Content marketing has rapidly evolved in the past few years to bridge the gap between businesses and customers. People are no longer paying heed to the claims you made through advertisements unless you demonstrate the same. Celebrity endorsements are taking a backseat because everyone knows that businesses are paying them to say what they want people to believe. Simply put, there’s no way to reach a consumer’s heart and mind unless you genuinely make an effort to win their trust. Let’s discuss how to improve your content marketing with some important tips.
The internet is already saturated with content that can grab people’s attention, but the problem is, there are too many of them. If you are churning out new blog posts every day hoping your customers will read it, sorry to say, but you are in for a huge disappointment.
Blogs are no more the only section where you share valuable information instead of promoting your business. There are myriads of content formats and content sharing platforms that are available today, which can be utilized multi-purposely for the benefit of your business.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the process of promoting content, but it’s not just for the sake of offering information to your customers.
Content marketing can be utilized to increase brand awareness, increase conversions, get more traffic, sign up more customers and drive revenue for your business. You can use any online channel at your disposal to market your content, which means you can utilize your website, blog, social media, online forums and emails as well.
Like we said earlier, people have now become smarter when it comes to making purchase decisions. They no longer believe advertisements or celebrity endorsements to try out products or services. They will rather seek honest opinions from sources such as online reviews and ratings or recommendations from influencers. Additionally, if your business is new, people would like to know more about it before they decide to invest in your products or services.
Content marketing helps new businesses build their online reputation and establish themselves as a trusted brand in their niches. It is also useful in developing brand awareness among people. For businesses that have already established themselves as a trusted brand can use content marketing to decrease the communication gap between themselves and their customers and provide better services in the future.
Content marketing is not something that can benefit new businesses, but it helps businesses of all sizes to provide better customer experience and establish brand loyalty.
6 helpful content marketing tips
Here are some actionable content marketing tips that can help you leverage your business online and gain more customers.
1. Know your consumers
You cannot afford to run your business on guesswork because you’ve invested a lot of time and money into it. To prevent such guesswork in content marketing, the first initiative for any digital marketer is to take time to know their customers.
A business can have varied customer demographics based on age, gender, and personal interests. The first thing that you must do while trying to figure out consumer behavior is to understand who your customers are.
Various online tools can help you determine your customer demographics easily. Based on the data collected from customer analytics, you can create detailed buyer personas. These personas can help you make a more targeted approach for all your content marketing initiatives.
2. Write evergreen content
Evergreen content is the content that is always relevant to the users irrespective of the time or the season. In other words, evergreen content is the opposite of seasonal content.
Every business should focus on producing evergreen content that can add value to their customers. Evergreen content can be the “how-to” articles that demonstrate readers on how to accomplish specific tasks. Beside being informational and useful, evergreen content should be well-optimized with keywords and phrases that can help it to rank. Usually, evergreen content pieces are written in a detailed format and contain more than 3,000 words on average.
Evergreen content never goes out of relevance; hence the writer who is writing it must take care to make the content completely error-free, factual and non-plagiarized.
3. Pay attention to content formatting
Content formatting plays a vital role in determining the success of your content. Informational and well-written content cannot guarantee your success unless you take care of content formatting.
Users like to stay longer on web pages that are interesting enough to keep them engaged. This means your content should be aesthetically pleasing as well as engrossing. Ensure to format your content correctly, especially the ones written in long-form.
Use headings and subheadings to break long paragraphs and give a hint to the readers about what is coming next. Avoid using long sentences and try to keep it crisp and concise. Use numbers, bullet points and tables wherever possible and add visuals like high-quality images or videos between your content to make it more appealing.
4. Focus on relieving pain points
The very basis of marketing your content is to tell your customers about the benefits of using your products or services. While explaining the benefits of your product or service, make sure that you are conveying a solution to relieve your audience of their pain points. Unless your customers are convinced that the item you are trying to sell will actually mitigate their pain points, they won’t purchase it.
Instead of writing “10 reasons why you shouldn’t buy a car” you should instead write an article stating “10 things I wish I knew before buying a car.”
5. Promote your content
The internet is so full of new content that is generated rapidly every minute. It is very common for most people to overlook any new article, blog or video that you produce for your website. With the vast competition online, there is nothing more effective than promoting your content online in order to increase its online visibility.
Once you publish a new piece of content, it is your responsibility to optimize it for the search engine and social media. Using the right keywords and internal links ensure that your content gets maximum online exposure. Make your website content easily shareable so that people can share them on their social profiles if they find it interesting.
While promoting content on social media, try to add relevant hashtags and tag the right people or business whom you think might be relevant. Besides, you must also invest in a good copywriter, who can write amazing captions while sharing your content on social media.
6. Don’t fatigue your readers
As we mentioned above, the amount of content available on the internet is enormous, for an average human like you or us. It can get overwhelming to find new content from our favorite brands more than twice a day. While some marketers might think that producing fresh content will keep them ahead of the competition, the reality is, they are calling in for content fatigue.
With content fatigue, you as well as your audience will lose interest in finding something valuable from what you write. Writing new content is definitely the need of the hour, but you can limit this activity to once or twice a week if you have the confidence to produce high-quality content. Don’t settle for anything less than the best just because your competitor happens to post new content on their website or social media daily.
Content marketing is about how well you use your digital marketing channels
Content marketing can be overwhelming in the beginning since there are so many channels and methods to do it. The success in content marketing doesn’t depend on how many marketing channels you utilize, but rather on how well you use them.
Don’t join the content marketing bandwagon because your competitors are doing it. Figure out the best content marketing channels for your business and what type of content appeals to your audience and then create your own content marketing plan.
This guest blog article was written by Shreoshe Ghosh, the content lead at Stan Ventures. She has been writing professionally for more than three years and has experience in guest posting services. She is a movie buff and an amazing cook.