Tag Archives: Content Marketing

Writing effective content for 7 stages of content marketing

Content writing for 7 stages of content marketing

I just came across an interesting infographic explaining the 7 stages of content marketing. They are

Setting a goal – what you want to achieve through content writing.
Creating a content writing strategy – what all factors will influence your content writing process.
Research – to create authoritative content, you need to do research to collect useful insights and data for making a convincing case.
The actual content writing process – use all the information that you have gathered, write the content and publish it based on your strategy.
Content curation – provided you can find it, you can curate highly useful content and either publish your own version of it, or share it using your social media and social networking timelines.
Content distribution and broadcasting – once you have written the content and published it, you need to broadcast it. In terms of content marketing, you need to “market” your content. You can use different channels available to you including email marketing, social media marketing and search marketing.
Engagement – this is also an important component of content marketing. Only when you engage your audience, it responds to your content.

Just as content marketing followers a 7-stage approach, so does content writing, although, content writing is a subset of content marketing – the content that you market is often obtained through high-quality content writing.

But the process is more or less the same.

When I start working on a certain piece of content, I always ask my client what he wants to achieve? What should be the end result? How must the reader feel after having read the entire piece?

Research is an expensive undertaking, because it takes time and also, access to data sources. Very few clients are ready to pay for research and they think it should be a part of writing content.

They need good content, good content needs data, data can be gathered with research, but they think, they shouldn’t have to pay for the research because it is part of content writing. It becomes a vicious circle.

Then comes the actual content writing process. Being an experienced content writer, this doesn’t take much time provided I have the needed information.

Content curation is not a part of content writing, but it plays a crucial role. For example, I didn’t have time today to work on something elaborate but then when I came across this infographic, I quickly had something to write about. This can be termed as content curation. You can directly share the content you are curating, or you can use it to write and publish content on your own website or blog.

One of the most crucial passes content distribution. This is where most of the content marketers are stumped.

For content marketing, you need to build an audience, or you need to spend money on a pre-built audience. Since people are not even ready to spend good money on content writing, spending money on content distribution is even more difficult. But, writing and publishing content is just a very small part of content marketing. What’s important is, you make sure that your content reaches the audience.

Engagement, again, is as important as marketing your content. We live and operate in a high state of distraction these days. People won’t notice your content unless you are able to engage them. Engaging means making people respond to your content. People respond through “Liking” your social media updates, sharing your content, writing about your content, recreating it on Twitter – basically, reacting to your content in a positive manner.

You may like to read What is engaging content writing?

Infographic-Goal-Oriented Content: how to create content for links, engagements and conversions

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Infographic on creating goal oriented content for link building, engagement and conversion

The adage “content is king” has been around for ages and is still embraced by Internet marketers today – so much so that it has become a marketing tactic of its own.

Nowadays, it is close to impossible to see a brand that does not have a website or a blog as a platform to catch their audience’s attention.

Content marketing is considered an integral part of any digital marketer’s toolkit.

It refers to the practice of distributing meaningful pieces of content among your target audience, so that they become your paying and loyal customers.

Each brand has its own strategy on how it plans to achieve this, from thinking up brilliant topics to creating series of posts that are relevant and helpful to their ideal market.

Of course, this is all the much trickier than it sounds. Blog posts don’t write by themselves, and to be truly effective, you need to consider how your content will benefit your readers:

By identifying your objective, you can optimize what you are writing.

So, instead of just churning out information, you can come up with goal-oriented content. Similarly, you need to make sure you are writing high-quality content that is easy to understand.

Coming up with content that is aligned with your marketing campaigns allows you to maximize its benefits.

In content marketing, you want to produce content for several reasons: building links for higher domain authority, sparking audience engagement, increasing social shares and converting your leads for more sales, just to name a few.

There are different types of content you can publish to achieve these goals, such as infographics, resource articles and blog posts.

In this infographic, we show you the different ways you can maximize your content production process and reach your content marketing targets. You can also check out the original post for more information.

Want to know why your content marketing isn’t performing well?

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Why is your content marketing failing?

You are regularly publishing blog posts. You have also tried your hand at publishing guest posts on other websites and blogs. You regularly send out your email campaigns. Then why isn’t your content marketing performing the way you think it should?

You may like to read 12 rules to make your content marketing successful.

