Let’s start this blog with a hard-hitting fact:
A large number of marketers start a content marketing initiative without knowing the ‘why,’ ‘what,’ or ‘how’ behind it. They don’t review the purpose of the content. They don’t analyze how it can fix within the overall content mix. They don’t know what they are supposed to do with the content, and they don’t know how the content will impact the business. Is it to create ancillary revenue? Is it to drive sales? They simply don’t know.
Only a few digital content marketers spend time in analyzing the purpose of content and curating them to drive more leads. Content marketing influencers consistently create marketing-related and high-quality search content. They are always at the forefront, churning one great blog post after another. And they yield over 10,000 visitors a week.
So, how do they get there? In this blog post, I’ll answer that question for you, through the 3Cs of Content Marketing.
The First: Content Creation
The path of content strategists and marketer is clear. To boost their SEO ranking, gain leads, and earn traffic, they must create great content. I’ve heard a few bloggers ask, ‘What exactly makes a content exceptional?’ In this section, I’ve listed few ingredients that make a content great:
Original content creation:
Original means originality. Rehashing the same post or concept over and over again is not originality. Your ideas should also be original. Google algorithm updates now prevent poor quality content from ranking high in search results. You cannot just find a bunch of articles and rephrase them. That ship has sailed.
True ahead-of-the curve content creators produce unique content by paying attention to trending topics, focusing on timely, relevant news, and writing trending content. You can be more effective by evoking emotions in your readers, bringing your perspective, and talking about your experience. This way, you’ll be able to make your content more relatable.
Focus on writing strong headline
When you’re writing a headline, remember that 8 out of 10 people read headlines, but only 2 out of 10 will click the article open and read the rest. Give time to your headlines. I suggest making a few and selecting the best one. A great headline convinces more people to click open the article and read it till the end.
Produce Actionable content
The best content is the one that provides users with a sense of how to apply the information shared. When you’re writing content, give readers tips on applying what you’re telling them.
Write contents that can provide answers
People using search engines ultimately want answers. There are millions of How-tos in the minds of millions of users, and your blog should deliver a few of these answers. When you write a thought-provoking content, you engage the readers. And an engaged audience will take every word you’ve written. To make your content engaging, tell them stories, have a promising introduction and leave them with questions.
Be reliable and accurate in your sourcing of information
When you’re linking to a source of information, you’ve to make sure that they are an authoritative and trusted source. The more you can substantiate what you’ve written, the more reliable your content will be. Make sure to updates your blog or website regularly. If you’ve a website or blog, there’s no alternative but updating it frequently with great content.
Add images and videos to communicate better
It’s a digital era, and you must know the importance of visual aids. Add images, diagrams, videos, infographics that help add value to your content.
Eliminate fluff: Write Short, precise, and pointed content
Stop focusing on the word count, and try to make it as brief as possible. Your content must be ‘to-the-point’ and filled with information.
Content is the king. You’ve heard this phrase so much that it has almost become a cliche. Yet, the importance of creating quality content is usually overlooked. Let’s look at some of the blogs/Website that create great content:
- Troop Messenger
At my company, Troop Messenger, we feature tips, tactics, trends, and how-tos of the SaaS world. There are 100s of informative, original articles that offer actionable insights on different topics.
What makes Troop Messenger blog useful:
- There is lots of content to keep a reader engaged
- Each article is actionable and sourced
- It’s easy to read
- Updated every few days with new articles
- A variety of topics
- Covers the data and fact
- Great information for anyone interested in using or creating SaaS products
- CopyHackers
Copyhackers feature tips, tricks, trends of writing a more persuasive, Believable and Usable content that can help businesses increase traffic to their website and boost the email conversion rates.
What makes CopyHackers Website great:
- Discusses impactful topics in an engaging way
- Content can be understood by general people
- Plenty of visual aids in every article
- Bold content that helps their content stand-out
- Covers the data and fact
The Second: Curate
A content curated in a way that focuses on the interest of your target audience will drive results. You’ve to get to know your customers, learn about their expectations, struggles, and then tailor your content accordingly.
3-Steps to Identifying an Ideal Customer:
Step One: Know your customer
Dig about the key demographic of your prospective customers using tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. Find out everything about your target audience. From Gender to Age, Occupation, Level of education, Interests, Location, Relevant behaviors, Income, Marital Status, and more.
