The internet has made it so that anyone can grow their business and reach millions of people in the comfort of their own homes. With content marketing, you don't need a big advertising budget to get your name out there - all you need is a great story. In this blog post, we will talk about using content marketing as an effective way to market your business online.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a content-driven approach to marketing your business. Copyblogger in fact defines content marketing as "the marketing and business process for creating content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action."
This means that content marketing is the process of creating content to promote your business. It involves the creation of content that builds trust with an audience and persuades them into buying what you have to sell, whether it be a product or service.
The most important part about content marketing/advertising is offering content that actually adds value to your audience. Content marketing is about content.
The main goal is to make sure you create great content with real meaning so that you can keep your content marketing cost down.
How to grow your business with content marketing
Growing your business with the use of content marketing is not easy and you should be aware of that.
If content marketing is done properly it can help your business grow faster than anything else! It's a very powerful way to connect with the right people at the right time so don't underestimate this opportunity if you want to take your business to another level.
In fact, Hubspot, in an article claims that 82% of content marketers believe content marketing is a crucial factor in growing their business. The same article claims that 47% of content marketers consider content marketing as the most effective tactic when it comes to generating traffic.
So, how do you start content marketing?
1. Start with a Content Strategy
First of all, content marketing is a complex process. A content strategy plan needs to be designed for this task and it takes time to carry out such a project.
It is easier to write content if you have a content strategy plan before starting so it will be easier for you to find valuable topics and create content around those points, which will help your business grow. The content creation process should start with research about what people need or how they behave when looking for products or services like yours.
A whitepaper released by Semrush claims that 91% of companies globally have a content marketing strategy, you need to be sure that your content is effective and you know what works for your business so the next time you can adjust it accordingly.
What it means, that the content strategy plan should be well thought out and you need to have a clear vision of what your content marketing goal is. The time spent on content marketing will pay off if done right, so put some effort into this project before starting with content marketing.
In building up your content marketing strategies, you need an action plan that includes content and many other strategies such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social media marketing, or email marketing.
2. Create an editorial calendar
The 2020 B2C Content Marketing: An Excellent Adventure research survey conducted by Content Marketing Institute found out that content marketing will be used by 89% of surveyed organizations and content marketers expect content to play a bigger role in their company's future.
The survey also discovered that content marketers see the biggest benefits from using content as it helps with lead generation (64%), gives them access to new audiences (61%), drives more traffic to their sites (60%), and provides content for social media marketing (55%).
As such, it is important that create an editorial calendar with topics that will be useful for content marketing. The calendar should have topics, deadlines, topics, and the dates of when your content will be published to social media platforms. You should also include key milestones from your company's business plans as well as any events or holidays in your calendar as content should be relevant to the business and it' customers.
In deciding on how many blogs or contents you should release, CoShedule suggests that content marketers should publish a minimum of one blog post per week.
In your content marketing calendar, you should also include the social media platforms where you will post your content. CoShedule suggests that content marketers should post content to at least three platforms. The top social networks for content marketing include Facebook (98%), Instagram (95%), Twitter (90%) as claimed by content marketing expert, Jay Baer.
Including a call-to-action in your content is another way for content marketers to increase leads and sales from their content marketing efforts. One example is to of using calls-to-actions is typing “click here”, including an image to draw attention to the content.
3. Create a blog post on your company's website.
The content of your blog posts should be valuable to the reader and provide them with useful information that is relevant to one or more of their needs.
By providing value in content marketers are able to free up time for themselves by outsourcing tasks such as content management systems (CMS), which can help increase productivity.
For example, you can use content management systems to schedule blog posts and content that will be published at a certain time. This way, you are free to focus on other tasks such as creating new content or managing the business's social media accounts.
The content of your blogs can focus on topics, such as promotion or marketing of your business, sharing news, updates, and information that you think people will find interesting or useful about the topics you are knowledgeable about.
A good way to get started with content marketing for your company's blog would be to write something covering some of the new services/products of your company. You can also write about industry-related trends and other things customers should know.
For example: let's say you're selling watches - try writing an article about what watch styles have been popular over the years so far!
But make sure it ties back into how it relates to buying watches from your store as well. It essentially promotes sales, also giving helpful content ideas for content marketing.
4. Share the article with social media followers and friends.
Sharing with as many people as possible will help content marketing reach the right people and get your blog seen by as many eyes as possible.
