Making Use of Content Marketing For Your Business
In the world of digital marketing, there is a word which both intimidates and tantalises businesses across the globe. Many have a false sense of what the word means, and countless others fail to grasp its scope and gravity. Content.
What is content?
Content is everything that is written or produced about your brand with your audience in mind. Your website, flyers, brochures, articles, social media posts, and much more.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing relates to any online content that generates interest around your products and services, rather than openly promoting your brand. Think about content marketing as part of your selling experience— if you are excited about your services and how they help solve different problems, you want people to have them. You want to sell them. ‘Selling’ isn’t a dirty word in this scenario, but rather a positive experience. It’s something you do with your clients, not to them.
Many small businesses avoid content marketing, as they fear that a huge budget would be required to achieve the desired results. Despite what this common misconception implies, however, you don’t need to invest a large sum of money on extravagant, professionally produced videos to get new leads. You can reap the benefits of content marketing without an excessively large budget if you are resourceful, smart, and passionate.
From little things…
Start small.
Start with a simple blog page on your website. This will act as a basis from which you may create more elaborate content marketing. Write about problems your customers have that relate to your industry. If you are a plumber, for example, write about things people shouldn’t flush down the toilet. If you’re a painter, write about different types of paint, and their individual uses. At the end of each blog, make sure to add a call to action. This could be a link to your contact form, main services page, or a clickable phone number.
Mix it up
Make sure your content adopts a variety of different forms and styles. You could create an infographic based on the research you’ve done, or perhaps you could have the research piece itself on your website as an informative blog. To further enhance consumer engagement, you could also create short videos to accompany your articles.
As you create content, make sure you share it all on all available forms of social media— ensuring that the form and content are appropriate for the chosen audience and platform, of course.
Reach out with Keyword Optimisation
Your content might not go viral, but if you optimise it for the right keywords, it will be seen by those who want to see it. When interested people, who actively seek information on products and services you provide, repeatedly find your content and see that you know what you’re talking about, that you are confident to share your knowledge, and that you care to help them, they will be more likely to remember and contact you.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the technique of ensuring you use the most effective keywords, regarding your product or service, within your content. If you’re already investing time and resources in creating effective content, it’s worth ensuring that the right people can easily find it when they need it.
SEO encompasses a combination of tactics that are implemented to increase your website’s ranking in search engines’ results, and in turn, increase your website’s traffic. While the topic is more advanced than many suspects and is constantly updated, it is best to initially ensure that you at least understand the basics of how it works and how you can use it.
SEO Basics
Research:
The first step you would take in this process is keyword research. Browsing your website, and your competitors’ websites, using free online tools, or hiring a marketing agency (we can help!) are just some of the ways which you may come to identify the top keywords related to your services. Discover their search volume. This entails finding out how many times people search these particular keywords each month, and how dense the competition is for each term. There’s no point writing about a topic with low search volume and high competition, for example. This would mean that not many people are searching for your content, and even if they were to use the relevant words by chance, they may not spot you among the many other websites that use the same keywords.
Implementation:
The next step would be to create content using those words or terms, but don’t go overboard. Online algorithms are becoming more sophisticated, and they mimic the way human beings consume content. If every second word in your article is your key term, and keyword density is too high, it will actually reflect badly on your website.
Branching out:
You can also make sure your images are optimised, that you use headings and tags strategically, and that your content links back to relevant pages within your website and to other websites. Additionally, attempt to get relevant websites to link back to yours as well.
Write with passion, and customers will be passionate about what you write
When it comes to content, the main takeaway is to remember that you are creating it for someone to consume and enjoy. Be natural. Keep it simple. Be confident about what you are saying and let your passion shine through your content. Say what you have to say – in simple terms – and keep it short. Most importantly, have fun. Your content doesn’t have to be funny, but whoever is reading or watching it can tell if you enjoyed creating it.