Here is a thought-provoking post on why your content marketing might be failing.

The author rightly mentions some of the reasons:

No definition of success: Having no clue what exactly you are trying to achieve through content marketing.
Bad content: Publishing content without paying attention to the quality and relevance of your content.
No commitment: You publish and broadcast content randomly and according to your convenience, without committing yourself to a content publishing calendar.
No promotion: You think that by just publishing content you’re going to generate traffic.

Many people mistakenly think that content marketing is a cheaper and faster way to online success, whereas, this is not the case.

Just like any other venture that needs hard work and focus to succeed, so does content marketing.

Content marketing is not a quick fix.

It is just another form of marketing.

It requires long-term effort and commitment.

It requires you to spend money although, not as much as you spend on conventional marketing and advertising.

If content marketing is hard work, persistence and even expense, then why use it?

It is more effective than other forms of marketing available to you.

It is cheaper, comparatively, and its success is long lasting.

Content marketing is a holistic approach to educating and informing your prospective customers and clients so that they come your website on their own rather than being tricked through an advertisement or a marketing campaign.

You may also like to read What is content marketing? Explained in detail.

Since in content marketing you promote your business through the strength of your content, your content is the backbone of the entire campaign.

If your content is lousy then so is your campaign and then so is the outcome.

You want good outcome?

You need good, high-quality content.

Then comes persistence.

Attention span is low on the Internet.

No matter how great that particular piece of content that you published is, after a couple of days, it is going to fall off the radar.

You have to remain in front of your audience.

But, despite having great content, unless you aggressively promote your content and push it in front of your audience (without annoying or offending them), it is going to be difficult for people to find it.

I suggest the following actions if you want to promote your content without going the conventional advertising route:

Publish regularly so that the Google crawler begins to crawl and index your content with greater speed.
Publish SEO friendly content so that you enjoy higher search engine rankings that in turn makes more people find your content and come to your website.
Build a mailing list to distribute your content.
Remain active on social media.

I would like to stress again, merely publishing content doesn’t make your content marketing successful.

You need to follow a multifaceted approach.

Nice analysis of how Grammarly attracts 41.46M monthly visitors with content marketing

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Grammarly content marketing strategy

I just checked my old email inbox that I used to use around 2010. In 2011, they were just in the process of launching Grammarly and one of their representatives had filled up my contact form inviting me to write a review for their writing tool in exchange for a three-month Grammarly subscription.

Through the email thread it isn’t clear whether I actually wrote the review or not – in a couple of years I had to take down my old website because another website had completely hijacked my content and due to that, my search engine rankings had dropped to 0.

I don’t have much problem with grammar and I’m not their ideal customer, nonetheless, a few times I have tried to use their service but have always found it a bit expensive, especially for my limited needs.

But that’s another story.

Here is a nice analysis of how Grammarly uses content marketing to attract 41.46 million monthly visitors to its website. The writer of this blog post says that Grammarly uses strategically connected content clusters.

What are content clusters? It is the grouping of multiple web pages and blog posts under one primary topic.

So, you create a blog post briefly explaining the main topic, and then for all the related subtopics you write separate blog posts and then link to those blog posts from the main blog post.

Why content clusters help?

Content clusters are good for conversion rate as well as search engine rankings.

Why content clusters are good for conversion rate?

Around 50% B2B buyers prefer to read 3-5 content pieces before they make a buying decision. Normally they read a blog post or a web page. Then they navigate to another website. Then you again make an effort to bring them back to your website. This goes on multiple times. Most of the times they lose the track.

When you create a content cluster, they are immediately exposed to all the relevant content pieces. Whatever they need to read before deciding, it’s right in front of them. You don’t have to get them to your website multiple times, wasting your own time and resources.

Why content clusters are good for your SEO?

Google evaluates your rankings on the basis of the relevance and comprehensiveness of your content as well as the way people react to your content. When you create content clusters you already create comprehensive content.

If people find your link on Google, go to your website and then leave your website to carry on with the search, Google assumes they didn’t find the information they were looking for and hence you shouldn’t be ranking for the search term used. Your ranking for that keyword or search term is lowered.

