Content Marketing is a strategy that involves the creation and distribution of interesting and relevant content for the purpose of eventually closing a sale. You need to develop digestible content that is accessible to your potential customers to aid them in their purchase decisions.

Here are a few elements to consider when creating an effective content marketing strategy.

 

Understand Your Audience

Aside from demographics, there are other signals that you must recognize in developing your buyer personas. These include social media habits, mobile usage, and content consumption.
 
Google Analytics is a good place to start to get a feel of your audience. It provides information such as who’s visiting your blog or website, where they are located, which sites they visited prior to your site, what devices they are using, and what topics keep them engaged.
 
Facebook Insights is another useful tool that can help you track user interactions. It helps you understand how your content is resonating with your audience. You will be able to tell which posts had the widest reach, the most likes, and the most shares.
 
These tools can be very beneficial when creating blogs, home page copy and overall marketing messages.
 

Choose Effective SEO Keywords

SEO has continually evolved through the years because search engines always come up with new algorithms that improve user experience. The constantly changing nature of SEO is important in bringing fresh and relevant information to the user. While it is essential to stay on top of SEO trends, you shouldn’t obsess with it too much but instead aim to develop engaging and valuable content for your audience. Here are some tools that could help you develop your own list of targeted keywords.
 
Übersuggest – a handy website that provides a comprehensive list of keywords. Some of which aren’t even visible in Google’s keyword research tools.
 

 
Google Keyword Planner – a free keyword research tool to get ideas for building your campaigns. It’s also a great way to determine what keywords your competitors use in their webpages and blog posts. Instead on typing your website on the search bar, enter your competitors’ websites and you will get lots of new keyword ideas for your own brand.
 

 
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords – these are basically keywords that are semantically related to your keywords. They are usually found at the bottom of the Google search page. Since they were already indexed by Google, you can be sure that these are the top search terms used by most people. This will give you a leg up when trying to rank higher in searches.
 

 

Engage in Content Curation

Content curation is essential in any Content Marketing Campaign. By offering content from various external sources that your audience might be interested in and aggregating them in your own channels, you will be regarded more as a thought leader and not someone who is just promoting a brand. They will regard you as an important resource. You will be able to nurture your own community of fans and followers as well as establish networks with influencers across your industry. Build a list of relevant content platforms such as Medium, Buzzsumo and Reddit to help you stay on top of news and trends. If you are using social media scheduling tools such as Hootsuite, you can build lists of accounts you want to follow and get information from.
 
Sharing blogs of interest and keeping your news updates fresh will help you become recognized as one of the experts in your space.
 

Create More Videos

With a billion users watching and consuming hundreds of millions of hours of videos everyday, YouTube has positioned itself as the dominant video platform on the internet. It has more traction in the 18 to 49-year-old demographic than any of the cable companies. That is what makes it a rich venue for marketing.
 
Another competitor in the space is Facebook which now offers embedded videos. Facebook discourages its users from linking out to services like YouTube by hosting its videos natively and allowing you to share with others within the social network without ever leaving the site. Do note that native videos on Facebook get more reach compared to links to videos from outside of Facebook.
 
Livestreaming has also gained popularity lately and companies have used this medium to engage with their audience in real time. Facebook Live, Periscope, and YouTube Live are some of the platforms that offer this service.
 
Video is an inexpensive way to connect with your market and levels the playing field with big companies. It also helps you stand out in other ways like demonstrating your product in action, showcasing customer testimonials, and giving your viewers a sneak peek into your operations.
 
If you would like to learn more about digital marketing, subscribe to our monthly startup and small business newsletter or contact us to find out how we can help.