Nowadays, content marketing is one of the most popular and go-to approaches that is adopted by online brands and businesses.
Ever since businesses shifted to the internet, digital marketing – in various forms – became the ideal method for attracting leads, and since content marketing is one of the most affordable and sustainable techniques in this field, it automatically became the preferred method for a lot of individuals.
However, like every other marketing approach, there are a lot of things and factors that can decide the efficiency of content marketing. A haphazard approach with no clearly-defined goals will not produce the same results as a carefully planned strategy with clear-cut objectives.
In this post, we will be discussing some elements that you can include in a content marketing strategy to increase the chances of getting the results that you need to boost the popularity of your business.
Strategy for Driving Traffic with Content Marketing
Here are some elements that you can include in your content marketing strategy to make it well-rounded.
1. Carefully Researching Your Audience
You cannot pull of a successful content marketing campaign if you don’t know who you are writing for.
Before you start any sort of content marketing activity – be it a blog, a book, or email marketing – you have to understand your audience.
You have to understand the type of people that buy and benefit from your offered products and services.
Researching your audience isn’t really very difficult. A lot of it is just obvious.
For example, if your business sells shoes for men, you will automatically know that your target audience are adult males from 20 to 40 years of age.
Similarly, if your company sells kitchenware like utensils and pots etc., then you can assume your target audience to be mostly women.
Apart from that, you can also just conduct some surveys via email blasts to understand the type of people that are interested in your offerings.
Once you have determined the type of people that are interested in your offered products/services, you can create user personas according to different geographical areas and demographics.
Then, you can use those user personas to tailor and adjust your content marketing endeavors.
So, in a nutshell, research your audience carefully before doing anything else.
2. Create a Blog
Blogs are one of the primary and most important elements of a successful content marketing strategy. According to an online source, 77% of all internet users read blogs.
If your online brand/business does not have a blog as of yet, then you should definitely think about making one.
Importance of Blogs
Blogs are a great technique for content marketing because they can largely contribute to a website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Actually, before we go on to talk about blogs, let’s digress a little and understand what SEO is and why it is necessary for your brand to gain distinction in the online market.
SEO is basically the collective name given to the activities that a website performs in order to make itself appear closer to the top of the SERPs.
A website that is well-optimized for the search engines shows up near the top of the search results when a user enters a related query in the search box.
For example, if the website of a shoe store has good SEO, it will show up close to the top of the results when someone will search up things like “shoes for men” or “shoes near x location” etc.
The reason why SEO is so important nowadays is that properly optimized websites get more clicks from online users as compared to un-optimized websites. If a website does not show up in the first page, it is ignored by a significant percentage of online users.
Benefits of Blogs
So, let’s come back to our point now.
With a blog, you will be able to upload SEO friendly content with the right keywords in it. Due to the keywords, the search engine will efficiently and determines the relevancy of the site and rank it where it needs to be ranked.
While the main benefit of blogs is to allow websites to upload SEO friendly content, another benefit that they provide is that they give other authoritative websites on the internet something to link to.
For example, if a website uploads a blog post that has useful information in it, other websites on the internet will be able to add links to that page in their content. This will further increase the website’s authority and it will be able to show up even higher in the search engines.
Creating Good Content for Your Blog
However, in order for that to happen, you have to make sure that the content you create for your blog is absolutely outstanding. No one likes to link to – or even read – lame content.
In order to make sure that your content is of good quality, there are a couple of things that you can do once you are done writing it. Here are some of them:
- Check for Grammatical and Spelling Mistakes: The first thing that you should do is check for grammatical and spelling mistakes in your content. If there are a lot of these in your content, it won’t look very nice to the readers and it will not pick up popularity easily.
- Check for Plagiarism: Plagiarism is also a very toxic element that you should make sure never comes in your writing. Plagiarized content can get penalties from the search engines, and it can mean trouble for your website’s ranking.
- Keep Things Readable with a Paraphraser: Lastly, you should make sure that the content you upload on your blog is easy to read by your audience. If you find that a particular part in your content is too difficult to peruse, you can try running it through a paraphraser to synonymize it with easier words.
Email Marketing
Although email marketing is a separate type of marketing on its own, it can be treated as a subset of content marketing because, it uses written content.
Email marketing has been around for a long time. But, unlike many, it is a technique that has stood the test of time. Despite being a 40-year old technique, it’s still used by a lot of organizations.
The thing about email marketing is that, once you automate the sending process, you really don’t have to do a lot. You just have to sit and wait for people to respond and get transformed into leads.
So, considering how easy and low-cost this technique is, it really doesn’t make sense not to use it.
The bottom line is, you should consider adding email marketing to your content marketing strategy in order to generate more leads for your business.
Conclusion
Content marketing can be a great way to increase your brand’s popularity and to raise awareness. However, in order to get the most out of your content marketing efforts, you have to make sure that you are proper and thorough about it.
In this post, we looked at three main elements that you can incorporate in your content marketing strategy to increase the chances of getting some positive results from it. In a nutshell, if you properly research your audience, work on your blog and start some email marketing, you should have a nice content marketing strategy to begin with.
