Tag Archives: Content Strategy

10 ways to make your content marketing super effective

Super effective content marketing strategy

According to the latest Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs 2015 survey (US-centric) just 38% people think that their content marketing is effective. What about the remaining 62%? The rate of dissatisfaction is so high simply because most of the people don’t understand what exactly content marketing is but they want to use it anyway because other businesses are using it. They have a basic idea. They know that compared to conventional marketing content marketing is multiple times more effective and multiple times less costly but somehow they are unable to crack it.

Content marketing, as I have multiple times mentioned on my blog, isn’t just about publishing content, although content publishing is one of the most important aspects of it. No matter how great your content is, unless people know about it, it is of no use. It is like the gold in a mine that has not been discovered. As the name suggests, a big part of content marketing is, marketing. You produce something, and then you market it. The difference in this case is, you are not marketing content to sell it, you are marketing content to develop your own platform, to develop your own broadcasting channel so that you become familiar to your prospective customers and clients and they develop a habit of consuming your content on an ongoing basis.

According to the link mentioned above, these are the 10 ways you can make your content marketing super effective.

Promote your content:
Millions of pieces of content is being produced on the Internet every day. This content doesn’t just exist in the form of blog posts and articles. It can be videos, slideshows, animations, infographics, PDFs, social media and social networking updates, online forum threads and comments left by people on various websites and blogs. Any piece of information, any piece of thought, any piece of idea, is content. When so much content is being published how can your content be noticed by people? How do they find your content? Each time you publish something new it is not going to be ranked well by the search engines and it is not going to be promoted by your fans and followers on social media. You will have to do it on your own. You will need to develop a mechanism to constantly promote your new as well as existing content.
Clearly define your content marketing mission statement: What exactly do you want to achieve when you publish and market content? Obviously you want to target an audience, a particular audience. For example, if you are marketing some gadget you will be targeting an audience that is interested in the benefits of that particular gadget if not that particular gadget itself. You also need to know what sort of content your audience prefers and what channels it uses to access its favorite content.
Create valuable content: Your content is of no use if people don’t find it valuable. They are not going to access and appreciate your content simply because you are creating it and publishing it. Only your mom is going to do that. Make your content irresistible. Make it worth-reading.
Repurpose your existing content for many formats: It is not easy to create unique content for all the formats you are trying to achieve. For example, if you have just created a blog post, you can also create a podcast out of it. Pick up the main points of the blog post and create a slideshow. You can also create a small video that goes through all the main points.
Document your content marketing strategy: How are you implementing it? What steps are you taking to streamline your content according to the needs of your audience? What are the stories that you intend to tell? Are you sticking to your targets? If you are not, what corrective measures are you taking?
Don’t go full-throttle at the beginning of your content marketing campaign: In order to make your content marketing super effective, testing is extremely crucial. Publish some content, distribute it and observe people’s reaction. Study the sort of traffic your content attracts. If it is attracting the right kind of traffic then you’re moving in the right direction but if the sort of traffic that your content is generating isn’t going to turn into business, then it’s time to rethink. This is why, if you have a lean approach in the beginning it’s easier to change.
Keep measuring: Evaluate your content marketing constantly. As mentioned above, study what sort of traffic and engagement your content encourages. Use Google analytics to study the traffic pattern.
Have a clear idea of what sort of buyer you’re targeting: The better you know about your buyer, the more effective is going to be your content marketing strategy. Don’t try to target everybody under the sun.
Automate some of the content marketing tasks: Promoting and broadcasting your content can turn out to be a litany of repetitive tasks. There is nothing wrong in automating some of those tasks. There are many services available on the Internet that can help you automate some of these tasks.
Develop a sense of discipline: Accept that content marketing is hard work. Very effective, but hard work. It requires discipline, perseverance, resolve and lots of confidence. At many stages you will feel nothing is happening but still you will need to stick to your ground. You will need to constantly come up with new content writing, content publishing and content marketing ideas to beat your competition.

As mentioned above, in order to make your content marketing super effective you constantly need to be one step ahead of your competition because just like you even your competitors recognise the importance of content marketing. Your competitors are constantly publishing and distributing new content to remain visible so accordingly you have to strategize each and every step. Besides, on the Internet, it isn’t just your competition that constantly challenges you, there is also lots of noise on the Internet that is constantly competing with your content.

