Category Archives: Content Strategy

Doing content marketing without content writing

In my previous blog post I talked about various types of content that you can use to carry out your content marketing strategy. Most of the suggestions in that blog post involve some sort of writing. Whether you write a blog post, an article, an e-book, a case study or an email campaign, writing is involved. What if you are not the writing type and your audience is not much into reading?

This blog post talks about 6 ways to build an audience without indulging in content writing.

Although for many years I have been providing content writing services since businesses these days are looking for turnkey content marketing solutions I’m also collaborating with other content producers that can help you generate non-writing content material such as

Infographics
Visual data representations and charts
Videos
Slideshows
Podcasts
Webinars

Another good way of generating content (that sometimes I do on my own content writing and content marketing blog) is content curation.

It is not necessary that every time you need to come up with original content (although more than 60% content on your website should be original). There is lots of interesting and great stuff being published on the Internet all the time. You can curate those links using your own blog as well as your social media timelines. A good thing about curation is that you can automate some of the publishing tasks by using the right syndication feeds.

Content marketing is all about eking out a presence for yourself and it can be anything as long as it gets the message across and people appreciate your content.

5 attributes that supercharge your content marketing

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Attributes of successful content marketing strategy

Content marketing isn’t exact science, but there are many attributes that can help you decide how successful it is or what can make it successful. Although every business has its own unique requirements, there are some fundamental attributes that, if followed, can bring you assured success, and these fundamental attributes can also be applied to content marketing. 5 of such attributes are listed below:

What do you want to achieve with content marketing? This is something that I have repeatedly asked through my various blog posts on this website. You need to have a clear idea of what you want to do so that your business or your ideology gets maximum exposure. Every business has, as mentioned above, unique requirements. Although content marketing isn’t exact science, the outcome that you get sometimes can be painfully precise. I remember in the early 2000’s my entire web design business was based on content marketing (although at that time I had no idea what it was) because I was publishing lots of content on my website (it was a compilation of articles as those days we didn’t have blogging as a concept) as well as on other websites about various aspects of web designing and JavaScript programming. Unfortunately, I ended up attracting wrong audience and within a couple of years I had to wrap up my business (there were other reasons also). Why? I had no idea what my content marketing was achieving for me. Please notice, I’m not saying that I had no idea what I needed to achieve (every business needs to attract customers and clients); it’s just that, I had no idea whether my content was attracting the sort of audience I needed or not.
Are you putting your content marketing strategy in place? Again, although content marketing isn’t an exact science, particular actions lead to particular results. The sort of content that you publish and promote draws exactly the audience it should be drawing. The content that you are publishing, the channels you’re using to promote your content and the format in which you are publishing your content have a big impact on the way your content marketing performs. This is where your content marketing strategy can help. A well-laid-out strategy keeps you and your team focused on your main goal. Your strategy helps you decide what your goal is and what you need to achieve that goal.
What are your content marketing success metrics? When you’re driving home from office (or going from point A to point B) what are the signs you look for to make sure that you are following the right direction? You know exactly where you need to take the right turn and the U-turn and the left turn. There is a familiar tree you always observe. There is that house with a peculiar red-tinted roof. There is that front yard with beautiful white roses. These are the signs that tell you that you’re going in the right direction and the same happens with your content marketing strategy if you know what are your success metrics. What are the signs that tell you that you are succeeding? Have your search engine rankings improved? Are more people submitting your contact form? Are more people sharing your links on social networking websites? Are your sales increasing? Are you getting more subscribers for your newsletter? Are more people downloading your e-book? These are all success metrics that you can closely observe while persisting with your content marketing strategy.
Are you are signing definite responsibilities to your team? For a larger and a medium-sized company where multiple people are working on a content marketing strategy, it is important that all the team members know their responsibilities and they have the guidelines and the tools to monitor their performance.
Are you able to maintain a balance between quality and quantity? This is a persistent dilemma faced by content marketers and people responsible for content marketing. You are in a highly competitive field. Your competitors are continuously publishing content and although it isn’t necessarily high-quality content but somehow, they are able to out-shout you and in the process, your content ends up getting ignored. You either spend more money marketing your content and making sure that it reaches your target audience, or you go on publishing high-quality content undeterred by all the noise being created having complete belief in yourself. This works. Striking a balance between quality and quantity. You need both. If you are a well-known brand, you can do with high-quality content and less quantity. But if you are a relatively new brand and very few people know about you, having lots of content is a must, without compromising quality.

