Content marketing is an amazing way to reach your target audience and get people engaging with your business. However, it’s not as easy as just putting up a blog and watching the customer roll in.
Good content marketing needs careful planning, and here are some tips to help you with yours.
You want to establish a consistent brand voice throughout your content. This should reflect the character and values of your business and shine through with everything you do.
If you’re using multiple writers, it’s difficult to keep this consistency, but you can do it if you’ve got very specific content guidelines. When you have a clear structure and voice, content creation becomes much easier, and your audience knows what to expect.
Good content guidelines will help ensure you’re getting the most from each piece of content, boosting engagement.
One of the most important things about creating content is understanding who you are creating it for. If your content is useful, it has to be optimized for a specific audience, which is why it’s important to create detailed personas for your content marketing.
Try to understand what your target audience looks like:
When you have a clear picture of what these personas look like, then you’re going to have a much better chance of creating content that’s going to engage them.
You might have a great picture of who you’re marketing to and how you want to portray your brand, but you’ve got to have a clear plan for how you’re going to implement content marketing.
If you do it in a haphazard way, where you write the odd piece of content here or there, then you’re probably not going to see maximum results.
Instead, it’s much more efficient to have a well-thought-out content plan that sets out what you’re going to do for the months to come. This will help you keep track of the content you’ve already created and better plan out what you’re going to produce in the future.
Don’t put your content out there and hope it does well – make sure it does.
You have so much data available to you to help you understand how people are interacting with your content, so make the most of it. If you’re not seeing the results you want over a sustained period, then make changes.
One great way to understand how your audience is engaging with your content is by asking them. There are lots of tools that can help you collect feedback, and this can provide some invaluable insights.
Inbound marketing is about producing content that resonates with your target audience, so why not ask them what they want to see?
Keywords are still important for content, and it’s an area where you need to spend time on your research.
It’s not just about finding big keywords and throwing them into your content; it’s about understanding how your audience is searching and then crafting the best possible content around those words. If you can do this well, then you’re not only going to be rewarded in the search engines, but you’re also going to get more engagement.
Remember that one of the big things with engagement is meeting people’s expectations. If your keyword is “E-commerce,” then your article has to be concise and address that subject from the outset. Otherwise, people will bounce back to Google and get their information somewhere else.
People consume information in different ways, and your content should reflect this. Written text is important, but you also need to make sure you’re making use of elements such as video, images, infographics, and podcasts.
The second most popular search engine in the world is YouTube, so this just goes to show the power of video. If you’re making use of different mediums, it means you’re catering to more people, and they’re likely to spend longer on your pages.
Each piece of content you create is an opportunity for your business to reach its target audience. You’ve put a lot of hard work into creating great content, so make sure you’re sharing it with as many people as possible.
Work on growing your social media presence and share all your work on your platforms. The more places you share, the more people are going to see your work and interact with it.
There are lots of different ways of reaching your target audience, so make sure you’re making the most of them.
Poor content is going to drive poor engagement; it’s as simple as that.
If you’re going to achieve results through inbound marketing, then you’ve got to invest in quality, and this goes for every piece of content you create. People are savvy internet consumers, and they know when a piece of content offers value and when it doesn’t.
If you don’t offer value, people won’t stick around, and you won’t see the engagement you want.
