Category Archives: Content Marketing

Content marketing doesn’t merely mean publishing more and more content

Before Panda and Penguin updates people were creating massive amounts of content to improve their search engine rankings. The 2012 updates from Google changed the game. Rankings disappeared overnight and businesses based on merely creating content for the purpose of getting higher search engine rankings were basically ruined.

It was also a year when content marketing evolved into a specialized profession. A glimpse of this E-Consultancy survey shows that over 90% companies recognize the overwhelming importance of content marketing. Coca-Cola, the biggest consumer brand in the world, has drawn out a 20-year content marketing strategy that is being considered as one of the most comprehensive paradigm shifts in the way brands are going to promote their products and services.

But no matter how mainstream it becomes, people are still confused about how to implement an effective content marketing strategy. Many still confuse it with creating and publishing lots of content. Of course you need content, but there is more to that.

In order to implement a successful content marketing strategy, you need to understand why people would look for your content. Why they would like to read or consume what you have published, but be it video, text or images? “Why” is very important. If you understand this “why”, 90% of your problem is solved.

If you are in the entertainment industry, then people access your content to get entertained. They may also access your content to know more about the people who entertain them (for instance, celebrities and players). If you are a news agency then people will access different categories of your content according to their interests such as politics, sports, industry, technology or science. If you are selling smart phones people want to know their various features and advantages over other smart phones.

Different people have different content needs and as a content marketer it’s your job to figure out what they’re looking for. Once you have sorted that out, you need to find out what format your target audience prefers, and tools and services your target audience uses in order to find the content it is looking for.

So content marketing doesn’t just involve publishing lots of content to improve your search engine rankings. It’s primary objectives are

Finding out what content your audience is looking for
Creating content that your audience is looking for
Publishing relevant and topical content as the need arises
Making that content available in a format your audience prefers
Making that content scalable so that it is accessible across multiple devices and platforms
Optimizing that content so that it is easier to find it on search engines
Making it easier and attractive to share that content on social media and social networking websites
Streamlining existing content and producing new content according to rapidly changing preferences of your audience

These may seem like lots of points, but whether you are a big business or small enterprise, in one way or another you can implement these points to drastically cut down your costs on conventional advertising.

Is content marketing the only marketing left?

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This is something Seth Godin said in one of the interviews he keeps giving on various Internet marketing forums, that content marketing is the only marketing left.

Many people tend to disagree, but they don’t get the import of the thing. They always equate content marketing with something that necessarily has to do with the Internet. Of course a major part of content marketing evolves on the Internet, but it goes beyond the realms of the world wide web.

Content marketing in its truest sense means two-way engagement. Unlike conventional advertising you are not simply broadcasting promotional messages using various channels (print magazines, newspapers, TV, radio and even some form of Internet advertising), you are actually trying to reach out to your target customers and clients. First with the arrival of the contemporary Internet and then with social networking and social media, the dynamics of how people consume content (information, education or advertising) have gone through a paradigm shift. It’s no longer about passively receiving messages. Now people immediately respond to those messages and also create their own messages.

This, is a big difference. People talk to businesses and they talk among themselves. Your business and your brand must be talked about in order to remain relevant. This can only be achieved by engaging content, and hence the relevance of content marketing.

Again, although I mostly deal with writing, content, it can be anything. It can be a video, and info-graphic, an audio, a presentation, a PDF file, your postings on social networking websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. It can be images and videos on Pinterest and YouTube.

The biggest reason why content marketing is the only marketing left is that people “search” on the Internet before doing business with you. People no longer buy your products and services after seeing your advertisements and flyers. They log onto their favourite search engine, and they search for your product name or your service name (and various other combinations involving your product name or your service name), and read and view information and opinions about it. If not their favourite search engine, then they use their favourite social networking website (most such websites like Twitter and Facebook are making search a big part of their offerings) to know what people are saying about your product or service.

Conventional marketing brings you brand awareness. Content marketing brings you brand involvement, and this is what you need in the current scenario. You want conversations to happen around your brand and business, and if possible, positive conversations. This happens when you create and promote content people can share, respond to or react to.

Content marketing also gives you an ability to measure various aspects of its effectiveness. Take for instance blogging. At a particular time, using analytics tools, you can easily find out how many people are reading your blog posts, from which geographic regions, at what particular time of the day, during which days of the week, etc. By actively engaging them in your comments section you can even get more information.

