Content marketing has become a vital part of any business who wants to succeed online. Why? Because GOOD content is relevant, helpful and engaging – thus, makes the reader more likely to purchase or enquire with your business.
Plus, there’s also the ‘shareability’ of your content, which means your exposure and web traffic are also likely to experience growth!
Sounds good right? Well, there’s just one catch – content marketing is not as easy as it sounds. If your content provides no value or insight to the reader, then you may as well not bother. When it comes to content, it’s quality over quantity.
It also doesn’t matter if you’re content marketing is done in-house or through an agency like DigitUX, these 6 helpful tips will help you can get going on your content marketing efforts.
1. Content Marketing Calendar
Content calendars are a great way to stay accountable and plan ahead so that no matter who is looking after your content marketing services, they will always be on top of it.
You might think that this exercise is a little time consuming but once you’ve created the optimum calendar, your business can re-use it over and over and keep building and implementing a solid content strategy.
2. What’s in the News?
Current events are a great way for your business to stay current and relevant to customers, clients and avid readers. If social media isn’t enough for you, then Google has a great Trend Tool that you can use to see what’s hot.
Tip: just make sure that your hot topic is relevant to your business.
3. Use Visual Content
Any successful content strategy will not only have relevant written content but will also incorporate visual imagery to break up the text and keep the reader engaged.
Even though search engines can’t read images or videos, simple SEO techniques, such as alternate tags, will ensure that web crawlers will understand all of the content on your page and that your readers will come back to read your content again and again – plus your SEO will benefit.
4. Re-purpose Content
There are so many online channels out there such as Facebook, Twitter, your own website and blog posts just to name a few.
To create a new topic for each of these platforms would be a tough gig for even the best content writers on the planet, let alone a busy business owner, marketing manager and the like.
Instead, it makes sense to re-purpose your content so that it slots into each online channel where you can reach a greater number of people in their preferred channel. BUT, just be sure to mix the content up a bit so that Google doesn’t see your content as duplicated all around the web and penalise your website.
5. Surveys
Once you’ve got your content marketing calendar up and running, plan to send a survey to your existing customers. You can make the survey anyway you’d like but the idea is to get their opinion about an industry related topic and then use the data to create a new, unique piece of content that your customers can relate to.
6. Test
If you’re not sure which way to move forward with your content marketing, look at your previous data for trends. You can always count on your previous statistics such as re-tweets, Facebook engagement, or time spent reading a blog post an accurate way to move forward with the content that people like the most.
So, with these 6 content marketing initiatives above you can immediately start to take hold of that dreaded task of supplying an endless amount of content to your hungry readers and engaged users.