The role of content marketing in today’s business world is increasingly growing because it has become one of the best ways to increase consumer engagement, generate quality leads, boost sales, and stimulate business growth.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnpr3pkFlk&t=908s
More than 2.8 billion people are active internet and social media users and this number is growing. That is why content marketing is a well-suited instrument for both start-ups and well-established business entities. However, the effectiveness of content marketing can be a challenge even for the most experienced marketers. Competition for consumer attention and favour is fierce and now companies, both large and small, have to follow new methods to get benefits of content marketing. They must learn how to inspire their audiences, how to use technology and social media, and how to integrate all these instruments to rise above the noise. Unfortunately, many organisations fail miserably because they overlook the most basic rules of content marketing. In this article, we have summarised the top 5 rules of content marketing for doing it right in 2019.
1. Have a content marketing plan
If you consider using content marketing as a full-fledged marketing strategy, then having a plan is a must. Sit down, think about what type of content you are going to use, document your strategy, and execute it. Yes, we know that working out a marketing strategy on paper may be quite boring and tedious. But no paid – no gain, right? Besides, marketers must not only wrap their head around the product or service they advertise and promote, but also to have a full understanding of all the details and nuances of the industry to succeed. So, without having a plan you will not be able to optimise your content marketing and achieve some real results.
Remember that a content marketing plan is something more than just creating content, it is about distributing valuable and relevant content in a way that allows you to reach you target audience with the right information, in the right place, and at the right time. The effective content marketing plan is also about how frequently you publish your content. It is your road-map, your calendar. Another reason why having this type of plan is a good idea is because it allows you to keep everyone involved in the creation and distribution of your content on the same page. Finally, you can always share this plan with others to buy into the role, which content plays in the marketing of your goods or services.
2. Focus on your content
Perhaps, the second-most important tip that we can give you is to focus of the quality of your content and its overall readability. This does not just mean using a particular type of photos, music, video, or paragraphs. What is really important here is to make sure your content evokes the right emotions. Your content should establish a deeper brand-consumer relationship by using such elements as storytelling, user experience, and brand visuals. Make sure to use all these elements and you will see how your content is becoming more appealing and engaging. It is also a good idea to use these elements to diversify your content so your audiences don’t get tired of the same type of content offered to them.
Creating engaging, compelling, and informative content is crucial for your ability as a marketer to generate more organic traffic and conversion, which is always good. However, remember that you need to weave your brand’s identity into the content to make it unique. It is not enough just to use a set of visuals to attract consumer attention. Today, consumers want to be connected to their preferred brands and feel this connection. That is why you must make sure all types of your content have a distinct tone and a unique set of visuals. The content should also have a clear set of compelling values, which closely relates to your audience’s values and helps distinguish your goods and services from those of competitors.
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3. Provide detail, breadth, and depth
It is quite apparent that both audiences and search engines prefer content that is informative, detailed, and digs deep into the heart of the matter to solve all topic-related problems. That is why developing a successful content marketing strategy requires investing your time and effort in producing high-quality, informative content. A useful rule of thumb is that the more time you spend creating this type of content, the better the chances that your website will rank higher in search engine results pages. In turn, the higher your website is ranked, the more traction among online audiences it can gain. Of course, creating high-quality content can be very expensive and time-consuming, but we believe that the rewards will be worth the effort.
However, one can argue that content quality is a vague term and every company or marketer has their own criteria of quality. Although this statement is partly true, there are still some objective measures of quality that can help you create unique, engaging, and informative content. One of these criteria is the ability of content to achieve marketing objectives. One simple measure of the quality of content is how much value it brings, not how much time or money you put into it. If you spend hours and hours just to create a visual, which does not achieve a certain marketing goal – it’s worthless. These goals can include, but are not limited to traffic generation, higher levels of engagement, conversion, and rankings.
4. Integrate SEO into your content
The role of search engine optimisation or SEO in the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy is hard to overestimate. This significance is explained by the fact that SEO is responsible for increasing the quality of traffic, as well as attracting maximum visitors to your website or social media pages. In turn, content marketing is aimed at using relevant and valuable content in order to drive profitable customer action. SEO is of strategic importance to the effectiveness of content marketing because every website requires articles, words, substance, imagery, and keywords to be ranked high in search engine results pages. That is why both SEO and content marketing must go hand in hand to be successful and effective. Specific attention should be given to the implementation of the right keywords into the body of the text on your website.
Remember that you should use keywords in a strategic manner to ensure they really work. For example, stuffing a page with keywords is probably a bad idea since it makes your SEO less focused and confuses search engines. For effective SEO, you should use the most competitive keywords, which are closely associated with your business, market segment, and industry. It could be beneficial to use keyword analysis instruments, such as Google’s Keyword Planner, to analyse the most popular keyword volume. It is also imperative to integrate keywords specific to your city, country, or geographic area to boost the ranking of your content and make sure it is consumed by the right audience.
5. Measure your success
How would you know that your content marketing strategy is successful or not? It is impossible without measuring your progress against a bunch of key performance indicators. So measuring the success or failure of your content marketing is a vital element of your marketing strategy. You can start with pretty basic stuff, such as page views, bounce rate web metrics, and time on page to get a picture of your content marketing effectiveness. At this point, it is important to make sure that every single link, which forms your content marketing strategy, can be tracked. If you want to get more sophisticated information and assess the effectiveness of your content marketing more thoroughly, you should drill as far down in the metrics as you can. For example, you could use such measures as the number of unique visitors, demographics, and geography to measure your efforts. By having access to this information, you can identify what aspects of your content marketing strategy are more effective and what elements should be refined or completely abandoned.
Social media also provides a valuable insight into the effectiveness of one’s content marketing efforts. As for measurement, you could keep an eye on the share count, follower growth rate, and the number of comments to assess the success or failure of your content marketing approach on social media. Finally, you could take into consideration the return on investment or ROI of your marketing efforts as another measure of success. To measure ROI, marketers usually use such metrics as marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, click-through rates, and email open rates.
So here you go – the top 5 rules of content marketing that will help you achieve real results. Of course, we could write a much longer list of these because content marketing is such a vast area of marketing. At the same time, to keep things simple, we stuck to the most basic yet extremely important rules for developing an effective content marketing strategy.
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