The same holds true for social networking websites like Facebook. The amount of information its analytics can give you is unparalleled.

The difference between content marketing and content strategy

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There was a time when I used to think that content marketing is a subset of content strategy, but now I believe that both content marketing and content strategy can be subsets and supersets of each other.

You cannot have a successful content marketing campaign without a content strategy, and a well-define content marketing campaign is an integral part of your content strategy.

So, if they are intertwined, what are the defining differences between content marketing and content strategy? What are the key differences?

In simple terms, the insights and data that you get through content strategy, you implement in content marketing. Content strategy gives your content marketing the needed direction. Without this direction, your content marketing turns haphazard and ineffective.

If content marketing consists of publishing regular content, content strategy is knowing what content to publish, what audience to target, and which platforms to use for publishing content.

As mentioned above, content strategy is based on the metrics and the insights that you obtain through analytics, observation, experimentation and third-party data.

Content strategy

What is content strategy?

As mentioned above, our actions must be well thought of if we want to achieve something. Here is what content strategy involves:

Knowing what content to publish and distribute.
Knowing who is your target audience and why?
Clearly defining KPIs.
Knowing how to obtain traffic and engagement data.
Streamlining content publishing based on goals and insights.
Zeroing in on the platforms that you will use to publish and distribute your content.
Establishing an audience engagement policy.
Figuring out which content type or format best suits your content marketing KPIs.

First, you need to know what is the purpose of publishing and distributing content and exactly why you need content marketing? How it can serve your business and help you promote your cause?

To be a successful communicator, you must know whom you’re going to communicate to. You should know your audience, you should know what they want, what they’re looking for, what their concerns are.

Data insight is a great power. When you set in motion your content marketing strategy, you will need to constantly analyze your data so that you can make timely changes.

You need a content writing and content publishing roadmap so that you remain focused and you always know what you’re going to published to cater to your core audience.

Merely publishing content doesn’t help you much these days. This is where content marketing comes in. You need to promote and broadcast your content so that it reaches the maximum number of people. For that you need to shortlist channels that you’re going to use to distribute your content, for example search engines, social networking websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

You also need to constantly engage your audience. Unlike conventional marketing, content marketing involves two-way communication between you and your audience (your customers and clients). Without meaningful and regular engagement it’s difficult to establish a rapport and make yourself more relatable and identifiable.

Content can be of multiple formats and if you have limited budget, you cannot target all the existing formats. For example, you can have written content (content writing, etc.), videos, presentation slides on SlideShare, images on your own blog, Facebook and Pinterest, sketches, infographics and basically, everything that you can use to communicate data and ideas. You may like to do something like content writing or images in the beginning and later on start focusing on other formats of content too.

This basically sums up your content strategy.

Content marketing

Content marketing explained

This involves folding your sleeves and actually getting down to the grind.

Whatever steps you have listed in your content strategy document, you implement during content marketing. Interestingly, there is a reason why there is “marketing” in content marketing.

Yes, sure, you publish targeted content. But, merely publishing content doesn’t bring you success. You need to “market” that content – you need to promote your content so that maximum number of people can access it and are then drawn to your website or blog.

Marketing is a proactive activity. You need to take steps so that the visibility of your content increases. You improve your search engine rankings. You broadcast newsletter updates. You engage audiences on different social media platforms. You closely watch and follow trends and publish content to leverage them. You make sure that you stick to your content calendar.

Why is content marketing important? I mean, why not simply advertise and promote your business the way people have been doing for decades?

There is a reason why a greater number of businesses are adopting content marketing rather than sticking to the old ways of business promotion. People these days don’t like being sold to. They want you to gain their trust. This is done through publishing valuable content.

On the Internet (and in real life) it is not physically possible to interact with thousands of prospective customers and clients on daily basis. Your content on the other hand can do the job seamlessly.

Content marketing is also called inbound marketing. Inbound marketing means your prospective customers and clients come to your website on their own after accessing your content or while trying to access useful information. It is their decision. It is they who find your link somewhere, click the link, and come to your website.

Outbound marketing on the other hand is a traditional form of marketing where you interrupt people while they’re doing something else.

