Create Great Content for Your Mobile Marketing Campaign to Get Customers Engaged with Your Brand

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To engage customers with your brand, along with other platforms you also need to focus on your mobile marketing campaign. According to Search Engine Journal, “4.2 billion people access social media sites via mobile devices with 189 million Facebook users being ‘mobile only’.”

This means that your website must be optimized for mobile use, and the content you share needs to be short, to the point, and interesting to potential customers reading small pieces of content on their mobile devices.

To engage your target demography, you need to create content that has a message people want to share with their friends and family.

Concentrate on Your Target Demography When Creating Content

Your potential customers are using their mobile devices more than ever before. When you concentrate on your target demography and write content they find interesting, you need to make it easy for the content to be shared on social media platforms.

Keep your content focused on your message, and don’t create content that is boring. When your content is unfocused, it is going to fall flat no matter where you share it. When you are creating content, strive for quality over quantity every time.

Keep Your Content to the Point

When you are creating content for use on mobile devices, keep your content to the point. Your content should be broken up into readable portions, including:

The use of bullet points makes your content easier to read.
Content needs bold sub titles to break up long paragraphs.
Short, to the point sentences make your content easier to digest.

Increase Your Mobile Marketing with an SMS Texting Platform

SMS texting platforms offer you several opportunities to reach your customers where they spend their time the most, on their mobile devices. To use an SMS texting platform, you must create an opt-in campaign to get permission to send marketing messages to your customer base.

Once you have members signed up for your texting campaign, you can create valuable content and share it with your customers through text messaging. While text messages offer you a number of opportunities to engage with your customers, one is to send links to the blog posts you create for your website.

Texting Offers Instant Access to Your Customers

The ability to text your customers at a moment’s notice is invaluable when it comes to mobile content marketing strategies. You can offer deals that are time-limited, and you can target specific customers based on where they are located.

If you have multiple locations for your business, this is an excellent way to keep track of your customers and only send out messages to customers that will be able to cash in on your deal. An SMS texting software opens up a whole new avenue of mobile marketing, and it is essential in today’s competitive business world.

Getting People to Share Your Content

To get customers to share your content, it should have a strong message and say something about the person sharing it. For example, content that makes a statement is going to be shared more than content that doesn’t have anything new to share. While you don’t want to create content that is offensive, content that has an edginess to it is more likely to go viral. When you want your content to be shared, it should be interesting to read.

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10 types of content that make your content marketing successful

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On what does the success of your content marketing depend? The success of your content marketing depends on two things:

How relevant your content is
How you make sure that your content reaches the right audience

Both these factors are interdependent. The second factor is self-explanatory. I mean, once you have created high-quality, relevant content, you need to use all the channels at your disposal to disseminate your content and make sure it reaches the right audience.

Before I proceed, how do you define a successful content marketing?

You create high-quality, relevant content on an ongoing basis, for a long time
Your content reaches the right audience
Your content elicits the right response from the right audience

What’s the right response?

People read/view your content
People respond to your content
People share your content on social media websites
Your sales increase

Now we come to the moot topic of this post: 10 types of content that make your content marketing successful. Here they are:

Content that creates a sense of urgency without misleading people.
Content that makes people feel important.
Content that tells an interesting story, especially with a lesson.
Content that inspires us to take an action that can turn our lives for better.
Content that reconfirms our beliefs without pandering to our misconceptions.
Content that educates us and also entertains us at the same time.
Content that challenges our beliefs without hurting our feelings, with hard facts.
Content that throws at us an element of surprise.
Content that gives us a fresh point of view.
Content that elicits strong emotions, like sadness, happiness or joy.

These are the 10 types of content that make your content marketing successful.

Should you switch to video content or stick with written content?

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They say Socrates was quite pissed when writing was gradually beginning to be used for preserving information and wisdom. He thought when we transfer our wisdom and knowledge to the written word, we begin to use our brain less and less. The oral tradition in India lasted for multiple millennia.

