Category Archives: Content Marketing

Some well-known benefits of content marketing for your business

Content marketing helps your business in multiple ways.

Content marketing benefits your business from multiple angles. In many cases content marketing doesn’t deliver because people are not consistent with it. They don’t understand content marketing.

It is equal to maintaining your visibility. In a crowded marketplace, how do you maintain your visibility? You cannot campaign one day, or for a few days and then get on with your regular business while other businesses are constantly promoting themselves or new businesses are entering the market.

People forget about your business fast. There are many things to make them forget your business, especially on the Internet.

Therefore, content marketing is an ongoing phenomenon. It is not a “campaign”. It is an activity that must go on as long as your business survives and as long as you need attention from your prospective customers and clients. The benefits of content marketing that you accrue from a few campaigns don’t last for long.

It goes for every campaign on the Internet. Your search engine rankings don’t last if you’re not persistent with your SEO. Your social media presence does not last if you’re not constantly active and engaging your audience. People forget about your newsletter if you don’t broadcast regularly and on routine. Your traffic plummets if you don’t publish fresh content on your website or blog.

If you are persistent, content marketing certainly pays, and it pays better than conventional advertising.

So, what are some well-known benefits of content marketing for your business? Here they are:

Increases customer loyalty

Persistent content marketing helps you create brand awareness. People come across your content regularly. They begin to trust you. When it comes to choosing between doing business with an unknown business and a familiar business, they choose to work with a familiar business. This increases your customer loyalty.

Better SEO

Improved search engine rankings are a natural outcome of ongoing content marketing. You publish more content. You publish targeted content. Google regularly crawls and indexes your content. You cover more of your keywords and search queries. You write on your topics. You increase the knowledge wealth of your website and blog. This increases your search engine rankings.

Increased search engine visibility

When your rankings improve, you become more visible on search engines like Google. You get more traffic. These further fuel your rankings and after a while, it becomes a self-sustaining phenomenon.

Greater trust among your audience

Familiarity builds trust. When people regularly come across your content through your blog, through newsletter broadcasting, on search engines and on social media, there is a greater trust factor. With greater trust, people readily do business with you.

Marketing becomes less expensive

Content marketing is way less expensive than traditional marketing. You increase your visibility organically over a long period of time. Search visibility sustains. When you are persistently publishing content, your search engine rankings improve, and they remain high. Once you begin to engage your audience on social media websites, they feel more connected.

You don’t need to pay for your online visibility. You don’t need to pay for your search engine visibility. After a while, content marketing is practically free.

Higher conversion rate

When you publish and promote your content people have more reasons to visit your website multiple times. This increases your conversion rate. Rarely people buy from you when they visit your website or blog for the first time. On the other hand, if they visit your website or blog multiple times, they buy from you.

Even bigger companies with massive marketing budgets are switching over to content marketing not just because of the cost factor, but also because of effectiveness. Content marketing has a greater ROI. The audience reach out exercises are meaningful. There is greater trust. There is more engagement. It’s especially beneficial for small businesses.

Repurposing blog content for social media

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Here is an interesting post on how and why you should repurpose your existing content for your social media updates.

I have been doing this of late. There are many listicles on my website and blog. Take for example this LinkedIn post where I published a carousal from one of my existing blog posts.

Sometimes I simply pick a sentence or two from one of my existing web pages or blog posts and use them as image captions for LinkedIn and Instagram.

Repurposing my blog content gives me lots of opportunity to generate new content for my social media profiles. This way I don’t have to depend on new ideas, which can be hard to come by sometimes.

There is already so much that I have said on my website and on my blog. A few years ago, I did a small blog post on how to repurpose your exist content.

In fact, you shouldn’t just repurpose your existing blog content for social media updates. You can also get new blogging ideas from the subtopics.

An All-Inclusive Guide To Creating A Content Calendar

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Guide to creating a content calendar.

Bill Gates, Diane Hendricks, Warren Buffet, and Oprah Winfrey.

Apart from being billionaires, what is a common thread among these highly successful individuals?

The power of ‘organization’ is an enviable characteristic.

All content creators have felt the need to be a little more organized and disciplined about their schedule at some point or the other.

A content calendar does just that!

Have a schedule to prepare and plan your content posting.

Hope you’re on onboard because we’re going to find just how to do so:

Meaning & Definition

Think of it as an editorial calendar.

Like your mom plans grocery shopping, cooking, arranging, taking care of your (unnecessary) needs, and working!

You too can plan when to post your next piece on great white sharks, status updates about your upcoming music, announcing a partnership with your favorite content creator (you’ve been waiting for this but it needs some build-up!)

Other updates regarding your content and promotional activity!

Where Can I Do It

While the medium is only a means to an end, it is necessary to pick one that you’re comfortable and quick in.

Your options are Microsoft Excel, Google calendar, Google sheets, Looming, Co-schedule, editorial calendar plugin for WordPress, to name a few.

The selection of a content calendar tool depends on your team, your content, and familiarity.

Don’t be afraid to try a few to pick the one that’s best suited to your line of work.

How To Do It?

