Consumers are bombarded with marketing content and all types of advertisements. If your company still focuses on the more-is-better method for your content marketing strategy, it may not lead you to where you want to get to. Content still rules. It just requires a new focus to be most effective. To attract the most leads, convert them into customers or clients, and get the greatest return on your investment (ROI), you need to adopt smart content marketing strategy for your online business.
Years ago, your standard content marketing strategy included mass article distribution to directories. The goal was off-site SEO and back links and few people cared if anyone ever read them.
These days, the focus is more and more on the content, not on the search engines. Businesses were forced to create more compelling brand content because of how search engines changed in the way they rank sites. Search now understands what is great quality articles and reinvented themselves while making brands do the same. Google's ever-changing algorithm steadily moves toward a total focus on human ideals rather than what the robots want. This is excellent news for any company because search engine bots do not buy anything, but people who browse through websites do.
Although different business types, niches, and industries may have content marketing strategies that can be very different, they all come down to the basics. And those basics all have the same goals: get consumers into the sales funnel and draw them through it until they pop out the end as a lifelong customer.
Rick Yagodich of Think Info has reshuffled the sequence of the Five W’s (and H) to provide a checklist that online content strategists can use to ensure their content strategy is watertight:
Bottom line: The Five W’s (and H) provide a checklist to ensure your content strategy covers all bases.
There is a wealth of knowledge a business can gain not only about themselves but also their customers. When you feed content for consumption you will know right away what leaves a bad taste and what a customer keeping wanting.
The online public is hungry for information. People have problems, and they turn to Internet sources with increasing regularity for solutions.
If you want your business to be noticed, known, and remembered, you need to give people what they want and need. You need to prove to your targeted audience that your company is the solution to their problems. In the marketing world, the things businesses want are called brand recognition and reputation. The right content marketing strategy provides the best opportunity to grow both in a positive way.
Start building your strategy with a written plan. State the goal of your business. Identify your target market. Discover what they do and do not want, and how they intend to get it. Once you understand that, you will know what type of content will attract their attention the most.
Each step of this plan must be laid out in detail before you begin. This helps your business stay organized, save time, and realize bigger rewards more quickly. Also, as analytic information starts to appear from a new piece of distributed content, you can easily tweak the plan to improve your ROI.
Beyond the blog post and quick, informative videos, content marketing also includes other types of content like online classes, apps, webinars, and ebooks. These help to convince your targeted audience that your company can provide them with real value for a long term. They make you look like and expert and build trustworthy relationships.
The more you share with the public, the more they will remember you. Improved value through content sharing also encourages the public to pass on your message to others.
We at Bright Vessel understand the importance of an active content plan. Contact us today to learn more about how a content marketing strategy can benefit your bottom line.
