Content marketing can be expounded as a strategic action aimed at creating relevant content to attract and maintain an audience and ultimately make a profit. It involves establishing a relationship with your audience by providing them with quality and relevant content. In comparison to advertising, contentment marketing shows that one cares for the customer. It creates a stronger and lasting bond between you and your customer. If you are new to this strategy and would like to start, you might experience some challenges. It can be confusing at first, not knowing where to start. Having used content marketing strategies, I would like to share my experience with you. I have prepared top tips for Content Marketing to get you started.
1. Know-How Search Results Work Before Writing Content
Before writing your content, you should first take the time to know how search results are displayed. Most people rely on keywords, with the hope that their audience will find their content. This can prove challenging for a customer. At times, there are hundreds of results that appear when a customer uses Google to search for a keyword. Sorting out all those results to get to the relevant content can be time-consuming. You should learn to frame your work in a manner which will make it easier for your customers to find. Learn how search engines like google work to maintain your content in a high rank. Most customers usually go for the first search result item on the list.
2. Lengthy Videos Can Be Challenging
When posting your content for your audience, the most important thing is to be outstanding. You will need to be unique, identifiable by your audience. Currently, people prefer shorter videos to longer ones. With a shorter video, you make your audience feel like the content is easy to understand. With a long video, one might think that the content is complicated and requires time to understand. To capture your audiences’ attention, it would be best to make your videos shorter. According to Balkhi, the ideal video time should be around 8 to 12 minutes. You should capture all relevant content within this time frame.
3. Keep It Relevant
When you are making your content, it is crucial to keep it relevant to your audience. Customers will lose interest if your content has a lot of irrelevant information. It should have information which concerns the audience and should be useful to them. An excellent example of content that maintained relevance is the video series by Siege Media. The videos had appearing colors, fonts, and thumbnails that were relevant to the audience, and this led to their popularity on YouTube. You should make your content more exciting to your audience. You can achieve this by using good audio or video.
4. Keep Your Content Fresh
It is common to find people changing dates of their post to make it look like they have updated their content. To a new audience, it might appear updated, but a person who has read or viewed your post before will notice that your content is old. It is essential to keep your posts fresh and up to date. Build a culture of revising your work, ensuring you add new information. You should also update your links so that it doesn’t always take your audience to the same page. This makes your work fresh; people see that you do constant research and therefore trust you more.
5. Know Your Audience
To have an excellent marketing plan, you will need to know your audience. You will need to know information like their age, education, gender, and how much they earn. With this kind of data, you can create content directly addresses them. You can also find out what interest your audience from social media and Google Analytics. Get to know what people look for on your website. Customer Feedback is also crucial: you get to find out what the people need, their attitude towards your content and deal with the complaints. Understanding your audience will help you make better and relevant content.
6. Assess Your Current Position
You will need to analyze and evaluate your content to know where you stand in the market. The first thing you will need to do is test your content to see if it is useful or not. You should ask yourself if your content is helping you achieve your set goals. Run an audit test to find out the usefulness of your content. Check the search engine ranking; see where your content lies. You should also check out your competitors’ content. Find out how it is performing to know where you stand. Know what you lack and what you need to do to maintain your audience.
7. Figure Out the Best Content Channels
With content marketing, you realize that some channels work best than others. There are networks where you are successful, and some networks where you don’t perform very well. You can identify where best to reach to your audience. You cannot just use all the channels, stick to what works best for you. Avoid the channels that don’t deliver your content to your targeted audience. Use web analytics to know where the people are accessing your work. It will help you to know which type of channel to use to share your content.
8. Decide on Content Types
It is essential to know which types of content you want to make. Most people have gained success by owning a base for the publication. Posting on your blog is one way to do it, and this has proven to work for a lot of people. You can post on your site and later have the content shared to other websites. You can also research and get to find out the most successful content type in the market and below inspiration from there. This can be easily done using tools such as Buzzsumo. Research shows that video marketing works quite well for marketing. You might want to consider using video to get to your audience.
9. Measure your Results
After all that, you finally need to test if your content is working. You will need to measure your results to establish if your work is helping you achieve your set goals. You can use Google Analytics to gauge your performance. Use tools like Buzzsumo to know how much your content is being shared. Compare your content with your competitor’s’ and know its level of success in the market. Google Alerts is also another excellent tool to help you measure your performance. It lets you know how many times your content has been mentioned. You can also check the rank on the search results of your content to know where it lies. These analyses will help you know if your marketing strategies are working or not and hence establish which measures you need to take. Measuring your results is crucial as it helps you to identify what works for you best.
Conclusion
Attaining a successful content marketing plan is a hustle. If you are planning to start, the tips I have listed for you will help in getting started. The key is knowing the type of content to use, your audience, the right channels, and evaluating your performance.
Deepak Chauhan
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