Step One – repurpose & start with what you have

Remember that old pitch you made to a brand you wanted to work with?

You can break it down into articles, personal blog posts, or videos for your website / social media handle.

Step Two – the best content will come from your friends, family, and coworkers

Setting up a workstation and traveling to look for interesting interviewees can take up too much time.

The best intimate, personal, and spontaneous moments are discovered with the people who know you the best!

Especially for vloggers and influencers, this allows you to be more productive when it comes to scheduling, marketing, and blogging, all at the same time.

While your followers get a peek into your life, you also save time chasing other people for interviews!

Step Three – creating your kind of content – find your usp

Depending on what your forte is, you should create more effective and impactful videos on your preferred medium.

Improve your social media presence by creating relevant content that strikes a chord with your audience.

You can do this in the following ways:

This involves two types of content –

Regular Content –

All types of podcasts, webinars, reports, a series of videos, etc that fall under the same theme and structure.

Your content could be entertaining, informative, or both.

Know who your audience is and keep reaching out to them by updating your content.

Regular posting – Posting every once in a week is a good lesson on how to properly update your content for SEO.

Plus, this means you can reach out to newer subscribers or followers on Instagram or YouTube.

Special Content –

Campaigns, research papers, and contests are less regular and don’t need as much posting but require more attention to detail.

Since your audience knows your stance and voice, these types of posts need more research and must be carefully planned out for release.

An example of this would be a collaboration with an NGO or an informative show.

Step Four – editorial meetings

While planning and creating content, you are likely to miss out on sitting down with your team and discussing your evolving strategies.

It is also a great opportunity to discuss pending timelines, newer product collaborations, ideas, social media activity, and feedback.

This is a good place to change and tweak your content for last-minute changes to increase customer satisfaction and improve response time before publishing.

Statistics regarding your revenue model and engagement can be discussed and brainstormed.

Step Five – have a content repository

Does your content calendar seem full of things to do and ideas to execute? That’s okay.

You will always want to take inspiration from previous experiences and moments.

A content repository is a storage, like your journal – with your ideas, thoughts, and your work – complete and incomplete.

It’s like a safe space for your work that you can come back to whenever you want to.

Step Six – make it shareable

You can edit your content calendar from time to time but let it be accessed and viewed by your team as much as possible.

Since content is never created alone, it is ideal to have the people working with you to be aware of your expectations, timelines, and deadlines.

This way, everyone works together in making sure that the best work is completed.

You can even share it with your mentors and peers, people whose feedback is important to you.

Step Seven – change is the only constant

Lastly, make sure that you update your content calendar as much as you can.

Regular updates will allow you to evolve and change your process according to the situation to target your potential customers granularly.

This way, you can also allow time for creative discussions and set aside time for ideation whenever required.

Conclusion

If there was one thing I had to leave you with, it would be this – there’s no right or wrong way to create a content calendar.

Start with a template and then commit to the realistic deadlines you set yourself for better productivity and an overall better work ethic.

This is why your content marketing is not working

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Why your content marketing is not working

ReadWrite has published 6 reasons why your content marketing might not be working.

You know what? Content marketing is like any other undertaking in your life – it is replete with unpredictable outcomes. Hence, if you have been publishing blog post after blog post and have been keeping yourself busy (or one of your representatives) on social media and still haven’t experienced any significant improvement in your targeted traffic, some signs of disappointment and disenchantment are understandable.

The above post rightly says that “in the majority of the cases, it is not the content that is to be blamed. It is rather the content strategy.”

What exactly is content strategy?

It is

What content you need to publish.
Whom you should target.
Which format of content gives you the biggest leverage.
What platforms you should nurture to promote your content.

The author also says that most people wanting to use content marketing to promote their businesses do the bare minimum. They will just write 300 words because this is what Google recommends (minimum). They will use keywords to “optimize” their content writing rather than writing something meaningful and then using the keywords contextually.

Should you always publish long content? The Post says that you should write at least 1890 words. This number was discovered by Backlinko after analysing 11.8 million Google search results.

How many words you write depends on how much competition your face. About 1 ½ years ago I was working with a client who had hired an SEO company in the UK and this company was using SEMRush to figure out what must be the titles of the web pages and how many words individual web page must have according to the competition faced by that particular keyword or title.

Due to some communication gap, for many webpages I ended up writing more than required. They were upset because they thought that the time was wasted because if those many words were not needed, I shouldn’t have spent time writing them. Whereas, I was focusing on the necessity of the information rather than the word limit.

Why I’m writing this here is because I want to say that how many words you use when writing content for your web pages and blog posts depends on many, and often, weird factors.

When writing for my own blog, I don’t get bogged down by the number of words I must write. Hence, sometimes my blog posts have more than 2000 words, and sometimes they have merely 500 words. It depends on what I want to say at that time.

Bigger content marketing companies come up with surveys, statistics and numbers to aim for because they make big bucks flaunting these numbers.

Personally, what I have experienced is that it is the regularity that matters, coupled with quality and relevance.

