Any business plan should include content marketing as an integral part. What can you do when you’re just starting out, or when you’re not feeling like a “guru” in some areas?
You need to read this list of content marketing tips, which includes some that are often overlooked by many marketers. Find out what you could be missing out on.
1. Look for Blog Topics Right in Your Email Inbox
You may receive many questions, comments, and inquiries about your business every day and some of them may keep occurring.
You can save yourself time by turning frequently asked questions into blog posts for your company’s website.
An FAQ that is also a one-stop-shop makes your company more relatable, provides the consumer with valuable information, and shows them you are thinking about their needs and concerns.
2. Embed Your Videos
This is because blogs with videos are more likely to get additional hits and shares. You should consider turning your company’s promotional and educational videos into blog posts.
Videos not only give customers more ways to consume your content, but are also highly linkable, increasing the reach of your website to people beyond your existing customer base.
3. If You Don’t Have Any Videos — Make Some
What makes your company stand out from the competition? What can you teach people? Would it be possible to turn your skills and enthusiasm into a video?
A company that sells fly fishing equipment could produce a series of videos on fly tying, whereas a content creation company could produce a few videos on publishing great blogs.
The sharing of knowledge is in high demand and when you are the source, people are likely to share it, which drives traffic and additional customers to you.
4. Compile a “Who-to-Follow” List
Even though you are an expert in your field, people always want to learn more. To help you excel in your field, follow a well thought-out list of other people who are successful in their respective areas.
There are two benefits to doing this: first, consumers will trust you more as a source of information, and second, the people you link in the article will appreciate the extra traffic and are likely to return the favor.
A lot of content marketing is focused on developing a good reputation, and one of the best ways to do this is through word-of-mouth and relationships with other experts.
5. Create a List of Facts that Supports Your Mission
People are interested in acquiring new knowledge, and lists of facts are convincing and simple to redistribute. If you want to create content that is likely to be linked to, include a list of facts that support your company’s main goal or mission statement in your blog or infographic.
This action not only meets the customer’s need for information, but also shows that your company is considered and has done its homework.
6. Tell a Great Story
Both Apple and Subaru have been extremely successful in marketing themselves by creating ads that evoke emotion and tell a story that resonates with their target customers.
Think about what your company is passionate about and how it relates to the company’s goals, then find a way to incorporate that into your content marketing strategy.
If you want to sell a lifestyle product, you should tell a story about how the product can make people happy, comfortable, or safe. The best way to gain customers is to tell them a story that will touch their hearts.
7. Consider the Questions Your Customers Ask
A potential buyer will usually go on the internet to do research and to seek out advice before making a purchase. If you want your company’s answer to be seen by people who type questions into Google, you need to make sure it is one of the millions of answers they see.
In today’s age, it is not enough to have a great product. You must also have great content to go along with it. Before people are willing to buy a product, they need to see that the company behind it is trustworthy. This means that the company needs to establish its authority from the beginning.
Think about what your customers are asking, and answer their questions in your blog or website post. If you do this, you will be considered an expert in the field, and you will build the consumer confidence needed to increase sales and conversions.
8. Make It a Date
While many companies offer ample opportunities for consumers to sign up for an email list or blog subscription, very few offer specific content at specific times.
companies should focus on providing content that is specific to what the consumer is interested in, rather than just generally offering an email list or blog subscription. Identity coach and writer Tim Ferris frequently achieves desired outcomes using this method.
If you want to create a stronger connection with your customers, invite them to listen to a podcast, attend a webinar, or watch a video conference. This will be more effective than simply subscribing them to an email list.
This type of move will not only make customers feel more confident, but it can also help create a community of customers and potential customers around your business or product. Additionally, this could lead to additional marketing opportunities in the future, such as podcasts.
9. Put Promotion First
To design a new product, companies often start by making sure that there is a demand for the product in the market. If the product cannot be manufactured, it will result in a huge loss of time and money. The same goes for content, believe it or not.
Before you develop your content, think about how you are going to market it. If a given piece cannot be promoted effectively, it might not be worth producing.
10. Focus on Positive Content Experience
The internet, especially everything related to marketing, seems to be all about the customer’s experience. Creating a good experience for customers, users, buyers, and subscribers is what the “experience economy” is all about.
The word has become so overused that it has lost its impact and is now more likely to be ridiculed than taken seriously. Even if something is really loud and annoying, there is usually some truth to it.
Focusing on experience works.
Don’t just assume, I’m saying that a good experience for your audience doesn’t have to be life-changing.
This isn’t just about budgets or creative genius, it’s about being honest and giving people what you said you would.