You assume that they are going to be thrilled at receiving your marketing message, whereas this is not the case. People are annoyed when you are urging them to buy from you while they want to watch their favorite movie, or read an interesting blog post, or watch an enchanting cat video. You’re interrupting them, and you’re not just interrupting them, you’re also urging them to part with their money on an item or service that they may need, but right now, psychologically, are not prepared to buy.

Through content marketing you are simply there. You solve their problems. You keep them engaged. You seed conversations. They become familiar to you. They become comfortable to your presence in their lives (or on their screens). The more familiar you become, the more they trust you.

Here is a good definition of content marketing from this Forbes article (slightly old)

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.

What should a small business focus on, content marketing or content strategy?

Frankly, there is no use doing content marketing without content strategy. Without strategy, your content marketing is going to be haphazard. It will be like throwing darts in the darkness. You may succeed, or you may not succeed.

Creating a content strategy may seem intimidating in the beginning, but it is not. Even if you spend 3 hours every month strategizing your content marketing, or at least, this is what I think, especially if you’re a small business, it is more than enough.

What is strategy after all? It is being aware of your environment, analyzing your environment, and then controlling your actions accordingly, to reach your goal.

For example, a strategy has a swot analysis – your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You may already have good content you can leverage by reusing and repurposing. There may be many gaps you need to fill. There may be some really good and useful topics you can write and publish content on. How is your competition faring? What can you do to beat your competition?

Using your analytics data is also a part of your content strategy and based on that you can give a direction to your content marketing efforts. If you use Google Analytics, your dashboard tells you the type of traffic your content is attracting. Is this the right kind of traffic or you need different traffic?

If you’re thinking in these terms, you are already using content strategy to make your content marketing effective.

Is the rise of content marketing good for your business?

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There is a sharp rise in the importance of content marketing and more and more business organizations are diverting their funds from conventional marketing to content marketing. Is it good for your business? Does it make things more difficult or easier?

It depends on how you look at it. As a small and as a mid-sized business it is perhaps one of the greatest marketing opportunities you have come across and in such a manner that you can compete with the big boys without spending big money.

Content marketing is all about quality and timeliness. Sure, a business with lots of money can generate tons of content in no time and consequently dominate traffic-generating sources like search engines, blogs and social networking websites, how much of that traffic actually converts is another matter. And this is where you can compete.

Of course realistically you will mostly be competing with businesses that lie within your sphere of influence but even that can be a big deciding factor. Then you can gradually move towards bigger, something like, Fortune 500 companies.

The moot point is, when it comes to content marketing, it’s very easy to initiate a strategy and then sustain it over a long period of time. All it takes is perseverance, a little focus, and an understanding of your market. Once you have decided that you are going to focus on content marketing rather than conventional marketing sources, you have to identify which channels you are going to focus upon. Initially, my personal recommendation would be the following:

Business blogging
Guest blogging
Information articles under your own domain
Information articles and opinion pieces on other publications
Twitter, Google plus and Facebook

These are very easy things to achieve. You can easily set up a blog under your existing domain name and start publishing informative blog posts. You can also approach other blogs who would be interested in posting your opinions and insights.

Aside from regular blog posts, you should also plug content holes within your existing website. Are all the pages your website needs there? Have you described all your services? Have you published testimonials from your customers and clients? Have you listed all the benefits of your products and services? What about your FAQs section? Is it up to date? Carry out a detailed analysis of your existing business content and see where you can update and add.

There are many publications that would be interested in publishing your articles, especially if you can give some expert advice people can use. This is a great way of expanding your brand presence on the Internet.

Twitter, Google plus and Facebook, of course you might already be using. It is a good idea to keep separate accounts for your personal postings and business postings. This way your core message is not diluted. Remember that search engines have started displaying social networking content among normal search results, so you wouldn’t like to appear for unnecessary material.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, the rise of content marketing is definitely good for your business. It helps you reduce advertising and marketing costs. It improves your search engine rankings. It brings you more visibility. It helps you engage your audience. Above all, it significantly improves your conversion rate.

How to keep on creating fresh content for your content marketing strategy

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One of the greatest hurdles faced by content marketing is creating fresh, engaging content regularly. You need more content to cover possibly every topic under your niche and in order to draw attention to that content from people as well as search engines it needs to be highly relevant, useful and well structured.

