In the last few years, the internet became a lot more important for businesses to communicate with their audience. And with this development, the interest in content marketing for small businesses grew very much. Every business, big or small, has a voice now and that’s exactly why online content marketing should be a big part of everyone’s marketing & communications strategy! But how do you create a successful online content marketing strategy?
What is content marketing?
If you want to be successful in content marketing, you first have to understand what using content marketing actually means. There are many definitions of content marketing, but the definition we like the most is the one of the Content Marketing institute:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
This definition shows exactly what it’s all about. Creating & distributing valuable content and building an audience!
Create, build & distribute
Create, build & distribute are the bricks of a perfect content marketing strategy. But how do you build a wall of them? Combine the following aspects to create the best content marketing strategy for your business.
Content creation
The most important thing in content creation is to look at what audience you want to reach and which info they like to read. If you know more about your target audience, you’ll be able to reach them much easier and your number of views will grow quickly. For example, you’re running a electronics web shop for students. Then you have to try to understand the way of thinking of these students. Write about subjects they like to read about, that are relevant to your website, in the language that they speak. So don’t write about subjects like ‘paying off a house’, but choose subjects like ‘how to save money on your mobile subscription’! Poor students like to save money!
If you know your target audience the best way you can, you will know exactly what to write about! So talk to, search for or do lots research about your audience! You can also easily check if you’re writing about the right subjects. If your views and interaction rate are higher on some post are better then on others, then this might be the subject in the right direction. Let the data lead the way to the best content creation!
Building an audience
If you’ve reached your target audience with your content, the next step is to bind them to your brand. But how do you build a proper audience that returns for your content? We’re lucky that nowadays most of the people connect through the internet with social media sites. That’s exactly the way how you can build your audience. If people connect to you on social media, they will be able to see and read your new content straight away. Besides that, they also feel like they connect to someone in person. If they have any questions about your brand, they know where to go to. If you show your audience that you care about them, through good webcare, then they will be able to bind with your business much easier.
Distribute your content
If you’ve build a audience through social media, you now have two main ways to distribute your content and build a even bigger audience:
-Through search engines
-Through shares and likes of your existing network
Search engines are the basic way to reach your audience. If you create content that is valuable for your audience, with the right keywords, then the search engines will lead the audience to your website. That’s exactly why we use on-page SEO to optimize your content, so your audience will be able to find you in the search engines. If you want to add these search visitors to your network, it’s really important that you provide the information they need. Otherwise the bounce rate of your content will be way to big. That’s why it’s important that you use the right keywords in your on-page seo strategy.
“Nice-to-read”-content is also important if you’re trying to get shares through social media. You have to increase the shareability of your content. There are all kinds of tips and tricks to share your sharability, but the basics are just creating interesting and creative optimized content. And another little trick is to add share buttons to your content of course. It’s also important to be active in discussions that your company has linkage with. If you’re able to show the people that you know what you’re talking about, it’ll be more likely that they’re going to see you as some kind of opinion leader!
So, why does it work? The Anatomy of Content Marketing [Infographic]
Content marketing works, but why does it work? Our conclusion is that the basic of content marketing thing is just good content. That’s the starting point and we’d love to help you with that with a free trial of our own Textmetrics! And concerning of the other aspects, you could learn a lot from this infographic: “The Anatomy of Content Marketing”.