Conversely, upon finding your link on Google, when people click it, go to your website and then spend some time exploring your website and going through additional links, Google assumes that your website contains relevant information and consequently, improves your rankings for that keyword or search term

Coming back to Grammarly…

The SaaS company knows that it is a service for writers or people who take their writing seriously whether they are scholars, writers or business persons. Consequently, there is lots of written content on their blog. The above-linked blog post says that Grammarly has 2100 content pieces on its blog.

On second thought, 2100 content pieces isn’t much for a company with a valuation of 100-US$ 500 million (source), but still, it is enough content to make it into a content marketing powerhouse, especially when the content pieces are strategically grouped together in the form of logical content clusters.

Exactly when does your content begin to generate more business for you

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The image shows pillars of coins in the form of ROI

When do content writing and content marketing begin to pay off?

Here I will write in the context of content writing. When do you start experiencing the positive results of writing and publishing content on your website or blog on regular basis?

When you are writing content on your own (you are investing time) you are not spending money, but if you have hired a content writer then it is a recurring expense especially when you want to go on publishing content for a few months.

The nature of content marketing, in terms of improving your search engine rankings and generating more business for you, is such that it takes some time before you begin to experience your return on investment.

It’s like doing farming. When you are just about to start farming, if you don’t have land, you buy land, which is an expense. Then you prepare the land for sowing, which involves effort and money. Then you buy seeds. You sow the seeds and take measures that they grow into a healthy harvest. Then you reap the benefits.

When you repeat the sowing and harvesting, your investment and hard work begins to pay. But until then, you must be patient and courageous.

The same happens with content writing and content marketing.

I was inspired to write this post when I came across this graphic. The graphic was prepared by the SEO website Moz.

Graph explaining exactly when content writing and content marketing begin to benefit your business

It shows that when you start investing in content, initially there is euphoria as you see some results. Then, as the search engines begin to figure your content and your competitors, knowingly or unknowingly, begin to catch up, although your costs go on mounting, the results dip.

The graphic shows an area called “The gap of disappointment” and most of the people abandon their content writing and content publishing efforts during this phase when they begin to think that although they have spent a lot of money, the ROI isn’t there. Just when their cost is going to come down and the content writing and content marketing is about to show results, they quit.

The graph shows that it takes around 5 months for things to really kick off. Then, by 7th month, the ROI begins to rise and cost and effort begin to come down and eventually, cost and effort plateau, but ROI keeps rising for a long time before creating a big gap between effort/cost and ROI.

Why content writing and content marketing take a while before beginning to grow your business, compared to conventional advertising?

It takes time to create a presence for yourself even when you use conventional advertising it’s just that, the mental conditioning is such that you don’t realize it.

First, we must make it clear why you want to use content marketing and not conventional advertising. I mean, if conventional advertising is better, why not use it instead of content marketing?

Conventional advertising is instant gratification. You pay for exposure, you get the exposure, and people buy from you. It’s an ongoing process. Unless you are a famous brand, there is always going to be a big gap between advertising expense and ROI, in the negative sense.

Take for example advertising on Google. You pay for every click. Stop paying for clicks and you stop getting traffic, it is as simple as that.

Similarly, you stop advertising, and people can’t see you. You haven’t become a part of their lives. You haven’t kept in touch with them. You haven’t helped them in any other manner. You have simply advertised your product or service hoping that they will come to your website and buy from you.

The combination of content writing and content marketing on the other hand isn’t instant gratification. It is a long-term investment in building and establishing lasting relationships.

Once you have published enough good quality, targeted content, you don’t need to pay for every click Google sends your way. When you have organically improved your search engine rankings, whether you get 10 clicks or 10,000 clicks, or even 10 million clicks, you don’t have to pay.

Content in the context of content marketing doesn’t mean publishing any sort of content just to get visibility. Your content needs to be meaningful, useful and informative. It must solve a purpose. Your prospective customers or clients must feel good when they come across your content on search engines and on social media and social networking websites.

Content marketing means building your brand presence through an emotional connection. People begin to know you. They begin to recognize you for the quality of your content. You don’t need to advertise. They themselves seek you out.

Yes, initially there is a cost. But once you have published enough content return on investment is so huge that compared to that, the money and effort that you spend on writing and publishing content is negligible.

As you can see in the above graph, it takes time. Depending on how much competition you have it can easily take between 3-6 months to get good results and if you can sustain yourself till then, often, there is no looking back.