website dwell time and helps in gaining leads. Creating high-quality content involves:

• Brainstorm topics and terms.

• Use a keyword research tool to gather results.

• Create original content.

• Creating compelling headlines.

• Give valuable content to your readers.

• Add resources from well-known sites.

• Create engaging and thought-provoking content.

• Follow a logical structure and use relevant images.

• Use different content forms.

• Prefer short paragraphs to make the content readable.

• Update your content regularly.

There's some other things that you should be aware of are:

• Avoid grammatical mistakes.

• Add a clear Call-to-action at the end.

• Create a content that fulfills viewers' requirements.

• Use examples to clarify your content.

• Make your content visually appealing.

• Add images from public domain sites.

• Prefer to give more information to your audience.

(3) CONSISTENTLY RUN A/B TESTS: A/B test is so important because with A/B split testing you can increase your conversion rates. 4 elements to test in your Content Marketing strategy are:

(a) IMAGES: Ensure the image you use is relevant to the post. With images you could test a lot of different variations of images, anything from people to outlandish imagery to just something very stock and neutral.

(b) CONTENT LENGTH: Test your ideal content length with the help of Google Analytics tool. If your average time on page is very low, don't write something very long, write something that you think is going to stick with that time on page.

(c) SIGN-UP FORMS: Improve your sign-up process and create a user-friendly experience for your website visitors. So, when you have sign-up forms, don't make them non-intuitive, don't make them difficult, don't put too many forms on the page.

(d) CALL-TO-ACTION: CTA stands out from the rest of your content, so, test the font, color, etc. of the CTA button.

(4) CONDUCT A COMPETITOR ANALYSIS: Opt for competitor analysis and identify your competitors' top-performing content for relevant topics. Competitor analysis can help an individual in improving their conversion rate. Find out your strongest competitors by using search engines and check which websites are competing with you. Keep in mind there are SEO platforms that will help you in getting information on your competitors like, SEMrush.

(5) CHOOSE A SUITABLE CONTENT FORMAT: Decide the type of content you want to create. Some of the most popular content format that marketers create are:

(a) BLOG POSTS: It should have valuable content that can be shared by your website visitors on social media and across other websites.

(b) E-BOOKS: It should have longer and in-depth content. Unlike blog posts, it shouldn't be published frequently.

(c) CASE STUDIES: Your goal in a case study should have a customer story who succeeded in solving a problem by working with you.

(d) INFOGRAPHICS: Organise and visualise data in a more engaging way so that it easy to understand.

(e) PODCASTS: Suppose your audience doesn't have interest in reading content everyday, a podcast will help them find your brand.

(f) VIDEOS: It is a highly engaging content form that are shared across various social media platforms.

(6) CHOOSE A CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: Choose a content management system where you can plan, produce, manage, publish and measure your results in one place. Some of the best content management software are, WordPress, HubSpot, Bynder, etc.

(7) TARGET YOUR AUDIENCE USING E-MAILS: E-mails help us to communicate directly with our target audience and convert them to leads. An e-mail is a good way to follow-up with your target audience directly or indirectly. Indirectly means you can collect e-mails and send out those e-mails with certain information or what you should be doing is targeting and segmenting your e-mails just like you are your content. So, if you're producing content for a certain audience, make sure that particular audience gets that same e-mail. Some of the e-mail content that you could share with your target audience are Newsletter, Automated Messaging, Seasonal Emails, Promotional Emails, etc.

(8) USE NATIVE ADS: Using Native Ads is one of the smartest ways to connect your audience with your brand. According to Forbes, online audience are 25% more likely to look at a native ad than at a banner.

(9) MEASURE YOUR CONTENT PERFORMANCE: Measuring and analysing the performance of your content on a continual basis is essential. Measuring the right metrics can help you understand whether your content is engaging or not. You just need to make sure that you're aligning the right metric with the right asset. Basic metrics include, Users, Pageviews, Unique Pageviews, Sessions, Bounce Rate, Dwell Time, etc. Location, Medium and Traffic Source are the additional metrics that can help you to focus on the target audience based on location, source of traffic and important channels that are bringing a huge amout of traffic to your website.

