Tips For Maximising Your Content Marketing
Content marketing should be fully integrated into your digital strategy. It establishes your business as an authoritative, knowledgeable voice in your industry, boosts brand awareness, builds valuable relationships and acts a powerful vehicle for organic growth. It’s no mean feat implementing a content marketing strategy, so here are a few of our top tips.
Be clear on your goals and target audience
It’s important to consider your goals and target audience when deciding on a content strategy. For instance, a hardware website that publishes widely discoverable blog content like ‘Top 5 DIY Mistakes’ could help contextualise people’s problems and generate new leads.
Meanwhile, for winning over people already in contact with your brand, you could deliver regular value-packed email newsletters, maintaining pole position for repeat custom. Some audiences may prefer podcasts, videos, infographic and downloadable eBooks, which is why researching your audience beforehand is crucial. Consider what you’re trying to achieve, who the audience is, and how they like to consume content.
Provide real value
Don’t fixate on what you want to sell. Focus on providing value to by being a trustworthy source of information, answering common problems, and providing tips, analysis and maybe even entertainment. This way, opportunities to showcase your product or brand will come naturally as part of the engagement process.
By knowing your audience, identifying their main problems and establishing the keywords that they use when searching online, you’ll gain a much better understanding of which types of content will provide genuine value.
Develop a content plan
Content marketing requires a fair amount of work if you want to establish yourself as a reliable voice in your industry. Try mapping out your content in a spreadsheet, identifying which topics your content will cover, in what format, and whether each stage of the customer journey has been catered to.
You can then easily identify any gaps in your plan, which enables you to cover all bases going forward. This also gives you the power to be more strategic in terms of where and when to publish, as well as ensure a constant stream of content for your audience. Bonus points if your plan includes style guides and the revising or repurposing of old content too.
Make your content discoverable
Content marketing is of course pointless if folk can’t actually find the content itself. If your content is located on your own site, efforts will be largely search-led, so make sure to use high traffic keywords in headers, descriptions, body text, media uploads – all the usual niceties of SEO.
Then there’s the sharing of your content on social media, where you can utilise hashtags and trending topics, driving engagement by making the algorithms do the hard work for you. Regular publishing of content will see your audience grow but you could always increase exposure with paid ads too, not to mention guest posts and email blasts.
Use analytics to inform strategy
Content marketing is a long haul, so it’s important to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and make a commitment to continuous improvement. Make good use of tools like Google Analytics or social media insights to find out which kinds of content perform well, focusing more strongly on those in the future and working to improve the rest.
You might even find that some kinds of content are better for attracting traffic and others for gaining actual leads, so you can often refine your strategy from there.
Ask us about content marketing services
As well as being your friendly Hull web design company offering affordable website packages, we can also provide and manage your digital content. This can include copywriting, blog writing, photography, videography, email campaigns and social media management. To find out more, get in touch on 01482 880929 or fill in our contact form.
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