Yaag Ganesh is the Director of Marketing at Avoma, the host of the renowned ABM Conversations Podcast, and the author of multiple marketing books. He puts good content experience at the center of all his work.
He believes that every piece of content you create is based around experience factors such as value, trust, objectivity, and expectations.
When you create an expectation that you will answer an issue but then fail to deliver on that promise, you are devaluing the experience and making it less likely that people will trust you or pay attention to you.
This means that creating a good experience is more important than trying to make a sale. Yaag is not the only company that believes this.
Other content marketers who share the same ideology act accordingly, even though they might not label it as content experience.
11. Bypass Search Volume as Content Idea Generator
Content creation is heavily informed and driven by the search volume of certain keywords. It’s understandable.
The position of your website on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) has a significant effect on the amount of traffic your site receives from organic search. Therefore, it’s crucial to make sure your site appears prominently for the relevant keywords in your industry.
However, SEO is not as easy to understand as it used to be, which can create problems for content marketers who are not careful.
If you only care about ranking and revenue, you will sacrifice quality, value, and trust. These are important factors to consider when creating content.
Marketer Gaetano DiNardi articulates the challenge facing many industries today quite accurately- “Many industries have optimized to the point of excess and you can no longer find the information you need in some cases.”
Focusing too much on SEO can make you forget about creating good content for your users. Google is losing trust because people are finding answers to their questions on Reddit.
Search volume is not as reliable as it once was for generating ideas.
Another problem with search volume is the volume itself. Topics that are interesting to your customers or broader audiences may not be the most searched.
People are often unclear about what they want to discuss, and will ask about the same problem or idea in many different ways. Thus, at one point, search volumes leave you hanging.
Michelle Goodall, the Chief Marketing Officer at Guild, cannot imagine content creation without communities:
A community can help you figure out what your target audience wants and needs from you, so that you can create content and events that meet those needs. Working together with others in the community lets you do this more effectively.
12. Capitalize on Sources of Influence
When spoken about in terms of SEO, Rand Fishkin’s “sources of influence” need to be mentioned.
He started with SEOmozblog in 2004, then launched Moz, the consulting company, and lastly became CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz.
This is a quote from Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz, and it is significant because he is an expert in the field of SEO. He is saying that the time when SEO was simple and easy to manipulate is over, and that it is now a more complex and difficult process.
Today, Rand is the CEO of SparkToro. He does not believe that SEO is the best or easiest way to get organic exposure.
He does not advocate for the traditional strategy, but instead for the “sources of influence” strategy. The concept is so obvious that it is fascinating.
Once again, it’s all about going back to basics.
Consumers, you included, behave the same way today. Even though the way that we are influenced by the people we trust may be different, the way that we behave is still very similar. We buy products, visit places and follow the advice:
- recommended in publications we trust;
- talked about by experts/influencers we trust;
- featured at events and conferences we trust.
There is a basic, natural reflex to listen to people we trust, regardless of our age.
This increasing trend can be viewed as both a way of creating content and a way of distributing it, depending on your perspective. What type of content do you need to create to appear on channels your target audience trusts?
It is possible that creating content for other channels could be more effective than creating it for yourself at certain times.
13. Entertain the Idea of TikTok for B2B
TikTok has been, unknowingly, becoming a part of the way B2B content marketers think. In that consciousness, it either exists as a huge negative or a giant positive. Some believe it’s the future others ignore its existence.
There is something to this even if you are against it. It might be helpful to some people. Are you one of them? For example, SparkToro removed TikTok from their potential sources of influence.
But their experience isn’t all-affirming and absolute. It’s just one of many and so, don’t give up on the idea just yet. How did some B2B brands and marketers find success on TikTok?
SEMrush approaches social media differently than other companies. They are not afraid of the platform, but they also do not treat it the same as the other social channels.
Olga Andrienko, a VP of Brand Marketing at SEMrush, explains that in TikTok they found a channel where their tool can become people’s ‘gateway drug’ to marketing.
TikTok is trying to focus on creating a name for themselves among future generation of marketers instead of targeting marketers who come to TikTok just to relax. We want to be the starting point for anyone who wants to learn about marketing.
We need to be closer to people who are struggling to understand marketing, how to optimize for Google, how to work on social, and how to create content.
Conclusion
A key point that I make is that originality is important. It is extremely important to be original in everything you do. Use storytelling and visual content.
Think about who you’re talking to. Before you publish your content, you should first think about what keywords you want to target so you can improve your ranking potential.
In conclusion, you should find a content marketing style that suits you and strikes a balance between being consistent, implementing SEO strategies, and being engaging.
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