Developing Quality Content for Successful Content Marketing
If you run a business, you know that it’s downright necessary to have an online presence to keep up in today’s world. But simply having a web presence isn’t enough to reach your target audience and gain new customers. In order to make the time (and money) you’re spending on your digital presence worth the investment, you need to have a solid content marketing strategy. That being said, a successful content marketing strategy can mean a lot of different things to different businesses, but let’s talk about some tips that everyone should know about successful content marketing.
What is Content Marketing?
Okay, so if you’re reading this and thinking, “I have a vague idea of what content marketing is,” let’s break it down. Content marketing is the creation of content that is valuable to your customers, relevant to your brand, and compelling to potential readers.
Content marketing can cover a variety of different types of content, but the goal is the same: to create brand awareness, increase qualified web traffic, and to generate revenue for your company.
Creating Content with your Business Goals in Mind
The first step to making your content marketing successful is to know what you want it to deliver. Publishing content takes time, effort, and money, so make sure that you’re investing your resources in a way that will yield positive results. How exactly can you and your business do that? Well, let’s talk about some content marketing tips that will help you.
1. Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Simply writing blog posts and using social media does not make a content marketing strategy. So what exactly is a content marketing strategy? Well, that’s a question you will need to answer for yourself, depending on your business, but here are some things to think about to get started.
At its core, a content marketing strategy should give your product or service life. It will be the living, breathing face of how your product is going to be used in the world. It should answer the 5 W’s:
- Who are you making content for? Who are your desired customers?
- What are you selling them? More importantly, what can you provide that other companies or services can’t offer?
- Where are your customers and how do you interact with them? Are you offering a service that goes to customers’ homes, or a product you mail? Are you asking customers to come to a brick-and-mortar location for a service or product?
- When might be irrelevant, but should nevertheless be stated. Are you available 24/7? How can customers or potential clients get in touch with you?
- Why is your business the one customers should turn to? What makes you better than the competitors?
When you can answer those questions, you’re ready to figure out how you need to form your content campaign(s). Are you going to make blog posts, post on social media, or send newsletters? Maybe you want to do all of these or just a couple. It will definitely take research and maybe some trial-and-error to figure those questions out.
2. Make Relatable Content
Of course, you want to make content that your customers are going to relate to. If your business sells greeting cards, it might be interesting for you to write a blog about the history of the printing press, but will it be interesting or actually relevant to your customers?
The goal of every piece of content you make should be to bring the right potential customers to your website, to interact at the very least, but hopefully also to start (or continue) down the marketing funnel on their way to making a purchase. So how do you create relatable content?
It’s not just a weekly advertisement, but rather a promotional service. You’re not telling people week after week to simply buy your product or service in your blog posts. What you do want to do is to get your customers to make that conclusion on their own. Post about topics related to your products and services. Most importantly, post about topics that show why your product or service is the best answer.
Some topics might sound like:
- “10 Tips for…”
- “How to…”
- “Top 10 List of…”
- The Most Popular…”
These are the types of blogs that you will see passed around on social media. Even if folks don’t know your brand, creating this brand awareness places your product/service top of mind. In the future, this will translate into revenue.
In fact, small businesses with blogs see 126% more lead growth than businesses without. That’s because almost 80% of internet users read blogs.
There are a million ways to make relatable content. Overall, you just want to make sure that you’re posting quality content that has a purpose that’s relevant to your company and your customers.
3. Post Consistent Content, Consistently
So now that you’ve figured out what kind of content you want to produce, the next step is to post it on a consistent basis. You want your business to feel like something that folks will turn to when they have a question or problem. Posting quality content makes people want to read it. Providing an established date and time when they can read your content will make people look forward to it.
Give your customers a reason to love checking their emails on Thursday afternoons for your newsletter. Make Sunday mornings exciting for people who can’t wait to see your new blog post. In the beginning, you might not see the following that you’re looking for, but stick with it! People like a schedule. They like knowing what to expect and when to expect it.
4. Create Content for Consumers, Optimize Content for Search Engines
When you share your content, you know that not every click comes directly through your website’s homepage. Hopefully, folks are finding your content through search engines, too! But we don’t want to get in the habit of creating content just so search engines will find it.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to search engines finding your content and showing it to potential customers. But if potential customers look at your content and find nothing but meaningless buzz-words strung together, you’re not going to convert attention into revenue.
When creating your content, make sure it matches the tone and feeling that seems natural to your customers. Search engines exist to answer questions. Making sure that your content gets noticed when people ask relevant questions can be challenging, but you shouldn’t make it your only objective. Speak to your customers through relevant content in a way that makes sense to them. SEO is important, but connecting with your audience is even more important.
Content Marketing Tips For Everyone
Every content marketing strategy is different because every company is different! What we all have in common is the desire to reach our customers in a way that is meaningful and measurable. You can create strategies that are as simple or as complex as you want them to be.
For the best results, you might want to think about hiring a marketing company if you don’t have the experience yourself. No matter what kind of strategy you need to create, these are some helpful tips that everyone should know!
Dan Bosco
Content Writer & Editor
dan at heartbrain dot marketing
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