What is Content Marketing?
“Type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.”
The concept of content marketing is to create something that your audience will want to read about, leading to consumers visiting your website and generating interest in your brand. The purpose of content is not to sell products but to provide consumers with information that is useful to them, building brand loyalty.
Content marketing is a key method of boosting your SEO ranking. Regularly updating content via your website has been proven to build your website higher up on search engines such as Google. 60% of marketers say that inbound (SEO, blog content, etc) is their highest quality source of leads.
In this guide we show you the key steps in creating top quality content to boost your online presence and create trust with your audience.
Research
There is a lot of information to consider before you start with your production, conducting research is a key method of increasing your results when it comes to content.
Competitor Analysis: Research competitors and see what type of content they create, what channels they use, how often do they post. This is an easy and effective way of gaining insight on what you should be creating and how the audience reacts to specific posts. Use this for inspiration.
Customer Analysis: Research your customers, who is your audience, what content do they read, what do they want to know, what platforms do they use and how to find them. Social media habits of the consumer are useful for gaining an insight and what content you can cater for them.
Research distribution channels: When is the peak time for posts? When do they gain the most interaction?
Research your own business: See which existing content has gained the most success and use this to develop a plan. Conduct an SEO audit on your own website and see what works.
Reflect Brand Identity
Before writing content, you should always consider that you need to represent the company. You need to match their personality; this is what makes the brand stand out to other competitors so execute this within your writing.
Writing this can be as simple as using the correct language and creating a continuation between different formats and platforms. This will create familiarity with the company and ultimately, build trust with your audience.
Show who your company is and what you represent.
Make an impact with your headline
The first and most important part of your content is the headline, the best way that you will catch your audience’s attention is with a gripping headline. This is what will cause the reader to continue reading. The general advice to follow is to keep your headline in less than 14 words; any longer and you risk the chance of losing your readers attention. Use powerful, emotive language to draw the user in.
Examples of headlines:
Passive:
“How to make content for websites”
Active:
“How to build unmissable content to boost your SEO”
Which sounds better and which makes you want to keep scrolling? Place yourself as a consumer and decide if your headline is capturing.
Serve a Purpose
Content isn’t about selling products; it is about providing users with relevant information which captures their attention. It needs to appeal to the user and serve a genuine purpose. Producing content is the biggest challenge for marketers. Provide answers and this is how you will gain the most interest.
If you create content with purposes such as how to do something, how to make something or tell them a story then naturally people will want to read about it.
Do not write content for the sake of it, make it something you would read if you saw it on your feed.
Key Words
Key words are words that are frequently used in content and with similar companies. They are a key component in getting yourself higher up on Google.
Conduct an SEO Analysis: A straight forward hack to do this is to look at your competitors websites, you can do a scan to see what the key words are most used on their website. Make a note of which keywords are used and when you start to build your content use these. This is what will boost your search engine ranking on Google.
You can make high quality content but if there aren’t enough key words you will miss out on many more readers.
Using data: Hyperlinks
Using other websites for information isn’t always a negative trait when it comes to producing content. Cross referencing will boost your SEO and using information from others will make your information more factual. A straight forward approach of increasing your SEO is by linking this information straight to your posts. This will help index your information on search pages.
Power Words
Use power words to grab your audience’s attention, passive words will make the reader quickly skim through so you need to make every word count. There are thousands of useful power words to choose from depending on your style of writing but the main goal of this is to drive emotion and make the reader feel important. Make sure that the power words you use aren’t forced and flow naturally within your sentences.
Examples of power words
- Pioneering
- Authentic
- Massive
- Essential
- Proven
Examples of passive words
- Great
- Good
- New
- Best
Visual Content
Writing a lot of text without any visual content can be daunting for the reader. Visual content is a much more effective way of gaining audience interest and if used correctly, will multiply visitors. Incorporating images and video enhances the overall look of your content, making it much more interesting and vibrant. It is also a key method of backing up your content with relevant information which will be more appealing to the user, illustrating your points.
Visual content includes photos, videos and animations. The best method of visual content is to use your own visual content staying unique and original.
Shareable Content
A key method of optimising your content marketing to maximum effect is to make content that is share worthy. This is an organic cost free method of further increasing your brand awareness as readers will share what they have read to others. This has the potential to bring your brand to all different types of people. The best way to do this is make the content interesting, relevant and appeal to the user, being controversial can also help as people will react and tag friends. Social media will play a huge role in your content marketing, many successful campaigns are done now by social media so create controversy, tell a story and make your content useful.
Be Inspired
An important consideration whilst creating your content is never copy others information. There are serious consequences of this, as you take the risk of breaking Google’s search engine regulations. This can impact your SEO ranking as Google will prevent you from appearing on search results. This does not mean that you cannot be inspired by others, there is tons of relevant information online which relates directly to what you aim to articulate in your writing. Use others information and reword it.
Consistency
The average amount of posts that you should use according to marketers is 11 posts a month. The key to gaining viewership and keeping consumer interest is to post consecutively. You can make the best post or addition to your website and spend much time on it, but this will not have an impact if you do not update regularly. This can be negative for trying to climb up your SEO ranking as Google will use websites that are regularly updated to place them as the most relevant. In the eyes of the consumer, they will look to companies who regularly update and naturally see these as more reputable and up to date.
Improve Old Content
Your content is never going to be perfect, a key method of making it top quality is to go back to it and improve. This does not mean you have to reword your sentences, conduct an SEO audit, see what is user-friendly and what isn’t. Optimise your content to fix the errors and you will naturally see an increase in page visitors.
Talk to Us
If you need help in creating content, our marketing team specialise in copywriting and are here to make the most out of your business. For more information get in touch with us today.