Step Two: Find where these customers hangout online
To curate content for the right audience, you must find where they hang out online, and what is the source of information. Do they read blogs of specific genres? Are they active on Facebook? Do they prefer reading news websites? Are they twitter junkies? Find answers to all these questions and you’ll know how you should curate your content, and where to publish them.
Step Three: Build a buyer persona
For effective content curation, you must establish customer profiles for your business. That way you can segment the audience and also develop a strong marketing campaign. An ideal ‘buyer face’ is important to effective marketing. It helps the marketer tailor content while focusing on the specific pain points, and it drives great results.
Successful content marketers and marketing campaigns make it big when they put a brand’s message (context) at the right time, in the right place. Creating content is not the only solution to providing your audience with valuable resources and information. Through content curation, you can become a source for industry tips, tricks and trends.
KYC as the core of content marketing strategy:
Can you expect a 13-year old to take interest in what business owners prefer to read about? Same way, would you expect a middle-aged entrepreneur to read about the latest superhero movies? Try to think about it. If you get your content in front of the wrong audience, you’d have already lost half the resources and time.
The Third: Circulate
As Jonathan Auffray says, ‘If you’ve spent 20% of time in content creation, spend 80% of your time in content promotion.” This may sound weird but it’s true. To find success with content marketing, you must shift focus on content promotion and distribution.
Content Distribution Channels and Tips for Content Marketing:
In this section, we’re going to share with you the best of the tips of content circulation:
- Partnership with Influencers:
Influencer marketing has a great reputation in the content marketing world since they have direct access to your target audience. When you create content with an influencer, your content will be promoted by you, and also someone who’s more audience reach than you.
- Share content in niche groups
It starts with identifying a relevant group of communities where you can share your content. Instead of sharing it everywhere, pick a few platforms that you know. At Troop Messenger, we make significant use of Quora, Reddit, and also Facebook groups.
- Repurpose your content
Repurpose your content into different formats: Images, Infographic, Tutorials, Graphs, Ebooks, Whitepaper, and Slides. Repurpose content for different distribution channels like: Email, Newsletter, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, Online Forums, Communities, and Sites like Medium.
For example, if you start with long-form content (video, or a podcast), you can extract text from it to create shareable gifs, video bites, and images to post. Each Subtopic from podcasts or videos can become a topic for writing a blog post. Share all these components (blog post, twitter threads, images, video bites) on social media and you’ll expand your reach since your content is diverse, shareable, and easy to consume.
- Cross-Publish on Websites and Content Communities
Cross-publishing on websites can help your content reach a wider audience and also create a backlink to your site. Submit your content to communities like Tumblr, BigSugar, Disqus, Plurk, Hacker News, Growth Hackers, and Inbound.org
You can opt for paid Ads on Facebook Advertising, Instagram Advertising, Pay-per-click ads, and YouTube Ads. Sometimes, content marketing can be as easy and embarrassing as asking for help. The key here is to make your content radically sharable. Find a catchy two-liner in your blog-post, a quote, tweetable advice, and add the option of ‘Click to Tweet’ and this will generate a custom link for the tweet.
- Know the right content marketing software:
Social Animal: With social animals, you can discover and find top-performing content for your competitor or any niche.
GetSocial: It is one of the most powerful tools for content distribution analytics. Using GetSocial, you can effectively distribute content on social media track social shares of each content.
Outbrain: With outbrain, you can serve the right content to the right audience, at the right time. Outbrain uses pointers from demographic, lookalines, interest groups, and location, and also brings publishers and marketers to the same platform.
BuzzSumo: With BuzzSumo you can analyse the best performing topic in a particular niche. The advanced search engine helps with analysis of most shared content.
Signing Off
Content marketing, especially the adoption of visuals, continues to change how customers consume content. A good digital content marketer knows how important it is to value the 3Cs of content marketing and stay on the top of trends.
If you’ve observed the way today’s content marketers approach content promotion and production, you probably know that they’re creating fewer pieces of content, and investing much more in driving people to that content.
As I sign off, I encourage you to take advantage of all the tips and tricks mentioned in this article. The steps mentioned should guide you to generate more sales and traffic.
Which of the content marketing strategies have you adopted? Which one has been more profitable for you? Please let me know in the comments below.
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This article first appeared in www.business2community.com
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