Difference between static, dynamic and interactive content

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Your content marketing strategy often needs to be a steady mix of static, dynamic and interactive content. Yes, content is of different types and every type of content has its own characteristics, and pros and cons. Let’s see how these individual types of content can help you take your content marketing forward.

Static content

Static content never or rarely changes. It remains there on your website for weeks, months and sometimes, even years. It may include your homepage, website pages, eBooks, case studies and white papers, landing pages, videos, PPC campaigns and social media profiles.

Wondering how come videos and social media profiles become static? By static content we don’t mean content that doesn’t move. Although in video things move, but once a video is published, it rarely goes through changes. It is the same story, the same visuals, the same sounds. No matter how many times a person watches your video, it is going to remain the same and eventually, people are going to stop watching it.

Social media/networking profile means the profile, the main page, not the feeds.

Advantages of static content

Easier to create.
Easier to distribute.
Low-cost.
Lets you focus on highly targeted groups for better conversion.

Disadvantages of static content

Has no repeat value, people soon get bored of it and stop consuming it.
Doesn’t get indexed by search engine crawlers repeatedly.
There is one-way communication with no intent to engage the audience.

Dynamic content

Dynamic content is constantly updated according to the latest trends, available information and user input. Some examples of dynamic content are your business blog, the RSS feeds, your social media feeds, email newsletters, personalised website content (the content changes if a person is logged in or if he or she has become your customer), A/B test landing pages and syndicated content.

Advantages of dynamic content

It keeps your visitors interested in what you have to say by continuously serving them latest and updated content.
It gives you higher conversion rate because dynamic content keeps people interested in your website and blog and keeps them coming back to your website repeatedly.
Interesting, relevant and evolving content increases audience loyalty.
Dynamic content is shared often on social media and social networking websites.
It improves your search engine rankings as search engines like Google prefer to visit freshly updated and dynamic content rather than static content that never changes.

Disadvantages of dynamic content

Dynamic content is costly compared to static content.
Requires complete change in marketing outlook as all your content becomes customer-centric from product-centric.
Requires constant analysis because it needs to change and adapt according to its metrics.

Interactive content

As the name suggests, it evolves according to user input. Interactive content is usually not prepared or created by a single person or a single agency and often you have little control over it. Examples of interactive content include your blog comments, people’s comments under your social networking and social media profiles, Facebook updates and tweets, online service, online games and mobile apps, multi-participant webinars, customer reviews and social sharing buttons. Some content marketers also prefer to call it “crowd sourced content”.

Advantages of interactive content

Low-cost and easy to set up, for example the commenting section on your blog. Similarly, once you create your social networking profiles and start interacting with people and increase the engagement level, people begin to participate in various conversations, generating interactive content in the process. After a certain threshold level, it is practically set on autopilot.
Gives you more social credibility. If more people are encouraged (feel encouraged) to spend time generating content for you it means they are serious about your brand or at least have some serious views (whether negative or positive). It is a social proof of your online reputation.
Increases brand loyalty. When people repeatedly interact with you in lieu of generating content for you their sense of loyalty towards your brand increases.

Disadvantages of interactive content

You have little control over the quality of the content.
Trolls can easily take over especially on social media and social networking websites.
Lots of spam can be generated making your entire content marketing counter-productive.
It can become resource-consuming in the long run because you need to closely monitor the quality of interactions.

What should you focus on? Static, dynamic interactive content?