5 beginners’ mistakes in content marketing

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I have mentioned in one of my previous blog posts that 94% B2B small businesses on the Internet are using content marketing in one form or another. So naturally, if so many people are using content marketing more people want to use it. But the problem is, there are some beginners’ mistakes that people commit when they don’t understand the true meaning of content marketing and simply try to ape people who might, to be frank, be aping someone else. Listed below are the 5 major beginners’ mistakes in content marketing.

When you are publishing blog posts and articles, you’re doing content marketing. Publishing blog posts and articles means you are creating content, which is good, which is a first step in the direction of content marketing. If you don’t have content, what do you market? And marketing here doesn’t mean that you are trying to sell content, it means through your content you’re drawing people to your website. You publish high-quality content so that people come to your website to make use of it. But by merely publishing that content doesn’t turn you into a marketer. For that you need to use various channels to distribute your content and make sure it gets found on social networking websites as well as search engines.
Just focusing on SEO content. Don’t publish content just because you want to improve your search engine rankings. There is nothing wrong in trying to improve your SEO, but if that is the only motive behind publishing content, you are not going to experience much success. So what do you do if you don’t publish content for your SEO? Publish content for the sake of its quality, for the sake of the value it provides to your audience, for the sake of helping your prospective customers and clients. Once you can create useful content, it automatically becomes SEO content. After that, what remains is, making sure that there is no excessive code on your website that stops the search engine crawlers from accessing the actual content.
Not being consistent with content publishing and distribution. Content marketing is an ongoing activity. It is not a “campaign”. It is a strategy. Strategy is always long-term. You may have a one-week goal, but you normally have a one-year or a five-year strategy. The search engines are constantly looking for new content to crawl and index and relegate the existing content to lower rankings. Millions of updates are posted on various social networking websites on a daily basis. This is the reality of our times. With so much content constantly being pumped into the Internet, if you are not producing content on an ongoing basis, you’re going to be run over by the content being published and promoted by your competitors.
Neglecting search engine and social media optimization. Fully focusing on the quality of your content without overtly worrying about search engine optimization doesn’t mean that you totally neglect it. Remember that most of your traffic will come from search engines and social networking websites. Better make them an integral part of your content marketing. Pay attention to the sort of keywords you use within your blog posts and articles. Use the language used by your prospective customers and clients. Create compelling titles that can attract people on social media and social networking websites. Wherever possible, use attractive images or videos. Create your social media updates in such a manner that it is easier to share them.
Neglecting your existing content. If you have had a website for a few years then you already have some content on it. You have the homepage. You have the company page. You have the products and services page. There might be an about us page. There might be big and small articles that you may have gotten yourself written a couple of years ago that still hang around. Whether they are performing well or not, they are your existing assets and you shouldn’t ignore them. Carry out an audit of your existing content and see what all improvements you can incorporate. Can you optimize your titles? Can you make your content crisp? Can you incorporate more keywords without indulging in keyword-spamming? Can you put a couple of more photographs? Can you improve the language? Can you add more content – maybe a couple of more paragraphs – to existing pages and blog posts? There is no sense in carrying out new content marketing activities if you haven’t gone through your existing content and worked on it.

There is an exhaustive list of content marketing mistakes that one can commit but these are basically beginners’ mistakes. If you can take care of these mistakes in the beginning, you are not going to encounter the crushing problems that many people encounter later on.

