The digital landscape is constantly changing but despite the cliché, content is still king when it comes to digital marketing and the success of your business in 2017. You may find yourself asking: what is content marketing?
Content tells your story: the story of your brand, product, and services. When visitors come flocking to your website, ask yourself: Are my products or services visible? What does my website say about my brand identity? Does my social media channels attract my target audience?
With the demand for value-for-money in the current market increasingly high, customers expect businesses to provide content which will help them make informed choices. If your brand message or services become muddied by irrelevant or inconsistent output, it won’t be long until you find yourself falling behind in the profit-making game as customer’s struggle to understand your offering.
Content itself comes in many forms: blog posts, guides, videos, articles, and infographics, but to name a few. They communicate with today’s digital-savvy consumers. However, this does not mean mindlessly throwing content out into the blogosphere and seeing what sticks – what you need is a content marketing strategy.
Building a Content Marketing Strategy That Works for You
Figuring out which content works best for you may seem like a daunting task at first. But, anyone can create the foundations of a great content strategy using the following steps:
Choose your topic. What is it your business all about? Free tools like Google Analytics or Keyword Planner should help you map out keywords and phrases related to your business. This also has a two-fold advantage for future-proofing great content; it will help when brainstorming content ideas and work towards optimising your articles for SEO when you come to the publishing stage.
Next, define your target audience. It would be wrong to assume this is a case of simple demographics like age, sex, gender or occupation. To ensure content is highly-targeted and truly beneficial to your end consumer you should tackle the bigger questions, like; how does my product fit into their lifestyle? What types of content are popular amongst this group?
Identifying the aims and objectives of your content is also vital before putting pen to paper, so to speak. What is it you want your content to achieve? For example, if you are a new business and driving traffic and custom to your website is high on the agenda, you may wish to put together informative or entertaining product-specific pieces. An established brand, on the other hand, may look to social media as a means to retain customers by engaging them in debate and conversation with topical pieces.
Well-crafted content is invaluable to any business. That’s because, in today’s overpopulated digital space, original, informative and relevant content is key if you want to climb search and increase visibility amongst potential customers.
Why Content Marketing Matters to your SEO Efforts
In a bid to tackle spam and improve result quality, search engine algorithms were updated to reward the best content. When a query is entered by a user, those sites which carry the most useful content would now achieve a higher ranking.
After all, what’s the point in creating content if it can’t be found by your target audience, right?
As mentioned earlier, people need content to make informed decisions. They use search as a means to find this content. The keywords you use to define your business will lead customers in the right direction – but remember! You are writing for readers, not robots. Use synonyms and look at long-tail keywords as part of your research, this way your content will be consumer and crawler-friendly.
The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of CodifyMedia.
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