Is your company using content marketing? Read this article to learn how to be successful.
Is your company using content marketing as a strategy for increasing brand awareness? Catching the eye of your target audience can be tough, but learning how to deploy these tactics effectively can help your brand reach more people and achieve top-of-mind status. With the proper planning and execution, content marketing can be a great way to find new and potential customers.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is everywhere these days, both appearing in digital content and in more mainstream entertainment like feature-length films. There are many ways to market your products and services by using created content as a vehicle for spreading the good news about your brand. According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” To ensure you are making the most of your efforts, read on to learn ways your company can be successful.
How to Be Successful with Content Marketing
Create a Brand Personality
Determining a voice or personality of your brand is crucial; it humanizes your company. In addition, it’s also a great way to encourage your audience to share your content. By proving you are a collection of individuals rather than a robot behind the screen, you’ll be able to form more meaningful connections with your clients and customers. Sharing content that is emotional and relevant to life experiences is a good way to develop your brand’s persona.
Curate Content from Other Industry Leaders
To avoid being overly self-promotional with your content marketing, create posts that shine a spotlight on others. Curating content that already exists online is a budget-friendly way to share relevant statistics or articles from the position of an industry expert, and can save time if you’re lacking the bandwidth to create your own content. By curating Top 10 lists or rounding up the latest industry news, you are establishing yourself as a leader in your field and showing your fans you are on top of your game.
Create Shareable Content for Social Media
You can post on social media all day long, but if you don’t create content that is shareable, chances are your words won’t make it past your followers’ newsfeeds. The best content is engaging, and social media is meant for sharing. Posts, articles, videos, memes or images that apply to a wide audience, strike a chord with your customers and are of a positive nature spread easily via sites like Facebook and Twitter. Focus on creating content that is helpful, applicable to a large group and relevant to ensure it reaches more social media users. This will help you get more in touch with your fans and be able to communicate with them on a personal level.
Provide Value to Your Followers
There are many ways to market your products and services by using created content.
Content that helps readers out with a common problem, offers a tip for success or gives them another sort of value will reach a wider audience than posts that are self-promotional or meant for a small group of readers. Make your content marketing assets relevant and helpful; offer information they can’t get elsewhere. Writing and sharing a how-to article is a great example.
Invest in Creating Original Content
While curating content created by others can certainly help you receive more likes, shares and boost your SEO, you should also balance it with a healthy amount of original content. Investing in writing blog posts, creating infographics, designing memes or sharing how-to articles can be a valuable addition to content curation via tweets, likes or shares. When you are ready to press Publish, remember to balance your content with a wide variety of other items by using the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of content you share should not be self-promotional, while 20 percent of it can be.
Do you lack the time to invest in content creation? Never fear! Three Girls Media offers full service solutions that can keep your blog and social media channels filled with regular custom content, created specifically for your brand; we’ll even engage with your followers and build relationships on your behalf. Contact us for a complimentary consultation to learn more!
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Keep Trying Again
One of the best ways to find what types of content resonate with your audience is through trial and error; no one gets it all right the first time. By paying attention to follower feedback and gauging the responses of your fans, you’ll find out what types of posts get shared more and receive positive feedback. In addition, social channels like Facebook and Twitter make it easy to track results by offering simple analytics that tally your page’s likes, comments, shares, clicks and views on each post.
Are you ready to get started? First make sure you aren’t committing the following content marketing mishaps. However strong your content marketing strategy may be, there are a few mistakes that may hold you back from effectively spreading your message. Here are seven common content marketing follies and simple ways to fix them.
7 Common Content Marketing Mistakes and How You Can Fix Them
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Not Creating a Catchy Title
If you create great content, but your headline is boring, chances are few people will read or engage with your work. According to research by Buzzfeed, the most successful titles are ones that present a list of items the reader will learn. At Three Girls Media, we like to run our headlines though CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer to make them as strong and engaging as possible.
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Refusing Help from Others
It’s great if you can create promotional material on your own without the help of a marketing team, but make sure you aren’t going at it alone. Making strategic use of guest bloggers or industry experts can help your content achieve higher visibility and attract more followers. Why does this matter? Working with an expert is a great way to gain legitimacy in your field and attract new customers, in addition to a potential SEO and website traffic boost from publishing guest content.
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Not Using High-Quality Images
One of the best ways to ensure your content spreads to as many readers as possible is to make it highly shareable; images are also a great way to draw your audience in. In fact, sites like Facebook prioritize images with faces in them in its algorithm, so posts without images may never reach your followers at all.
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Only Sharing Content on Your Blog
Is your content highly shareable?
Although your blog is an excellent place to share tips, tricks and company news, your content shouldn’t live here alone. Not cross-promoting articles across platforms is a common content marketing mistake that can impact the visibility of your brand’s updates. To fix this, create social media updates and share your posts on your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest accounts. Being able to offer your content in multiple places makes it easier for readers to find you, and helps you breathe more life into the content you worked so hard to create.
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Not Planning for Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is not just a marketing buzzword; it’s crucial for making sure your brand receives the online visibility is deserves. Optimizing for SEO good way to make sure your articles get found by the right readers; some marketers have a limited understanding of SEO best practices and strategies. To make sure you get the most of your content, optimizing it for search engines is a key to raising visibility. Read this article for some basic advice.
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Not Staying in Line with Your Brand’s Message
While it’s important your content marketing efforts don’t lead with sales pitches, it’s also vital to pay attention to your brand and produce work that’s in line with your strategy and company vision. Creative content is shared and enjoyed by followers, but make sure they know who produced the article after reading it by including a boiler plate or business logo. You can embed your brand’s energy, enthusiasm and personality into anything you produce so you are maintaining a consistent image.
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Keeping Your Content Secret
Unfortunately, creating incredible content that’s perfectly in line with your brand isn’t enough if you don’t distribute it freely. Share it across all your social channels and make sure it’s publicly available, without needing a subscription to read it. Many business owners place content such as blog posts on a password-protected section of the website and fans and customers aren’t able to access it. You want to make sure anyone who wants to read your work, are able to.
While many marketers lack the time to deploy successful content marketing strategies, there are several things you can do that are easy on your budget and schedule. Using the above tactics can help you reach a larger audience. What does your content marketing plan look like?
For more DIY tips and tricks to helping your brand’s visibility soar through content marketing, I recommend these additional articles by the Three Girls team:
11 of the Best Public Relations & Content Marketing Tools
Content Marketing Metrics to Master [Infographic]
[Creative Content Marketing] 3 Great Summer Approaches
Content Marketing Tip: Count to Five!
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