Content Marketing

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What is Content Marketing and How Can a Good Content Marketing Strategy Help Me?

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing web content that is unique, valuable, and compelling to your target audience. If you have a company website, ecommerce site, or personal blog, you may have heard the adage that content is king. That is absolutely true no matter what type of website you have. Whether you sell a product or offer a service through your website or maintain a website to educate consumers about your company or offerings, it is your content that will get you noticed. High quality content will provide value, win you fans, generate leads, and increase your sales. For the small business owner looking to expand their online presence and get more customers via the web, content marketing is king.

The Internet has changed consumer behavior forever. Consumers now use search engines like Google to find information about the products they buy or are thinking of buying, whether they be major purchases, services, or everyday items. They browse review sites looking for feedback from past buyers. They discuss companies and products on forums and on social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook. Content marketing is getting your content in front of as many people who may be interested in your product, service, or business as possible. But how do you that? Before you can implement a content marketing strategy, you have to understand what content is, what separates great content from the rest, what your target market is searching for, and how to engage them by creating great content.

Online Content

So what exactly is content? In simple terms, content is anything you create and publish to your website. All of the pages on your site make up your content as do the elements of those pages which include the text on the pages, any videos you create, pictures you display, white papers or pdf files you offer for download, blog posts, podcasts, and more. Content that you syndicate via RSS, article directories, guest posting on blogs, document sharing sites, and other avenues. Content you create specifically for other web properties such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter also makes up your web content and can be used to great effect as part of your overall content marketing strategy.

Strive for High Quality Content Creation

Now that we understand what is meant by the term content, you are probably wondering how you can leverage your web content to drive traffic, capture leads, and make more sales. You can do that by creating and promoting quality content. A lot of what you find on the web, be it product pages, blog posts, informational articles, or corporate pages ranges from uninteresting to utter crap. High quality content is content that establishes you as a credible source for information about your industry and an expert in your field. High quality content is unique and establishes a persona for yourself or your business. High quality content can engage the viewer in ways such as solving a problem your target audience faces, by being humorous or entertaining, or by presenting information in a new or interesting way. High quality content is often bookmarked, shared on social networking sites, linked to from other websites, emailed from friend to friend, and discussed both online and offline. By engaging your intended audience with quality content, you can establish yourself as an authority in your space, increase website traffic, rise in the search engine rankings, and generate more sales.

Building a Content Marketing Strategy

For you to have the best chance of success with content marketing, you need a content marketing strategy. You cannot just slap any old web page together, post it on your site, then hope people find it. A good content marketing strategy is comprised of several parts all of which work together to achieve your goal of reaching your target market. An effective content marketing strategy will include goals, research, content creation, distribution, promotion, and tracking results.

• Goal Setting - Your content marketing strategy needs to have one or more goals. Without at least one clearly defined, measurable goal how will you determine whether your content strategy was successful or not? Your goals will influence your content creation, results tracking, and possibly other areas of your strategy as well. "I want to get more traffic to my site" is not good enough. Be more specific. "I want to increase traffic to my main product page from 100 hits per day to 200 hits per day within six months." Such a clear goal shapes your content strategy by placing the focus on a specific page of your website, it can be tracked at various points to measure progress, and it has an end date at which point you can see if you were successful or not.
• Research - Before you can build effective and engaging content, you have to know what your prospects and existing customers are searching for. You can use keyword research tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool or question and answer sites like Yahoo! Answers to get a sense of what your target audience is looking for. Enter words that describe your product or service and see what comes back.
• Content Creation - After you have done your brainstorming, you can create new original content or revamp your existing content. Remember that content marketing requires that you provide interesting and engaging content. You do not want to just post the technical specifications of your product or a generic description of your services. You want to be compelling, establish your expertise, and create trust. Content can take many forms and showing is almost always better than simply telling.
• Distribution - There are a lot of different ways to distribute your content online and depending on the type of content you create, you may end up distributing your content via multiple venues. In addition to your own website, web content sharing sites like YouTube for videos and SlideShare for presentations are two very popular examples. If you are posting content via your blog, most blogging platforms include an RSS feed which people can subscribe to in order to get your content delivered to them automatically as soon as you publish an update.
• Promotion - There are several ways to promote your content.Promotion means demonstrating value to the point where people will want to share your content with their friends, colleagues, network, etc. or link to it from their own websites or blogs. Compelling content attracts links and links are an important factor in generating interest, establishing credibility, gaining more traffic, and getting higher search engine rankings. Find bloggers who blog about your industry or products similar to yours. If your content solves a problem or addresses an issue they blog about, you can contact them and offer your content as a solution. Cultivating relationships through social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter just to name a few can garner you an army of promoters for your content as well.
• Tracking Results - Tools that analyze your website traffic such as Google Analytics can give you great insight into visitor behavior and activity on your site pages. You can see general traffic trends over time, which pages get viewed most often, how long people stayed on your site, and a host of other useful metrics. Analytics will help you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy and provide you with new ideas for content to develop or promote.

Content Marketing

You are no longer limited to expensive, one way forms of generating interest in your product such as print advertisements, radio spots, or television commercials. Your website coupled with a good content marketing strategy allows you the opportunity to engage and interact with your customers and potential customers. By creating and leveraging high quality web content, you can create new opportunities for your small business.