5 Simple Keys To A Successful Content Marketing Strategy

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Content marketing is a phenomenally effective way to get people to your site. After all, what better way is there to get people to come and see what you’ve got to offer than to give them what they want? Done correctly, a well done content marketing strategy can have people willingly coming back to your site over and over again. You can even position yourself as an authority and expand into thought leadership if you play your cards right.

The thing is, it can be hard to play your cards right. A lot of people misunderstand content marketing or try to take shortcuts and end up with a strategy that doesn’t work. Then they decide that content marketing is over rated. Great. Let them. That leaves more room for you and me.

Here are some of the simple key concepts that you should use to become an effective content marketer.

Write content that actually matters

The internet is filled with a humongous amount of information. About one million terabytes, apparently. Most of it is in the graveyard called ‘nobody cares’. That’s the information a handful of people look at and never gets beyond them. You don’t want to write content for that part of the internet. That’s pointless.

For that reason, make sure that you write content that’s actually relevant. It’s better to write a few high-impact articles that are actually interesting than a lot of low-impact articles that people have forgotten the moment they click away from it.

Do note, you do want to publish relatively regularly. You see, you can’t in advance know if an article is going to go big. Sometimes you’ll create an article that you’ll be sure will do well and it doesn’t get very much attention at all. Other times, you’ll write something off the cuff that will garner huge amounts of attention. Still, if you have to choose between hitting that deadline or postponing the publication by a day to give it another bit of oomph, I say postpone.

Always aim at your audience

You’d think it would be pretty obvious. And yet a lot of people screw this one up. They end up writing for who they want to impress instead of who will buy their products. And it’s understandable. If you’re a business owner then your peers are other business owners. So you’ll feel the happiest if they have good things to say about the content you’re putting out there.

The thing is, are they actually going to be buying your product? If you’re a B2C business obviously not. Even if you’re a B2B business they still might be too busy to read what you’ve got to say. Instead, it’s people responsible for acquisitions who you ultimately want to draw to your site.

So make sure that your content is geared towards them as much as possible. It’s generally a good idea to have a ‘who are we writing this for?’ put up somewhere on your wall to remind yourself that just because you’re excited by a topic doesn’t mean your readers will be.

For example, if you pulled them in with write my essay please, then you probably don’t want to explain the finer points of grammar. That’s not what they’re there for.

Make sure you’re the right person

Once you know who your audience is, you’ve got to make sure that you can actually appeal to them. If you’re writing for 12-year-old boys and you’re a middle aged woman, then you might struggle to appeal to them. You won’t know their language, you will struggle to understand their emotions and what gets them out of bed in the morning and will therefore find it hard to build a following among them.

Still want to go for it? By all means. But just be aware that you’re going to need to run your content by people who are actually part of the aimed for market segment. They’ll be able to give you feedback about whether what you’re saying is actually interesting for them.

You have to push it hard

So many people think content marketing amounts to writing some content, putting it up on their social media profiles and moving on. That won’t fly. Once you’ve written your content you’ve only done half of what you need to. The next stage is to get it in front of people. That means marketing.

Your best bet is to actually have people who do this for a living do this for you. People who know how to publish things on the different social media platforms to get it the best exposure. They can put it up in the right groups as well as create ads that people will actually click on. Because ultimately, a successful contentment marketing strategy is still a numbers game.

How many people see it X the quality of the article = how successful you are

It’s a long game

Content marketing follows a very clear route: You use your content to draw in an audience. You build trust with that audience. You use that trust to sell them your wares. If you try to take a shortcut anywhere on that route, you’ll end up running into a dead end.

For that reason, only do content marketing if you’re willing to stay in it for the long haul. You’ve got to continue providing high-quality content to your audience so their respect for you grows over time.

That not what you’re after? Then pursue a different strategy. There are a lot of different forms of marketing out there. Some of these will be more successful far faster. In fact, it’s generally a good idea to employ some of these along with content marketing as they’ll work more quickly and can work in synergy with it.

So why bother?

Content marketing is a slow strategy that takes time. Opposite that, however, is the fact that once you’ve built it up it can stick around for a long time as well. Once you’ve got a dedicated following of your content who respect what you’ve got to say, then you’ve also got people who are willing to listen to you when you’ve got company-related announcements to make and who are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt when things happen. After all, they know you.

That’s worth its weight in gold. After all, society is all about networks. And by creating a successful content marketing strategy that’s exactly what you’re creating – a network of people who believe and who trust you. And though that can take a long time to build up, when it’s there it can help you weather nearly any storm.

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