Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. Content marketing IS the process of creating valuable, relevant content to attract, acquire, and engage your audience buyers. This is a type of marketing often used by businesses to attract attention and generate lead expansion.
Consumers today are inundated by more marketing messages than ever before…more than 2,900 messages per day by current estimations. This creates an environment of scarce attention, challenging marketers to produce engaging content that won’t get lost in this static.
Content marketing can be blogs, ebooks, podcasts, videos, or anything else you can realistically consume. On a philosophical level, what it really comes down to is providing free or additional value to your target users or the users you already have.
A customer base generates (or increases) with sales increases, brand awareness, or when credibility engages in an online community of users. Everyone thinks it’s just about your audience, but you’re the one creating and writing the content. If you don’t write content that you’re passionate about, that you love, it won’t come across as great content, and it won’t do well.
One of my favorite examples of content marketing is an infographic. That’s because it combines text and visuals to create a story, to tell a story. For example, you can post an infographic on social media or send out an email blast, and it goes viral. That will drive lead generation. There are so many more ways you can generate blog views, landing page views, and anything that will establish more credibility, expertise, thought leadership, and ultimately…leads and sales. A well-crafted content marketing strategy places your business in the position of a thought leader.
Content marketing is still one of the cheapest and most effective ways to get targeted visitors hitting your website regularly, and according to HubSpot, marketers prioritize blogging. After all, it’s 13X MORE LIKELY to see a positive ROI.
I think that content does three things primarily. It provides inspiration, information, and it is entertaining. Each of those benefits plays a significant role in helping someone solve their individual pain points, contributing to the overall problem that the product actually solves.
This new data allows them to make an informed decision on what best fits their lives and businesses. Perhaps that informed decision is purchasing the product itself. If it’s inspiration, maybe it’s showing them what they can accomplish when they actually address their issues with the new information. And of course, it has to be entertaining because our eyeballs are distracted, our brains are distracted all over the place, and we need something that’s gonna keep our eyes glued.
A lot of people think, “Ok, I’m going to put this blog out there. It’s super high-quality, it’s a great story, great information, and then everyone’s going to find it on the internet!” It doesn’t quite work that way.
You have to allow people to share, you have to distribute it on social media or on other distribution platforms, and there is a number to choose from, both paid and organic. You need to make sure that the content is being distributed in a way that people can find it and share it.
Whatever you’re using your content for, it’s essential to know how it’s working and why it works. If you’re looking at bounce rate, traffic, or whatever it is…that’s gonna be a very different kind of measurement than if you’re trying to measure for retention and how your existing users are engaged with the content you already have.
Step one: Define your goals. What is your niche? What type of content are you looking to create? What do you want to do with your content? If you don’t know or understand the kind of content that you want to create, then you will not have a positive outcome.
So first you have to figure out…What do you want to write about that you think people want to hear? And that leads into…
Step Two: You need to research your audience. What is your audience persona? What questions are your viewers asking? What problems do they have that you can help solve? How can you provide value to them?
And by knowing these answers, it ensures not only are you writing content that you love, but that other people want to hear about, which will help you rank higher as well.
You’re probably also trying to figure out, “Hey, how do I figure out what problems people have?” Well, type any keyword that is within your niche into UberSuggest. Click into the keyword ideas reports, then click “questions.” It’ll show you all the questions that people are searching.
These are the issues people are having, and by you looking at this keyword base, it’ll help you figure out, “Alright, these are the problems people are facing, maybe I will enjoy writing on some of these topics.”
Step Three: Do your keyword research, which ties into the last tip that I just gave. You’re already in UberSuggest; UberSuggest also has a giant laundry list of keywords that you could be going after.
This will show you what’s popular in your niche and what’s not. But, you don’t just want to go after popular keywords. You want to go after the keywords that are high in conversion. You want to concentrate on the keywords high on the conversion list or the keywords with a high CPC (Cost Per Click).
Keywords that tend to have a high CPC tend to convert better and generate more income for the website owner.
Step Four: Content ideation. You need to come up with topics that cater to your audience. Check out what your competitors are writing. You can put their URL into UberSuggest, click on “top pages,” and that will show you everything that your competitors are writing. Or, if you want to see it based on a keyword, go to UberSuggest, go to the content ideas “report;” type in a keyword, and it’ll show you what’s hot in your niche.
You can also do the same thing with BuzzSumo. It’s a paid tool, or with UberSuggest you can do it for free. Or, you can also do the same with AnswerThePublic, which is also a paid tool. This gives you a rough idea of what’s working for others and what’s not. It breaks it down based off of social shares, search traffic, and backlinks.
That’s important because when you’re looking at the content ideas report on UberSuggest you’ll see, “Oh, this is what’s working for my competitors.” If they’re getting a ton of search traffic but no social shares, that means you’re too reliant on Google. Ideally, you want pages and posts that have a lot of search traffic and social shares. Then, you can diversify your traffic sources.
Step Five: Create content that is tailored to voice search. It’s estimated that roughly fifty percent of the searches are voice searches, according to ComScore. So, use structure data markup, and when you do this on your website, it’ll help you get into the rich snippets.
When you get into the rich snippets, it also helps Google pull your listings and your results for voice searches. That way, your brand is getting out there, and you can keep getting more traffic. This is important because with devices like Google Home and Alexa becoming more and more popular, you’ll see this trend continually increasing.
The last thing you want is to see 70-80% percent of the searches being voice search, and then you start optimizing for it. You want to do it now before it gets to that point. There’s a trend in which videos are becoming more and more popular, and it’s a better way to relate an audience to your brand, right? Helps you build that deeper connection. That’s why you should definitely start creating videos today if you already haven’t started.
Step Six: You need to create videos and visual content. It’s no secret that visual content video storytelling is taking over the web. From Instagram to Facebook to YouTube, it’s all super popular.
If you don’t want to do videos, you can also try podcasts or even infographics. It’s a way you use images to tell the story, and that works really well.
There’s a trend in which videos are becoming more and more popular, and it’s a better way to relate an audience to your brand, right? Helps you build that deeper connection. That’s why you should definitely start creating videos today if you already haven’t started.
Step Seven: Leverage social media. If you’re not leveraging social media, your brand is not getting out there. A lot of people say, “My reach is continually dying. Why should I be on social media?” Either way, whether your reach is dying or not, these sites are super popular.
So, the way to combat this, to do well on social apps is going live all the time. Take, for instance, people like Tai Lopez. He goes live. He even sells from his live videos and converts exceptionally well.
Sure, driving the people to your website doesn’t get as much engagement, but uploading videos still does well.
Step Eight: Follow the EAT formula. EAT stands for expertise, authority, and trust.
Google ended up releasing an update awhile back. In which, they don’t want people writing on content that they are not credible for. For example, “I’m a marketer. If I start writing about health when you get fevers, and you get sick, should you go to a hospital or not?” I’m not an expert on that. No matter how well written and how many backlinks I build, they should have ranked that content because that’s not my expertise, and it can damage someone.
The same goes for financial content. I’m not a financial planner. So, I shouldn’t be telling people how to invest their money, where not to invest their money, and how to maximize their 401k.
You should stick to what you know. So, you want to make sure you’re adding your author bio on every page you’re writing content on. Linking to your social profiles, or even guest posting on sites to build up your credibility.
Hopefully, this information I have provided you with is the content you need to improve and grow your own content marketing skills.
Take Care, and Stay Tuned for More!