Anyway, in the beginning, people used to use clay tablets to preserve important facts. Then they started using animal skins and after that, tree leaves and tree barks.

Eventually publishing came and it took the world by storm. For a very long time books, newspapers and magazines were the only source of news, entertainment and information. Along came the radio and then came the television. Now we have the Internet and even after the initial stage of the Internet, now we have the Internet-connected mobile phones. What am I trying to get at?

No matter what is the message, the medium keeps changing. And we have to adapt. In the times when connectivity was scarce, slow and expensive, people preferred written content to such an extent that you would find hundreds of tutorials advising you not to use even images on the webpages so that they would load fast.

These days there is no such problem. Bandwidth is abundant and today’s mobile phones are more powerful than the PCs and laptops we used to use 10 years ago. They say that the total computing power that was used to send the man to the moon for the first time is equal to the computing power that we have on an average smartphone. A minimum Internet browsing speed of 2 Mbps is almost becoming a fundamental human right. The point is, it’s easier to view videos today than it was a few years ago. We don’t even give a second thought before watching a video on our mobile phone even if we are using mobile data.

Not just watching a video, these days even making videos is easier. If nothing else, you can simply create a PowerPoint using MS Office and then export the PowerPoint presentation to a movie file and then upload that movie file to YouTube. Of course you can use your phone to create HD videos any given day.

So, if so many people are inclined to watch videos rather than reading text, should you switch to video content marketing from written content marketing?

If your audience demands it, then why not? Ultimately it depends on whom you are trying to target. If your viewers/target customers prefer videos, promote yourself using videos. If they are not crazy about watching videos all the time and would rather go through text, give them written content.

Video content is good but you cannot use video content everywhere. For example, if you have a website you have to explain your stuff with written content. Whether it is your homepage or your about us page, or services section, or the products section, or the FAQs, you need written content. So no matter how great video content looks, you cannot rule out the importance of content writing. On the flipside, if your business can benefit from video content then you should definitely consider having it for your business and using it for marketing.

How much should you pay your freelance content writer?

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One of the most important questions my clients have while negotiating for my content writing services is, how much should they pay me as their freelance content writer? In this blog post I’m going to talk about “serious” clients who know the importance of content marketing vis-a-vis their businesses and hence, totally understand that there are going to have to pay for quality content. So the question here is not whether they can get cheapest content or not, the question is, how much they should pay for quality, result-oriented content.

This blog post on Clear Voice has a nice infographic explaining how you should pay your freelance content writer according to the demands of the assignment and the expertise of the content writer you are working with. The Clear Voice blog post/infographic has been prepared according to their work model – the content writers working for them charge per minute or per campaign. Although I’m open to the idea, I have never charged my clients per word (although sometimes I quote per 100-word-bracket) because then, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, the clients begin to get bogged down by the number of words they need or don’t need. Hence, for many years now, I have been charging per page, per blog post, per email campaign with an average word range of 400-700. If research is also needed, I charge an hourly rate because you cannot quantify research-based writing.

So how much should you pay your freelance content writer?

Again, as described in the above-linked blog post, it depends on your content requirement as well as the expertise you require. Anyway, since I’m writing this on my own blog under my own content writing and content marketing website is, you must be wondering how you should pay me.

My current rates are at this link.

As the cliché goes, these are not written in stone. I keep changing them according to different clients but in most of the cases, I stick to these numbers because otherwise working becomes a constraint. I should feel appropriately compensated for the effort I am putting in. Just imagine, if you are not interested in paying me fairly, why should I be interested in writing content that helps you generate more business? It works both ways.

I haven’t arrived at these numbers by referring to another website or by talking to other content writers – these are the numbers I have arrived at after having worked for multiple clients under multiple conditions, for many years. These are the rates, I feel, currently, my clients are comfortable with.