The more it's shared, liked, and commented on - the higher up in Google rankings it can go!
You can also use digital marketing in sharing your articles and other content to get results.
Make sure to include a link back to whatever article you wrote so that when the new people you reached, too, click through from social media posts or friends' shares - they're sent directly to your site.
And if a content piece gets linked within another page of yours (which you should ensure that it happens), this counts towards how high up in results lists it will rank for certain keywords.
5. Publish an infographic to share on other websites.
Infographics are a great way of getting content out there in the digital world. They're a fantastic way to illustrate an idea or process. You can then submit for sharing on other websites and blogs specializing in infographics like visually. Moreover, content-sharing websites like 99 Signals also accept infographics as well!
This way, you can tap into a new audience that would have never seen your content before and get traffic to your website, all for free. They can also link back to your website if you have a content-sharing policy in place.
In addition, don't forget about social media either! You can upload infographics directly onto Facebook or Twitter and get even more exposure on popular networks. If it relates to an industry that is often shared on those platforms (like business content), there's a good chance your content will be found and shared.
All of these platforms can help you to build your brand, improve SEO rankings and attract new customers as well. Remember not all content is the same so make sure that whatever content marketing activities you take part in are relevant to both your industry and business goals!
6. Email the article to influencers in your industry.
Another content marketing strategy to use is - to connect with influencers. Influencers in your industry will be the most receptive to content that they know is coming from a trusted source. So don't waste time sending them content that has been published elsewhere.
Try to create something unique for each influencer by customizing it. This will make them share your post with their audience on social media or link back through an author bio.
Include links at the end of each email you send asking people if they'd like to add the content piece shared below.
This would look something like: "Hey [Name], I've written some content about how we grew our business using content marketing into 100k organic visitors per month (with data). Would you like me to send it over?"
This content could be a blog post, infographic, or even an ebook.
Make sure you have different content for each influencer, as this shows some level of research behind your outreach.
You can also ask the person if they would like to add anything else before sending through the content, making them more likely to share and link back.
7. Write a guest post for another site in your niche.
Writing a guest post for another site in your niche is an effective content marketing strategy as this will help you get your content in front of a new audience and build you some more link juice and backlinks.
Writing as a guest for another site or niche will open you up to a news set of audience and build your content marketing strategy. It is also beneficial because it allows the person writing content on that blog exposure which can help them grow their own business too, building two businesses at once with one post.
You can also reach out to a content curator or content manager and ask if they would be interested in featuring one of your articles on their site. You can use their site's search function and look for recent articles that have related topics with your own content and send them a message.
You could also use social media or outreach platforms like Buzzsumo or Ninja Outreach to find content curators in your niche who you could work with without having an audience or content of your own.
8. Offer free content, such as templates or ebooks, in exchange for contact information from visitors who download it.
Free things are hard to come by. So when a content curator can download a free ebook or template, they will likely be willing to share the content.
Offering something for free is an effective way of encouraging content curators to link back to your site and use it as a resource in their articles.
People generally want more from you when they get less, so don't offer them everything at once.
Another thing you could do is create a piece of content that other people can then add to.
For example, you could create a content series around the topic of content marketing. You then encourage people to build upon that content by writing their own articles using your content as source material. This makes it easier for them to write about this specific subject matter.
So no matter what kind of products or services you're selling online, start creating valuable blog posts which people want to read.
Also, content marketing will help your traffic grow. You'll be able to build a list of subscribers who become customers later on.
9. Measure your results
Measuring your results is essential. That's how you know whether content marketing is working for your business or not. It is through measuring your results that you'll be able to determine whether content marketing is working for your business or not.
So what kind of data should you measure? Here are some key metrics:
- number of leads generated from content creation and promotion;
- average time spent on a page;
- bounce rate;
- social media following; and
- content consumption by social networks.
All these can help you get more content marketing insights.
Conclusion
Content Marketing has become an important part of digital marketing strategies used by businesses, large and small alike. It's a way for content to be created and shared on the web that is inviting and informative in order to get customers interested enough to buy your products or services.
More than just content creation, Content Marketing is also about content promotion. Promoting content to the right people at the right time will help get you more customers and grow your business' reach online.
Content marketing can be done by anyone with an internet connection! The only thing needed are good ideas on how to promote content effectively.
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