Tag Archives: Content Marketing Strategy

The importance of visual content in your content marketing

When I started providing content writing and content marketing services more than 10 years ago, content marketing mostly constituted of publishing blog posts, broadcasting a newsletter and publishing articles and blog posts on other websites and blogs. People were quite happy writing lots of stuff. We were writing articles, tutorials, how to’s, and in the process, attracting decent amount of traffic to our websites.

Then a new breed of content marketers started experimenting with visual content. I remember, initially they used attractive graphics and imagery along with textual content. Gradually, in fact, not gradually, but quite fast, they started replacing textual content with infographics. They started presenting useful, insightful information, with the help of very attractive and slick visuals.

Along with visuals, videos also became an integral part of content marketing. GIF files for some time appeared here and there, but they lost to videos, but then again, they are in vogue with the advent of giphy.com.

In fact, visual content has become so mainstream that recently I came across a keyboard that types just emojis. There is an instant messaging app that just allows you to send emojis instead of text messages.

All mainstream instant messaging apps like Snapchat and Instagram heavily depend on images and videos. On Facebook and Twitter, updates that contain images and videos get more views and likes compared to the updates that contain just text.

So yes, visual content is as important, if not more, as textual content for your content marketing. Text is important, as of now, because it is down to earth, and not everybody wants to see just images and videos. Sometimes you just want to read text so content writing isn’t going to be replaced very soon.

In fact, most business websites depend on content writing for their content marketing needs. Whereas visual content requires some sort of platform, content writing can be accommodated almost everywhere. Even the images need to contain some sort of text to convey a message. This is why, no matter how much importance visual content gains, content writing for content marketing is indispensable.

But this blog post is about the importance of visual content for content marketing.

Visual content is everywhere these days due to many reasons. It’s way too easy to notice an image or video in your rapidly changing timeline than text. According to these insightful statistics on importance of visual content for content marketing, 51% B2B marketers preferred to publish visual content in 2016. Here is another very useful blog post on the importance of visual content and how it is gaining traction compared to textual content.

There is a misconception that creating visual content is difficult compared to content writing. Of course it is, comparatively, difficult, it is not as difficult as it is perceived.

For example, there are many online image editing tools available that allow you to create very attractive graphics. Videos can be created using an average mobile phone. GIF files can be created using giphy.com. Simple text messages can be created using image files. You can create PowerPoint slides and then export them into video files and then upload those videos on YouTube. Later on, you can convert certain portions of those YouTube videos to GIF files.

If you have been ignoring visual content for content marketing simply because you think that it will be difficult to produce, just start with shorter images and videos. You will be surprised to know how easy and interesting it is to create them.

Content marketing should be fun, not stressful

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There is a reason why content marketing should be fun, not stressful. I will come back to this after briefly sharing with you what my Guruji often says (he is my vocal music teacher):

When you are performing, you are communicating an emotion. In order to communicate that emotion, it needs to exist within you – you need to transmit it to your audience. If you are not enjoying your singing, neither will your audience. So if you want your audience to enjoy your performance, enjoy your performance yourself.

Coming back to content marketing, after all, it is a communication. It is in expressing art. Whether you are writing as a content writer or creating a graphic as a visual artist or creating a video as a videographer, you are expressing, you are communicating a thought or an idea, and your attitude, your inner psychology, mostly unbeknownst to you, permeates your creation.

So if your content marketing is stressful, if it is becoming painful, if you are not enjoying it, your target audience too will not enjoy it.

This Forbes blog post opines that if content marketing for you isn’t fun, maybe you’re overthinking it. Maybe you don’t have a strategy that gives you focus and peace of mind (that comes with a sense of clarity and purpose). Maybe you’re not targeting properly. Whatever are the reasons, your content marketing is no longer fun, it is stressing you out and it shows in whatever you do.

So what should you do to make your content marketing more fun and less stressful?

Personally I would suggest, find a purpose. You will no longer feel stressful if you know what you’re doing, what you are trying to achieve and whom you want to help, and why. Have a documented content marketing strategy so that at every stage you know what you’re doing and what you are accomplishing and accordingly, what you should do.

Also, this I can say as a writer, develop a conversational style. A pedantic style would be boring and uninspiring and it will eventually stress you out. Have conversations with people you are writing for. Keep yourself loose (no, I don’t mean become uncouth). By the end of the day, it will only be effective if your content marketing is fun.

So do you think content marketing is easy?

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Just like any other marketing, content marketing has its own share of hardships that you have to go through in order to achieve results. Just because most of the content marketing happens on the Internet and just because it’s easier to do things on the Internet compared to the brick-and-mortar world, many people develop this false notion that content marketing should be easy or at least, if not easy, then dirt cheap. Both are misconceptions.

The author of this blog post rightly complains, “Hey, nobody told me content marketing was going to be hard!”

In the blog post the author quotes Joe Polizzi, the founder of Content Marketing Institute who says that in terms of content marketing, we may be entering the “age of disillusionment”.

Surveys show marketers are skeptical about the effectiveness of their content efforts. Many people are trying content marketing with high hopes, but they’re not seeing the engagement they expected. Professionals are confusing short-term campaign-based marketing with long-term content marketing endeavors and they’re not looking for the right kind of ROI as a result. Many are told by agencies that “going bigger” is the solution, but it often isn’t (even if they COULD justify more spend). There are great successes… But there are disappointments, too.