Having said that, clients would like to get more content, more quality content, at lesser rates. I would like to charge a higher rate or at least maintain my current rate while maintaining my quality-level.

Some clients are determined to pay me a lot less than what I quote. How do I deal with those clients?

I don’t like turning my clients away. I know that my content writing can help you get more business (if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t write for you). There are 3 reasons some clients don’t want to pay me what I ask for:

They don’t understand content marketing yet
They don’t believe in their own business (and hence, unsure whether they should be spending money on getting quality content)
They believe in their business but they are genuinely short of funds

After an interaction of 5 minutes (or exchange of a few emails) I can make out whether a client believes in his or her own business or not. Once I get this feel, without wasting time, I let it be known to the client that I’m not interested in his or her work.

For type 1, I either try to convince the client by providing data and relevant information or I let him or her go.

For type 3, if I really get a strong feeling that the client is serious about his or her work and the lack of funds is holding him or her back, I agree to work at lower rates.

How you can band content marketing and SEO together

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SEO is a big reason why most of my clients pursue content marketing. Even today I got a query from a German client asking for SEO content that will help them improve their search engine rankings and draw targeted traffic to their website.

SEO and content marketing are related to each other but the problem is most of the small business owners think that the sole purpose of publishing content on their website is to improve their SEO. On the surface there is nothing wrong in this perception, the problem arises when people completely focus on SEO, ignoring the inherent strength of publishing quality, engaging content on the website and elsewhere.

The basic purpose of publishing content and then distributing it using various channels available to you is to provide value to your target audience so that you can establish a long-lasting relationship with them. You need to provide them valuable information. They should hear from you regularly so that they begin to recognise you whenever they come across your content. The purpose of content marketing is creating a recognition space for you and your brand so that it becomes easier to find you, to relate to you and to feel like doing business with you because of a positive association.

Why people use content marketing solely to improve their SEO?

In the beginning content really helped you improve your search engine rankings. Back then the search engine ranking algorithms weren’t as complicated and choosy as they are today. Have 20 webpages talking about a particular topic (with different titles) using your keywords and you could rank well. For straight 2 years in 2004-2005 I used to rank on the 1^st page of Google for the phrases “freelance content writer” and “online content writer” because I had published lots of articles on my website talking about these 2 phrases– it was my mistake that I couldn’t take advantage of this privilege and didn’t pay much attention to maintaining my rankings. Maintain an acceptable keyword density, use the keywords in your title and publish 20-30 blog posts and articles and you could enjoy good rankings.

Since then, much has changed, but people’s perception hasn’t. Firstly, they still think that indiscriminately using keywords in their blog posts and articles is going to get them higher search engine rankings and secondly, the confuse content marketing with SEO. Both are partly related and partly unrelated.

Search engines are constantly aiming at indexing high-quality content and while indexing and ranking high quality content, although they take note of the sort of language and words being used, more important is the relevance and the quality of content you are creating and publishing. How is it going to be useful to the search engine users, this is their primary concern. How do they find out whether a particular piece of content is of good quality? There are thousands of factors but the primary factors are:

How relevant is the title of the blog post or webpage you have just created
How well-written the content is
How the keywords have been used (yes, the keywords still matter)
How easy it is to access the content on the web page
How easy it is to view your content using different devices
How many influences are talking about your content
How many trustworthy inbound links your content attracts
How much buzz it is creating on social media websites
How frequently you publish quality content

All these attributes solely depend on the combination of quality, relevance and usability of your content. A well-meaning title naturally contains the subject you are handling. People naturally share content that is useful. Engaging content encourages people to talk about it through blog posts and social media updates. People link to your content if they like it.

All these factors are taken into consideration by the search engines while ranking your content.

So while it is important to take care of SEO (so that people who are meant to find your content can find it easily) this shouldn’t be the sole objective of your content marketing strategy. You use content marketing to improve your conversion rate and draw people to your website naturally.