Content Marketing Made Simple

The Market is Ripe for the Harvest

Your business is your brand, and vice versa.  It's the composite of everything your company represents to others. Marketers talk on and on the importance of “branding” because the content of your marketing efforts directly affects your brand.  In fact, FrankStrong goes so far as to say that “content marketing is the new branding.”  

The trick to a great content marketing strategy is finding a way to communicate information about your products or services without actually selling. Instead of pitching, in an article for Forbes, Michael Brenner recommends that you deliver valuable information that helps your consumers. In a world where you can fast-forward through commercials and tune-out ads, you need to create content that’s better than great—it has to be stellar.

Unlike traditional advertisements, content marketing is not about interrupting your target with “Act now!” messages; it’s about making a connection with your customers. When your marketing content is exceptional, your target customers reward you with their business and faithfulness.

How to Make the Inner Workings of Your Content Marketing Strategy Stellar

Heidi Cohen takes exception with bosses who think blogs are a total waste of time and effort. Even ones who think blogs are no more than a necessary evil.

Building links to a lot of other, highly-regarded sites is a big priority for any site.  For now (and for the foreseeable future), link building is, arguably, the most effective way to promote content and increase search engine rankings.  Since it takes time and effort to do, many site owners would like to short cut the whole process and honestly, I don't blame them.

However, the fact remains that links are still the basic form of communication between websites, and the easiest way for search engine algorithms to judge the value of a site.  So, link building remains an important part of any online marketing strategy. 

Of course, as any veteran link builder will tell you, linking to other sites is the easy part.  Getting trusted sites to link to you-- not so much so.  Why?  Well, the big boys and girls in your industry, i.e. the trusted authorities, have been around the block a few times.  They know when it's worth their while to link to a site and when it's not.  Much like in "real life", the football star isn't going to give the average plain-Jane the time of day.

So, your site is likely to be ruthlessly snubbed for awhile.  Be prepared for this, because it happens to everyone- at first.  What will it take to get noticed?  Neither time nor even large amounts of fresh content will necessarily get people to link to you.  These are helpful, but for you to really start seeing results with your link building strategy, you must back up and reevaluate the quality of your content.

Lee Odden at TopRank once asked, "How can you attract links if you don't have content worth linking to?"  This statement seems painfully obvious, but it's been proven time and again that people tend to gloss over the content portion of their marketing strategy in order to focus on marketing tactics that they believe will get them quick results.  As if these tactics are individual and apart from each other.

The truth is, they are always part of a larger plan-or at least they should be.  Start with original, thought-provoking content.  If you're just starting out, or developing a blog, or getting involved with social media for marketing purposes, the same principles apply.  Don't worry about link building until you've established your ability to produce worthwhile content on a regular basis.  Here are some ideas for creating better content, so you can get the big boys and girls to notice you:

        1.  Target your audience- Identifying your market gives direction to your content.  Before you start writing about topics that may or may not interest your potential customers, find out who's likely to read your stuff.  What would they like to know?  What are their concerns?

        2.  Choose good keywords- With all of the keyword research tools out there now, there's no excuse for missing the mark.  Despite the fact that content marketing is no longer focusing on keyword density, and the "rules" for placing keywords in your content have loosened up considerably, you still need to be indexed properly.  The proper keywords (and related terms) in your content give the search engines a way to know who you are.

        3.  Offer value- There's content, and then there's useful content.  Offering value means that you take the time to research your topics, provide answers and helpful tips, share timely news and try to be a solution for your readers.  Once you establish the fact that a) you know what you're talking about and b) you are committed to helping them, you're on your way to becoming a trusted source.

        4.  Don't sell- Unless your content is on your squeeze page or product pages, please do not use it to sell products and services to your readers.  It's not nice.  Enough said.

        5.  Update your content- Building your reputation takes about as much time and effort as it sounds.  It doesn't happen overnight.  You need to create fresh content on a regular basis in order to keep people interested in you.  Try starting a blog and posting a new one at least twice a week.  You can do it every day if you'd like.  Useful content is one thing that you can't have too much of, and people will learn to check for it each day.  Let people subscribe to your blog and bookmark your content (another effective way to get links).

Great content, maintained over time, will not go unnoticed for long.  Link building with quality content is the best, most authentic method for establishing yourself with your audience, and achieving higher rankings naturally.  Should you stop linking to the authoritative sites?  No!  One day, those guys are going to become curious about you, check out your link, and see what you've got to offer.

Just make sure that what they see is worth their while.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

With limited funds to spend on marketing, many businesses are unsure as to how they should best use their budgets. Research proves that spending on content is a smart move, for a number of reasons.

First off, you won’t be alone! A survey conducted by Forrester Research shows that U.S. advertisers will spend $77 billion on interactive, digital content by 2016. With those kind of numbers, it’s clear that businesses are all trying to hop on the content bandwagon. If you don’t follow suit, you’ll be left behind. This isn’t a dying trend, people; it’s up and coming, and it appears we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg so far.

Strapped for Cash

There’s a lot of power in content if, and only if, seen in the right perspective by the right audience in a timely fashion. The B2B online marketing landscape is becoming more crowded and noisier each day. You need to be not just visible but to stand out by offering content that creates an impact even to the most indifferent reader and thus build relationships that last.

According to Phil Mershon on Social Media Examiner, more than 30 billion pieces of content are shared with social media friends just on Facebook each month. Getting your readers to share your content with their friends on Facebook or other social media site is one of the fastest and most effective ways to build traffic.

With any business, growth often means staying ahead of your competitors. Whether through exemplary customer service, product innovation or lower costs, when customers have a choice to make, you want them to choose you.

With 70% of online searchers using local search to find brick and mortar businesses (Source: Kelsey Group), it’s important you be found online. Following these few steps, learn how you can rule local search and jump off the map!

1.     Dive into Research