Your audience doesn’t respond if your content is not relevant to what they are expecting. I provide content writing services. Sometimes I get obsessed with SEO-related topics but if I write too much on SEO, I will end up attracting the wrong audience because I’m not offering search engine optimization services. For me, SEO is intertwined with quality and relevant content writing.

Regularity is very important because even if you provide great content people need to come across your content on an ongoing basis. Thousands of businesses are continuously publishing content. Even if it is not great content, this content manages to occupy space in people’s minds as well as on the web. Hence you need to remain visible.

Here is my personal advice:

Don’t worry much about words and instead, focus on providing as much “useful” information as possible.
Maintain quality and relevance and give it precedence over regularity.
Be regular.

I know, explaining this to clients who want to pay according to the number of words their blog posts and web pages must have, can be difficult. Although most of them except that it is the quality that matters, they all aim for a certain number of words.

I can understand their worry. If they don’t give their content writer a “word-target” the writer may not spend much time on each topic.

Something to ponder on for me in the coming weeks.

How to use content to market your business during Covid-19

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Using content for marketing during Covid-19.

Marketing budgets are being slashed all over the world. This Forrester research says that marketing budgets all over the world have definitely declined due to the Covid-19 outbreak, but they are expected to start going up by the end of 2020 and may recover by 2021.

But it depends on which side the unpredictable camel of the outbreak sits. Nothing is for sure right now. Many countries don’t even know what their current position vis-à-vis the outbreak is.

According to the above research, the CMO’s are taking the money out of out-of-home advertisements and moving the budgets to digital marketing for obvious reasons.

Despite the lunatics denying the severity of Covid-19, lesser number of people are moving out and are spending time working from home and consequently, being in front of the screen for longer durations.

Another thing many marketers are stressing is that, you shouldn’t stop marketing. A McGraw-Hill research of the 1981 and 82 recession found that businesses that marketed aggressively during the recession had 256% higher sales than those that did not.

But how do you market yourself if your business is making less money than before?

The answer is content marketing.

You spend less money than you spent on traditional advertisements, and it is far more effective. Especially now, when digital marketing is more effective than traditional marketing.

You can either publish original content or you can re-purpose your existing content, or you can do a mix of both.

The point is, now is the right time to let your customers and clients know that you are still in the game (you haven’t been destroyed by the Covid-19 outbreak) and you are still actively promoting yourself.

The dust is settling. In the early months of the year people were caught off-guard. Emotions were running high. People were scared and concerned. They were caught unaware.

Although the virus is widespread and a big part of the population is infected (in New Delhi right now 33% of the population is reported to have been infected by the virus), people are less worried. A lot has to do with the ignorance about the effects of the virus, but many businesses are getting back to their feet.

https://twitter.com/AmritHallan/status/1285550801151119361

During this time, it is nice if you set a healthy example and use content marketing and digital marketing to promote yourself. Here are a few things you can do with your content:

Repurpose existing content

If you feel you have already got lots of content on your website or blog but you need to add new content, you can consider repurposing your existing content.

You may like to read: How to re-purpose old content?

Repurposing your content means generating new formats of content out of your existing content pieces.

For example, if you have a detailed blog post on how to do content marketing on mobile phones, perhaps you can create a slideshow or a video. You can also create a PDF e-book that people can download.

Refocus on your email marketing

Email marketing is a big part of content marketing, in fact, the most effective aspect of it. When you send emails to your prospects, your message appears right in their inbox.

Of course, before you can send them emails, you need to win their trust so that they regularly open your emails.

Winning the trust of your email recipients is a different ballgame and requires a dedicated post, but for the time being, you need to understand that since most of the people are confined to their homes, they are more receptive to receiving valuable information through emails.

This Campaign Monitor study has revealed that more people are opening their emails than before. From February to March, businesses reported a 16% change in the open rate of emails.

This American Express blog post has shared some insights on the emerging email marketing trends during Covid-19 and what you can do to make your email marketing as effective as possible.

Accelerate your content publishing

Since more people are working from their homes, they are consuming targeted content with greater frequency than when they were going to their offices.

Also, while working in isolation, people are searching for relevant information to solve their day-to-day professional problems.

Basically, everything on the Internet is content. What you publish on your website, whether they are web pages or blog posts, is content. What you publish on social media, is content. When you send an email marketing campaign, you are broadcasting content.

To publish purposeful content during the outbreak, you first need to find out what your core audience is looking for.

For example, my clients want to improve their search engine visibility through quality content. These days, on my blog, I’m publishing lots of content that can help you improve your search engine rankings vis-à-vis the Covid-19 outbreak.

Information is another thing that people are constantly looking. They want to remain informed. Whatever business they are dealing with, they want to get the right information about whether the business can deliver or not.

You can also sail your content marketing boat on uncharted waters. If you have never published case studies, maybe now is the right time because they are a big confidence booster. If you have never published videos on your website, perhaps now is the right time.

Content marketing can help you in multiple ways during these trying times. For example, it can help you stay in front of your customers and clients. You can help them by providing them useful information and as a result, increase customer loyalty.

It was also set in motion your core content marketing strategy even after Covid is over.