What is content marketing and what is it’s real purpose? How can you afford to spend hours of your time labouring over long blogs to generate an income for your business? In this blog I’ll walk you through exactly why this is an incredibly high value area to invest your time and resources in and how to use your content marketing efforts to grow your business.
Most online marketers will have heard of the term content marketing splurged around over the past decade. But what do we mean by it?
Basically, content marketing is all about creating and sharing online material that will grow your traffic through organic search – Google, Bing etc.
The relevance of this from a business perspective is simple maths. If you can grow your site traffic, you are also growing a bigger pool of prospects, and more prospects should lead to more revenue and profit over time.
The reason content marketing has grown so much in prominence nowadays is the value organic search holds for your business vs other acquisition channels (e.g. social media, email marketing, paid search, referral).
The goal of any digital marketer these days is to earn rankings on Google and drive sustainable customer acquisition and business growth.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
So often when I speak to people about content marketing they often forget the most basic of steps – identify your target audience.
Often companies want to skip this step and just dive in – don’t do it!
Skipping this step is a bit like deciding to sell steak at a vegan restaurant – you’ve likely missed the mark.
Identifying your target market or markets should always be the foundation of any marketing, let alone content marketing.
2. Carry Out Keyword Research
Once you’re confident in who your customers are, it’s time to work out what is relevant and useful content for them which will also help your business.
This is done by conducting and analysing keyword research.
What is keyword research?
It’s basically an analysis of the types of keywords and topics people search for.
Taking the vegan restaurant example again, if you don’t utilise this step to formulate great ideas and opportunities, everything on the menu may as well be cale!
3. Identify and Allocate Resources
Next up, you’ll want to map out who will be producing your content.
If you have a marketing or content team, great! If you’re a smaller company or an individual, it’s time dust off the cobwebs and get out your ergonomic keyboard!
By this point you will have identified your customer personas and planned out the content you want to produce and mapped out the structure.
4. Create a Content Calendar
This part is pretty straightforward but can be highly effective for mapping out how to drip feed your audience as well as showing Google how active you are.
A content calendar doesn’t need to be remotely complicated, it just needs to organise and spread out the promotion of your content and take advantage of key dates, times and trends if possible.
5. Create Content
Now this stage might seem overly obvious, and well, it is.
However, there is a difference between simply creating content from the homework you’ve done, to actually setting it up correctly to meet the criteria needed for on-page SEO.
Before you even think about ramming in the keywords you’ve uncovered and try to game the system to favour your blogs and articles to help it rank, keep it simple – write for people.
6. Promote to Your Target Market
You made it! Your content is relevant, useful and most importantly, written!
The next part is all about how to successfully blow your own trumpet and position your fantastic content to the right users.
Here’s where you want to be really smart.
In any good content marketing strategy all your content produced should be your net, and what you do with the prospects you catch and how you nurture them further is up to you.
7. Measure Results
No marketing strategy could be considered a success without clear measurements.
This idealistically should include a set of key performance indicators (KPI’s) and benchmarking.
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