When you initiate your content marketing strategy as a serious business it is given that you’re going to pursue quality no matter what. It’s regularity you need to worry about. Some businesses publish new content every day, some prefer it twice or thrice a week, some make it a weekly affair and some even do it once or twice a month. The frequency primarily depends on where you are publishing your content. You might be publishing it under your regular business website, on your blog, on other blogs (guest blogging, for instance), news and analysis websites (Washington Post, Huffington Post, Techcrunch, etc.) or social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Listed below are a few ways you can get a ton of quality content on an ongoing basis.

Maintain an editorial calendar

An editorial calendar keeps you focused and it also helps you know which topics you have already covered, which topics you need to improve upon and where you have to publish more.

As already mentioned a well-managed content marketing strategy requires you to publish content on varied platforms. Just focusing on one publishing platform might not be a good approach. For instance, if you are just publishing high-quality content under your own website it may not get the kind of attention it deserves. You need to spread your content so that it also becomes visible at other places. It means you have to generate content for other blogs (it is called guest blogging), niche publications, article directories, wikis and social networking websites.

Without an editorial calendar keeping track of all these platforms can prove to be a gargantuan task and unless you have a team you won’t be able to focus on all of them on a daily basis. On Facebook and Twitter you will need to be pretty regular as visibility matters a lot there. You can allocate certain days to your own blog and others for external publications. Accordingly you can create topics for your own blog as well as other blogs. You can use an Excel sheet to create your editorial calendar. Some also prefer Google calendar.

Use your existing content to create new content

You can get lots of interesting ideas from your existing content. For instance, I can write a completely new blog post (300-500 words or more) on this very topic – How to create new content from your existing content.

Whenever you cover a topic there are many subtopics that you simply touch upon. They may need further elaboration but it might not be within the scope of the current topic. There might be some bullet points that need blog posts and articles exclusively for themselves. This is also an added advantage. Once you have created content around those words, you can hyperlink to this newly created content from existing articles and blog posts and improve your SEO.

Update and improve your existing content

There is always some scope for improving your existing content and once you have updated it, it is as good as new. Suppose you wrote a blog post in the times of MySpace that might not be relevant today. Either you can mention this in the blog post or make necessary changes.

Maintain an ideas file

Ideas are hard to come by especially when you are sitting and thinking about them. They are random dust motes that need to be captured as soon as they manifest. You can maintain an ideas file to do this. As soon as you get an idea for a new blog post or a new update on Twitter and Facebook, quickly jot it down in your ideas file.

My personal favorite for this is Google Docs because you can access them from any device. This way you don’t necessarily have to be in front of your computer or laptop in case a new idea strikes you. You can use your mobile phone or your tablet to save the idea.

If writing seems to be a problem, you can record your ideas using audio, video and photographs.

Make regular content publishing a part of your thinking process

The more you think the more ideas you get. It’s like building a particular muscle in your body. If you keep using your arms, lifting weights with them, they grow stronger and stronger. In the same manner, if you keep on thinking about different writing topics for your content marketing you will keep on getting new ideas.

Track conversations on Facebook and Twitter

Most of the time it is just gibberish on Facebook and Twitter so you might have to use some tools to track relevant conversations. You can use hash tags; for instance if you want to track conversations on content marketing you may try following the hash tag #contentmarketing. Similarly you can join dedicated pages on Facebook. Pay close attention to the sort of questions people ask and out of those questions try to make new articles and blog posts.

Look for questions and issues in various question/answer forums and websites

Have you ever seen the “Answers” tab in LinkedIn? Similarly have you been following questions on Quora? Try to find out what sort of questions people are asking in your particular niche and then create content around those questions.

Engage your audience

You will be able to engage your audience through your blog as well as social networking profiles. Initially it may take some time but if you post relevant content for a sustained period gradually you will build an audience you will be able to engage with. Ask them questions. Request them to let you know what they would like to read on your blog and what sort of issues they would like you to address.

Follow other blogs and websites

This is an oft-repeated advice. You can get lots of content writing and content publishing ideas from other blogs and websites. Just as you can use your own pre-existing content to create new writing ideas, you can also get ideas from others’ writings.

As already mentioned above, quality as well as persistence is required for a successful content marketing strategy and generating new content writing ideas is as important as having a content strategy in place.