It depends on your target audience. As mentioned above, it should be a heady mix of static, dynamic and interactive content and all types of content should follow a clearly-defined path of evolution. For example, you can begin your online presence with dynamic content which is needed to create your presence and improve your search engine rankings. Once you have generated decent amount of dynamic content, you should focus on increasing the number of pages containing static content for consistent information. Eventually, as you become more famous on the Internet, interactive content begins to manifest. When this happens, you not only have to keep up with the momentum, you also need to monitor the quality of your interactive content.

For effective content marketing you must know your audience

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There are three reasons why you publish and market your content: to improve your search engine rankings, to provide useful content to your target audience so that your business or your brand becomes familiar to them, or for both. Whether you want to improve your search engine rankings or increase brand awareness, you need to know what sort of information your target audience seeks (related to your business) and then publish and market that content.

Exactly how much time do you spend understanding your core audience before publishing content on your website or blog? I always ask this question from my clients before starting new projects. I need to understand for whom I’m writing. Sure, I’m writing for my client in terms of my business, but for whom am I actually writing? I’m writing for my client’s customers and clients.

In broad terms everybody knows who should be the target audience. For example, I am publishing content on my blog and website to attract people who would like to hire me as their content writer, preferably for content marketing purposes. I’m not selling content writing books. I’m not trying to earn ad revenue by publishing content writing and content marketing tutorials. No, I’m trying to attract people who would like to hire me as a content writer. This can be a big difference and I need to constantly keep it in mind while writing and marketing my own content.

I gained this experience while trying to promote my web design business (in the early 2000’s) through content marketing – at that time very few people talk about content marketing but I knew publishing content on other websites meant greater visibility for my own website. But a tiny mistake that I committed was that I ended up writing lots of content that drew only those people to my website who wanted to learn web design. It wasn’t attracting clients who would need a web designer.

In order to understand what your core audience wants, you first need to understand what core audience you want to draw. As I mentioned above, I didn’t want to draw people who just like to learn about content writing and content marketing. I wanted to draw people who would like to hire me as a content writer and content marketing consultant. This is a broad category. I can go deeper and deeper – maybe I would like to attract small businesses because they are easier to handle compared to big businesses. I’m comfortable writing about technology, so I may try to draw technology-based small businesses that are looking for a content writer and a content marketer. And so on.

It’s not just about knowing what your core audience wants, it’s also about constantly being aware of what sort of audience you want to attract.

This is also called creating a persona for your content marketing – what sort of person should come to your website? What should be his or her requirements? What is he or she looking for vis-à-vis your website?

In most of the cases even when you know what sort of people you must draw to your website in order to increase your business, it is difficult to know what such people look for. This is the question this Content Marketing Institute blog post answers by interviewing various content marketing experts. Although there are many pearls of wisdom shared by these experts, the advise I can most relate to is given by Rand Fishkin of Moz.

Talk, watch, think

I’m actually not a big fan of personas. But, I do love spending a lot of time with real customers, hearing their frustrations, talking to them about the industry and its challenges, seeing what speakers are talking about on stages, watching the blogosphere and social media to see what’s resonating and being discussed, and generally being part of our customers’ world. I also love doing the work myself – being my own customer and feeling the same pain our customers feel. Those experiences give me a much better sense of the field than a persona

70% of Internet content will be video?

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I found this interesting visual on this link:

70% content on the Internet will be video content

Being a content writing doesn’t worry me that people will be accessing with your content more than textual content? It doesn’t. Writing will always be needed. Yes, more people are consuming with your content because one, more video content is available and two, connectivity is improving all over the world. Even in Indian villages people are accessing YouTube videos and sharing them with each other and posting them on Facebook.

But that doesn’t mean people don’t need written content.

Well, I don’t have much to delve into this topic. It’s just that for a very long time I haven’t published anything on this blog and I wanted to make a beginning somewhere and when I came across this visual, I thought I should post it on my blog.

The actual link though is quite interesting. It talks about how MasterCard used content marketing to expand its brand presence by creating videos that emotionally touch people rather than thrusting their marketing pitch upon them.