Tag Archives: Content Strategy

How to attract influencers with content marketing

Influencers play an important part in your content marketing. They are the ones who often promote your content, share your links and talk about your products and services to their friends, families and colleagues. They take interest in your insights, reach out to you and talk to other influencers in your niche. If you want your content to go viral on the Internet, you need a big team of influencers constantly engaging you and paying attention to your blog and social media updates. A big part of content marketing is attracting as many influencers to your business as possible and then keeping them engaged.

Decide who are your influencers from the onset of content marketing itself

As described above, influencers are people who would be interested in hearing from you and spreading your message voluntarily. They don’t always have to be your customers and clients. Even if they never buy from you or do business with you, they can be highly beneficial to your content marketing strategy. They are like evangelists, but unlike evangelists, they may not always use your products and services.

So who might be your influencers?

People who have an active social media presence
People who have lots of followers, connections and readers
People who show interest in your updates and what you have to say
People who write blog posts and articles in a field that relates to your business interests

The main attributes should be their unwavering interest in your own field of interest, their ability to communicate convincingly and regularly and their reach. These are the people that you have to target through your content marketing.

Targeted content marketing for your influencers

You need to publish content that caters to the interest of your influencers and then use the channels that enable you to broadcast your content to your influencers.

Decide your channels first because you will be creating and publishing content based on the dynamics of your distribution channels. For example, the content that you publish on Twitter will be totally different from content that you publish on Facebook and the same goes for LinkedIn. On Pinterest you will be posting visual content. On SlideShare you upload slides. There is a website where you can upload PDF documents. On YouTube you upload videos. So define your strategy that reaches out to your influencers according to the publishing and broadcasting channel that you’re going to use, and then start creating content.

Creating content for influencers

In order to target influencers, you need to create content that is entertaining, captivating and useful. Remember that influencers not only go through your content, they react to it, which is very important. People who simply consume your content are not your influences. Your influencers leave comments on your blog. They write blog posts in response to your blog posts and articles. They respond to your social media updates. They post links to your blog posts and articles on their own timelines. They broadcast your videos and images using mobile apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. So you must create and publish content that interests them and makes them feel that sharing your content would be useful to their family and friends and even if not useful, it will be cool to share it.

Most of your influencers are high-performers and this is why they are influencers. They themselves influence people. People pay attention to them. They become influencers because when they talk about you, people pay attention. This is why it is important you create high-quality, relevant content that they can appreciate. Remember that they will pay attention to your content only if it suits their purpose – it provides value to their audience. They don’t necessarily have to agree with you. Even if one of your influencers publishes a blog post as a rebuttal to what you have written it is going to benefit you (unless you have written something totally crappy). Your content must move them to take an action. You should create and distribute content that is

Original
Thought-provoking
Relevant
Packed with information
Helpful
Well-written
Uses references from highly reputed sources
Created/written in a friendly tone
Easily shareable

Finally, there is no hard and fast rule – you just need to be regular, persistent and quality conscious. It will take some time before your influencers begin to notice you. You need to interact with them as and when opportunity strikes (don’t just butt-in for the sake of it). Write them an email if you have something genuine to say. Connect with them on Twitter and Facebook (or whatever channel you are influencers prefer). And once again, persistence is the key. Most content marketers fail here.

5 steps to creating a powerful content marketing strategy

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A powerful content marketing strategy may carry different connotations for different marketing needs but its fundamental purpose is to give you the results you want. It doesn’t matter whether you want to generate more leads, more sales, more subscribers for your email updates, more blog readers to generate ad revenue, get more donations for your charity organisation, get more students for your school or college or further your political career, a powerful content marketing strategy can help you create an impressive presence on the Internet. Again, impressive presence means that it’s easier to find you for the stuff you should be known for and what people find is compelling, relevant and useful – it solves the purpose.

This Huffington Post blog post on creating a powerful content marketing strategy lists 5 steps that can help you create one for your business, although it misses the 2^nd step, which I will try to incorporate here. These 5 steps are

Know your audience
Prioritise and plan your content publishing and marketing
Assign roles and responsibilities if you have a big content marketing team
Set goals and track performance
Focus on the long-term (the point that I feel is missing)

Points 1-4 are explained in the blog post so I will throw some light on the 5^th point.

Although content marketing is one of the most effective ways to project yourself (or your business) it also takes time and effort, and money if you want to work with a content writer. Many small business owners mistakenly believe that since content marketing seems to be free (because hey, everybody can write blog posts and articles) it should be quite easy and low-investment.

Yes, exceptions are always there. There are many small-business-owners who are doing a great job doing their own content marketing and many small businesses have transitioned from small to medium and even big. But for every small-business turning into big-business there are thousands of businesses that never grow or evolve. In fact, a majority of businesses shut shop within the 1^st year because they get disillusioned. If everything is so easy and free on the Internet, why doesn’t it work, they wonder?

Well, just like any other marketing medium, content marketing is for real businesses and when it comes to real businesses, you need to spend money, time and effort.

You want to achieve success in your content marketing? Then prepare a long-term plan. Don’t expect a jump in your targeted traffic or your social media exposure within a couple of months unless you have a million dollars to spend. Content marketing requires a strategic, focused and sustained effort. Only then it shows results.

It pays to make people laugh with your content

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Content marketing – mostly B2B – is usually considered to be a very serious affair but it doesn’t have to be that way. There have been many instances of content marketing where businesses try to make their prospective and present customers and clients laugh.

