How your content marketing should be in 2020
This LinkedIn content marketing blog post compiles insights by various industry experts on what to adopt and what to leave in 2020 while implementing and carrying out a digital marketing and content marketing strategy.
The first, and the most noticeable advise is from Michael Brenner (because I too have been advising the same thing to my clients) who says that marketers should shift away from content randomness and have a clearly-defined idea of why they are publishing a particular piece of content.
He says that brands that stop publishing content randomly and follow a consistent pattern experience an increase of 50-200% in traffic and leads.
When you use content marketing to promote your business on the web, it is like maintaining a publishing or a media platform.
Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, your target customers and clients expect you to publish high-value content on regular basis.
Read How to come up with great content writing ideas every day.
Another issue that I have experienced with many content writing and copywriting clients is that all their content requirements are based on their keywords.
Yes, keywords are important, and you must optimize your content for better SEO, but if you solely focus on the keywords instead of the value that you plan to deliver with your content, your content begins to lose meaning.
As the next person in the thread says, you should escape the “sea of sameness” and focus on something unique.
The beauty of the world is, every person is unique.
Although, when you’re working with a content writer or an online copywriter, his or her own perspective is going to permeate through the content, but you can control the direction of the content to a great extent by choosing to focus on the value that you want to deliver instead of the keywords you want to optimize your content for.
How do you do that?
Stop living in a cocoon.
Take an active interest in your industry.
Follow conversations on Twitter and LinkedIn and participate in those conversations.
See how you can align your marketing message with the issues affecting the society in general.
You can also publish valuable content by vertical focusing.
Talk to a single individual instead of targeting a broad spectrum.
Focus on problems and issues being faced by a single individual for that blog post or web page.
Yes, if you don’t handle multiple issues in a single blog post you may have to publish multiple blog posts but then, this is a blessing in disguise.
You do need to publish multiple blog posts to cover all possible topics.
Does a strict schedule matter?
If you are publishing a blog post every Wednesday, unless people are really expecting to hear from you on Wednesday, it hardly matters, as long as, you are publishing every week.
Regularity is important.
It increases your brand visibility.
People become familiar with your business and they also begin to recognize you for your quality and sincerity.
This is what ultimately improves your SEO.
The right content writing way: focus on value and accommodate SEO.
The wrong content writing way: focus on SEO and accommodate value.
The wrong way doesn’t work but it seems like shortcut and hence, most of the people want to follow it.
The right way takes time and effort but also delivers results.