CHECKLIST:

• Create an editorial calendar in order to keep track of the publication of content in a given time period.

• Make your content worth reading.

• Curate your content.

• Guest post on influential bloggers websites.

• Add statistics, numbers and quotes to your content.

• Make sure you share all your content on SlideShare.

• Once you have published the content, share it on your social channels and blog.

• Write a testimonial for you.

• Promote your blog post for maximum success.

• Create personal for your different user audiences.

• Choose the right content type.

• Add a single H1 and multiple H2 tags on your web pages.

• Customise the meta-data.

• Create a detailed summary and title.

• Make it easy for audience to ask questions and comment on your blog.

HOW TO RANK #1 ON GOOGLE:

If the content is not really informative then it's not necessarily going to get good engagement. In the eyes of google they want to rank content that's very informative, fresh, exciting to read and interesting. When you don't get good engagement, people don't stay on the site to engage in the content and they leave the website after landing on the page causing a bounce. Then, the content is just going to continue to fall down the rankings and we want to prevent that, we want to move up the rankings, we want to be number one on Google, we don't necessarily want to fall in the rankings for our content. So, content is a key driver in being able to rank number one on Google. You can share content on social media to gain more engagements. And once you share that quality content, then the likelihood of it moving up the rankings on Google is going to be greater.

• HIGH-QUALITY CONTENT: High-quality content is the most important factor that helps your website to rank on Google because google take content seriously.

TIPS TO REMEMBER:

• Perform research on your chosen keyword. • Create a content that fulfills users' requirements.

• Make your content readable.

• Keep your content more organised.

• Add resources from well-known sites to your post.

• Opt for white hat techniques.

• Prepare different forms of content:

- Feature infographics in your post.

- Include videos and images in your post.

• Review your content.

NOTE: To increase dwell-time always create a comprehensive, long and engaging content. When a user dwells on your web page for a longer time, Google will rank your website favourably.

STEPS TO CREATE HIGH-QUALITY CONTENT:

• Begin with a comprehensive introduction.

• Content should be relevant to the chosen keyword.

• Create a click-worthy title.

• Include LSI (Long-tail) keywords in your content.

• Heading and sub-headings should consist of keywords and variants.

• Shorten your sentences and paragraphs.

• Build a comprehensive internal linking structure of web pages.

• Add suitable images (with descriptive alt text).

• Incorporate callout boxes.

• Update your content regularly.

• Finalize your CTA.

DO's:

• Create a high-quality content.

• Add images from public domain sites (like Freepik, s6hutterstock, flat icon, etc.).

• Be relatable and use examples to clarify points.

• Simplify complex words and use bullet points.

DON'TS:

• Avoid plagiarism.

• Do not steal images from websites.

• Don't give less information to your audience.

• Avoid long paragraphs in your content.

HOW TO RANK ON YOUTUBE:

• CREATE HIGH-QUALITY VIDEOS: High-quality videos help you to rank well on YouTube. Content is the primary factor in ranking videos. So, in order to have keywords, we need to have content and in order to rank, we need to have good content. Suppose your video content is least informative or irrelevant to the topic, it won't rank on YouTube, no matter how optimised it is for SEO. High-quality content is determined by:

(1) AUDIENCE RETENTION: Audience Retention is the percentage length of your video that audience has watched.

NOTE: Audience Retention can be both absolute in minutes (average view duration) or % watched.

(2) USER ENGAGEMENT: Viewers who are engaged with your content will likely share, subscribe, comment and like your videos.

TIPS TO REMEMBER:

• Publish longer videos.

• Plan your video script.

• Upload high resolution videos.

• Your video content should be relevant to the chosen title.

• Create a content that fulfills viewers' requirements.

• Use examples to clarify your content.

• Make your content visually appealing.

• Add images from public domain sites.