Content marketing is one of the most effective inbound marketing strategies you can use to bring in new leads and create buzz in your industry or market. Fundamentally, content marketing is about creating relevant and valuable content to draw people in, whereas conventional marketing aims to push your message to the target audience. The concept of this strategy sounds simple but it can be very complex, so here are some basic tips to help you get up to speed.
1. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
One of the biggest mistakes that businesses new to content marketing make is to invest their budget into churning out as much content as possible. You have to understand that the goal is to create a great piece of content that people will want to share and read. So rather than invest in quantity, it’s better to invest in research, testing, quality writing, market trends and marketing of that content.
2. Create a Step-by-Step Plan
There are multiple parts involved in bringing a content marketing strategy together. For example, someone will have to research the target audience to find topics that may be relevant and valuable to them. Another person will have to create the content based on that topic or manage the outsourced writers. Then, somebody will have to edit that content and format it correctly for posting. The point is that you need a plan to bring your strategy together.
3. Testing and Tracking Is Key to Success
How do you find out which pieces of content are working? You test different ideas and track the response. Some elements to test include the number of page views, time spent on page and the number of shares. By starting out your promotion on a small scale, you can quickly see which content is the most popular so that you can focus more of your resources on what’s working the best. Through tracking results, you also get an idea of what format, subject matter and type of content your audience likes.
4. Focus Heavily on Marketing and Relationships
Just because you have a great piece of content doesn’t mean that it’ll go viral almost on its own. That does happen time to time, but the reality is that you need to market your content. Blast it out to your email list, post it on your blogs and send it to your strategic partners. And speaking of partners, you’ll have an easier time succeeding with content marketing by developing relationships with other publishers. Sometimes it’s just a matter of sharing their content to your audience and later asking them to share yours.
5. Integrate with Search and Social for Optimal Results
Content marketing works best with search and social. Since it generates valuable links, it will help support your SEO campaign. As far as social media goes, many businesses depend on their social following to push out their content. That’s why you want to focus on building a following on social media. If you’re starting from scratch, funnel some of your SEO traffic to your social media accounts. From there, you can push your content to your social following. The goal is for all three mediums to work in a synergistic manner.
