A Simple Guide to Content Marketing

For businesses struggling to drum up more leads, generate more traffic and increase their revenue… all on a budget, content marketing might be the best solution to their problems.  Why?  Because content is king!!

Simply defined, content marketing is the process of consistently producing and delivering focused content aimed at attracting and/or retaining a specific audience, whilst building a brand, establishing market authority and generating profits from the process.

The ultimate goal is to build so much trust with your prospects, visitors and leads that they naturally think of you when they need to hire a service you offer or buy a product you sell. It is essentially an effective way to build incredible authority and become the leading resource of specific topics.

Content marketing is often a long term marketing strategy and will require considerable time and even financial investment –creating great content might cost money. The good news is once done correctly, the content can literally run itself for months and years, leaving you free to take care of other things.

In this simple content marketing guide, we’ll show you how to create the best content possible and promote it effectively too. Content marketing is divided into two phases:

• Creation and Production of content
• Content outreach and promotion

Best Content Creation and Production Strategies for Businesses

Effective content marketing is often tied to creating compelling content. All successful content marketing campaigns have great content centered on them. So, focus on creating evergreen content. This is even more important if you’re looking to build a content marketing machine that basically runs itself.

1. Choose a Format

Hopefully, you have an idea of what your audience wants or likes and the format in which they like it. Content can be presented in the audiovisual or text formats. Audiovisuals can be in the form of videos, infographics, podcasts, powerpoint slides, and images. Texts can be in the form of regular articles, blog posts and white papers.

2. Research Topics for Your Content

There’s research, and then, there’s in-depth research. You need to use the latter a lot if you want your content to stand out. Here’s the truth: there’s probably a ton of content already in your niche. The question therefore is, how will your content stand out?

• Use tools like Buzzsumo to find the most popular content in your niche. Then, create content with similar elements. An even better method is to look at the popular content, spot their loopholes and points that weren’t completely fleshed out, go write exhaustively on that topic, then reach out to the publishers or owners of the very popular content and tell them that you wrote an in-depth article or created a highly informative vide that does justice to a point they only mentioned in passing. Many would be more than willing to publish your content or the link on their websites.
• Check out industry trends. In fact, it is possible to build a five or six figure business or list by capitalizing on industry trends and riding the waves by creating an epic content around that subject. A good tool for spotting industry trends is none other than Google Trends.
• Use tools like QuestionSpy to unearth and find out important questions that people are asking in your niche and answer them, either using FAQs or addressing each specifically.
• Borrow ideas from leading blogs and websites in your niche, and then create your own content.
• Even better is to look at the best content on specific topics in your niche, then go create an even better content.

3. Focus on Viral Elements

The most popular content in your industry tend to have viral elements. This means powerful titles, better content, actionable strategies, and even fun/entertaining content. These content tell powerful, compelling stories and do it extraordinarily well. So, get creative with your content and put out amazing content.

Foolproof Content Marketing Strategies

You know how they say, write it and they will come? Well, your target audience won’t come check out your content, subscribe to your lists, buy your products and hire your service if they don’t see your content. Don’t relegate your content to the web’s graveyard. Give it the attention and reach that it deserves. Use the following strategies to get started:

1. Guest Posting

One of the best content marketing strategies, this often involves writing for leading sites in your industry in the hopes that they’ll link back to you and you can funnel some of their traffic back to your website. Guest posting works really well when you know how to find the right sites, pitch the right titles and publish the right content for them. Many people consider this tedious because there’s sometimes, no immediate financial rewards. As a result, there are fewer people doing this; which gives you even more leverage if you use it well.

2. Paid Content Promotion

This can be in the form of ads or sponsored posts on relevant platforms. For instance, if you have a B2B service, you could pay for a sponsored post on LinkedIn or WSJ. If you have a product, you could do the same on Facebook. Paying to promote your content is the fastest way to get some traction for your content marketing.

3. Go Share Your Content

Sharing on popular user-driven social networks such as Reddit, Facebook, Quora, Pinterest and LinkedIn, can produce such wonderful results for your business. In Reddit, look for the best sub-reddit, and post it there. Some content have gone viral courtesy of being posted on Reddit.

There you have it… a simple guide to content marketing. This is only the tip of iceberg. There are so many excellent strategies that could be deployed to helping your business through content marketing. Let us help you do that.  Click the button below and start today!