This is something that I have repeatedly written on my blog too, that most of content marketing efforts fail because people have no idea exactly what they are trying to achieve. In most of the cases, they confuse content marketing with relentlessly publishing blog posts and articles trying to cover the keywords to improve their search engine rankings. Whereas there is nothing wrong in trying to improve your search engine rankings, this shouldn’t be the sole objective of content marketing.

The blog post further quotes

The most common mistake is also the most mistake easiest to correct — failing to establish a foundation, or starting point. You can’t just jump in and start producing content and expect to be effective. You have to have well-documented buy cycles, buyer profiles (personas), a library of existing content and an understanding of the tools/technologies you’ll need to effectively measure your programs. And most of all you need alignment from all key internal stake holders.

When it comes to content marketing most businesses apply the “jump first and worry about how deep the pool is later” attitude. You need to have both short-term and long-term plans. You need to figure out your content marketing metrics. You need to know what you exactly aim to do.

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.

10 metrics that tell you content marketing is making a positive impact on your business

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It’s been now a few years since content marketing went mainstream. People no longer wonder what content marketing is although a majority of business owners, entrepreneurs and companies still have doubts regarding how it exactly works for businesses and companies that vouch for it. The problem with content marketing is most of the buzz in its favour is created by people who themselves are content marketers. There are few non-content-marketing companies that put forward case studies to show how it has impacted their businesses in a positive manner and improved their bottom lines. This is also because content marketing is also a relatively new phenomena (in terms of using it on the Internet, otherwise it has existed for centuries).

Why is it important to know the content marketing success metrics?

Because unless we know them, how do we know what works and what doesn’t work? Success stories of many businesses have proven repeatedly that content marketing is working for them, but it is not a copy/paste technique because every business is unique. If you want to use content marketing, you have to use according to the needs of your own business and according to the needs of your customers and clients. There are different dynamics involved. The metric that works for business “A” might not work for business “B” and vice-a-versa. But of course, there are some standard metrics that can be observed and monitored in order to know how well your content marketing is working, and some of these metrics are listed below.

Metrics that tell you that your content marketing is benefiting your business

The increase in traffic for the targeted keywords: Most of my content marketing and content writing clients approach me for this purpose – they want to increase search engine traffic for their targeted keywords. How many of these keyword-centric visitors actually turn into paying customers and clients is another issue, but if you see that since the beginning of your content marketing campaign your targeted search engine traffic has increased, it means your content marketing is working.
The amount of time people spend on your website or blog is increasing: The more they stay on your website or blog the more they buy from you. This maxim works for every website. If people are spending more time on your website it means your content marketing is working.
Your bounce rate is coming down:
Bounce rate means people leave your website immediately after coming to the page or blog post they landed on without checking out the other pages or block posts. The success indicator of your content marketing is that your bounce rate reduces and people tend to not just stay longer on your website but also go through other sections.
The number of unique visitors is increasing: If your content marketing is drawing people from various sources it means your presence on the Internet is being recognised and gaining traction.
The number of repeat visitors is increasing: People repeatedly come to your website when they find something valuable, whether it is your content or the products and services they are looking for. Again, the more they come to your website, the greater is the chance that they end up becoming your customers and clients.
Your email subscribers are increasing: Your mailing list is one of the most valuable marketing assets you have. It takes lots of effort to make people sign up for your regular updates and if your signups are increasing, it means people value your content and would like to repeatedly hear from you.
The number of inbound links is increasing: There are 2 reasons your website and blog need inbound links – to get diversified but targeted traffic and to increase your search engine rankings. When more people link to you it means they can easily find your content because unless they come to your content directly or via another source, they cannot link to it. If more reputed blogs and websites are linking to you your content marketing is yielding results.
More people are sharing your content on social media and social networking websites: Again, 2 things are happening – people are easily able to find your content and they consider your content valuable and useful. In terms of marketing, it is easier to publish valuable content but difficult to make it findable. This happens with strategic marketing. When people are finding your content links through other resources (not directly from you) and then they are sharing your links under their own social media and social networking profiles, this is a very healthy content marketing metrics although you may not realise how it brings direct business to you.
The number of leads are increasing: Your content marketing effort is showing results if the number of leads that you generate during a particular period is increasing. Surely you have some mechanism in place that tracks how many leads your website generates per week or per month. If you are observing an increase in the number of people showing direct interest in doing business with you after the initiation of your content marketing campaign, you’re getting positive results.
Your business is increasing: Your revenue has increased. You are making more sales. You are getting more clients. Your customers and clients are referring more customers and clients to your business. If you have been running a content marketing campaign and nothing else and you can see these results, it is one of the strongest metrics.

Please keep in mind that sometimes metrics can be misleading. If suddenly you see a spike in traffic you may believe that your content marketing efforts are working wonders but unless the traffic turns into business, you cannot rest assured of the efficacy of your content marketing efforts. This is why you need to analyse constantly. If you are getting traffic, what sort of traffic your content marketing is generating? Are you getting search engine traffic for the right keywords? Is your brand getting known for the right reasons? Are people lingering on your website for the right reasons?

Nevertheless, these 10 content marketing metrics can keep you focused.