Everybody loves humour. Back in the late 90s I was writing course material for computer training centers that were sprouting everywhere in India. The For Dummies books were my inspiration. I applied their style while preparing lessons on DOS, dBase, COBOL and FoxPro (many of you haven’t heard of these, right?) and some of the training center owners loved the way I wrote (and so did their students). I was also known to use humour in my journalistic writing for quite some time. Sadly, I lost this touch but I’m trying to regain it and hopefully within a few days you will be able to see it on my blog and elsewhere.

Humor has a relaxing effect. No matter how tense a situation it is, when people are exposed to funny anecdotes, jokes and situations, they forget about their troubles and shift their focus to the funny thing that is taking place in front of them. According to this Forbes article,

Dozens of surveys suggest that humor can be at least one of the keys to success. A Robert Half International survey, for instance, found that 91% of executives believe a sense of humor is important for career advancement; while 84% feel that people with a good sense of humor do a better job. Another study by Bell Leadership Institute found that the two most desirable traits in leaders were a strong work ethic and a good sense of humor.

You may think what amusing you can write for a, let us say, plumping website, or a refrigeration spare parts website, or even a church website. Well, here is what I came across while reading “writing bloopers” in The Sense of Style (the writing guide I’m reading these days):

The sermon this morning: “Jesus walks on the water.”

The sermon tonight will be: “Searching for Jesus.”

This was written on a church noticeboard somewhere.

Here is another one

The patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in 2008.

This was written by a psychiatrist probably in a case study.

These are just examples of how humorous material can appear even at least expected places.

Various industries are mistakenly categorised as “boring” and “exciting”. For example, according to popular perception, you may categorise fashion, cookery, modelling and music as “exciting” industries (just to name a few to give you an idea). On the other hand, you may consider healthcare, automobiles, accounting, legal and real estate as, according to the convention, “boring” industries. Of course, something that makes you money, something that is your livelihood, cannot be termed as boring but here I’m not writing this from your perspective – the business owner who runs an accounting firm – I’m writing from the perspective of your clients. How do you keep them interested in your content without boring them with numbers and concepts that they may come across only on an annual basis while trying to file their returns?

Here is an exceptional example of using humor to educate people even when it’s a matter of life and death:

Dumb Ways to Die is an Australian public service announcement campaign by Metro Trains in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia to promote rail safety. When my 10-year-old daughter mentioned the video I was sort of pissed at what sort of videos she was watching on YouTube. Then I saw it, did some research and to my pleasant surprise, found out that it is an awareness campaign.

As you can see by the number of people who have watched the video and a slew of video games and proceeding videos that have been uploaded onto the Internet what a hit the campaign has been. Safety is a life-and-death matter but it doesn’t have to be very serious.

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

Combine content marketing, social media and SEO for inbound marketing

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Inbound marketing is a balanced mix of content marketing, social media marketing and SEO. In fact, these are not standalone activities. Every effective content marketing strategy incorporates social media as well as SEO.

When I work on a client project, this is how I prioritise these three aspects of inbound marketing on the Internet:

Content marketing
Social media marketing
SEO

Although most of my clients contact me to improve their SEO on my priority list it is the last aspect of content writing I pay attention to. Does it mean I don’t think it is important? Of course SEO is important and I would never ignore it. It’s just that, I would prefer SEO to happen automatically rather than making an effort for it. I will explain below how. But first…

Content marketing is the most important aspect of inbound marketing

This is because unless you have quality content and unless you know how to market it and then actually market it, nothing much can be achieved. Inbound marketing means people coming to your website or blog on their own after, either having interacted with you on one of the social media or social networking websites, or having come across your content either on your own website or blog, or somewhere else. But whenever they come across you, they come across you via your content.

And it doesn’t just stop at them coming to your website, in fact, the real action starts when people are on your website. It is on your website that you have to convince them into doing business with you. This is where your content plays the most important part. If your content doesn’t convince them, everything goes to waste. If your content is below par, your social media strategy as well as SEO are going to fail. This is why, at the beginning of your inbound marketing campaign, the first thing you need to take care of is content marketing.

Content marketing automatically takes care of social media and SEO

Yes, for the sake of talking to clients one has to talk about content marketing, social media marketing and SEO as separate plans of action whereas they are not. They are all a part of your inbound marketing strategy fuelled by your content marketing strategy. Content marketing means

Writing/producing high-quality content on your website/blog and elsewhere.
Distributing that content using various channels available to you including social media and social networking websites and email marketing.
Search engine optimizations so that people can easily find your content on search engines for the right keywords and search terms.
Constantly analysing the effect of your content using web analytics tools like Google Analytics.
Tweaking your marketing effort according to the results obtained from the web analytics tools

So why do I say that content marketing automatically takes care of social media and SEO?

Assumption.

Assumption that you are going to take all the right steps. What are these right steps?

You use the right language to write your content – the language used by your prospective customers and clients. If you do that, you are automatically search engine optimising your content and hence, in the process, improving your search engine rankings.
Strategically promote your content on social media and social networking websites. You know that in order to promote your content you need a responsive audience. How do you get a responsive audience? By engaging them with not just high-quality content, but also responding to them whenever they reach out to you. If you do this on an ongoing basis, you are handling your social media well.
You are using the right words at the right places while creating content. If you’re going to address the problems and concerns of your prospective customers and clients you are going to use the appropriate expressions while creating titles. You will also use the keywords and search terms people normally use while trying to find your sort of products and services in your headlines and sub-headlines. If possible, you will also use these search terms and keywords in your bulleted points and the hypertext links.

If you properly take care of your content marketing, you are automatically taking care of the other aspects of content marketing like content writing and content production, content distribution, social media marketing and SEO. All these lead to a solid inbound marketing strategy that can totally transform your conversion rate.

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