How to create content your market will love

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A few weeks ago I wrote about knowing your audience before writing content and starting your content marketing campaign. This can help you save lots of time and effort. But how do you know what sort of content your market is looking for? This Marketing Land blog post explains 8 ways you can create content your market will love. These eight ways are:

Develop your strategy keeping the big picture in mind – what you eventually want to achieve with the content you’re planning to produce.
Interview people as well as other stakeholders to get ideas about what sort of content you should create. You can invite the employees of the company. You can carry out surveys on your website. You can talk to people on social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter. You can directly talk to your customers and clients. Ask them what they want. Note down the questions they raise while talking to you.
Create your content according to the preferred format. Not everybody wants written content. Not everybody wants slides and presentations. Not everybody wants to see videos. Every business has its own type of audience that prefers its own type of content format.
Optimize your content for search engines and social media. In order to love your content people need to first find it and how do they find it? They will use the search engines as well as social media and social networking websites to come across your content.
Measure the effectiveness of your content. Unless you know that your content is really working, how can you improve it? Improving your content means streamlining it according to your target audience’s preferences. By closely analysing your content and audience behaviour you will be able to make out exactly what attracts people to your content and hooks them to it.
Maintain constant contact with people who access your content. You can maintain a mailing list. You can encourage people to follow you on Facebook and Twitter. You can use various online forums.

Some of these points are not included in the above-mentioned link and they should have been, so I have added them on my own. Instead of focusing on creating content that is loved by your audience, they have focused on how to make your content more effective and how to streamline it. That is different from creating content your audience loves.

Why your content marketing strategy might be failing

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Wondering why your content marketing strategy isn’t working the way it should have? This Inc.com article uses some advice from Joe Pulizzi to throw some light on why many companies fail at their content marketing.

Content marketing, as Joe rightly puts it, isn’t just about creating content and publishing it indiscriminately on your own blog/website or on social networking websites. It means a regular broadcasting. It means ongoing interaction with your audience. Here are a few things that make your content marketing strategy click:

Let people subscribe to your updates: No matter how great your content is you cannot assume that people will come to access your content on their own. You need to remind them on an ongoing basis simply because there is too much content on the Internet to get their attention. This can be achieved by encouraging them to subscribe to your regular email updates. They can also like your Facebook page, or follow you on Twitter or even subscribe to your RSS feeds. The basic idea is, getting people to subscribe to your updates is an important ingredient of your content marketing strategy.
Create brand evangelists: Take for example Apple. Most of its business happens because it has got millions of brand evangelists. When you create brand evangelists for your content marketing strategy, people promote your content on their own. But of course, in order to create evangelists your primary focus must be not just creating high-value content but also making sure that the content reaches the right audience.
Help your content writers coordinate with each other: If your business employs or works with multiple content writers, make sure that there is coordination between them, otherwise they will end up producing lots of duplicate content or something totally irrelevant to your core content marketing strategy.
Content marketing, keep in mind, is a different specialty: Just because a person has had a career in advertising and marketing doesn’t mean that he or she knows a lot about content marketing. Content marketing is a totally different ball game. Rather than marketers, as the above-linked article says, put your trust into the hands of publishers because content marketing on the Internet is more about publishing and distributing high-quality content rather than stuffing it down people’s throats.

You can read the remaining points in the original article.

What is viral content and how to use it to get more traffic to your website

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You must have come across the phrase “this has gone viral” especially when it comes to some amusing video or an image or even a meme (remember Kim Kardashian’s break the Internet?”). When your content goes viral, it means it is being shared on the Internet in general and social media and social networking websites in particular like crazy. Millions of people may share it on their blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter and personal websites.

There are two ways you can use viral content for content marketing and consequently, get more traffic to your website:

Create viral content yourself
Create content that is somehow associated with the content currently going viral

There is no exact science that explains what sort of content goes viral although there are some fundamental ingredients that may go something like this:

Your content is outrageously funny or outrageously, well, something
Your content is some breaking news that can change people’s perception or can give them a totally different point of view
Your content is something that gives a new twist to an existing piece of information
It captures attention immediately
It encourages people to create their own content based on what you have created
It should have global relevance

How can you make your content go viral in order to generate traffic to your website?

Remember there used to be Digg? The website is still there, it is not as popular as used to be to make content viral. Every start-up would dream of appearing on the first page of Digg. Once you had reached there, you could rest assured that your content would go viral and even if it didn’t go viral, the massive traffic would stall your servers.

There were many ways you could get Diggs for your link, but the best way was to be friends the so-called Digg power users. They were a part of an inner circle that could push any piece of content to the front page. In fact, this also proved to be the undoing of the website. All sort of shitty content was being pushed (because a small group controlled which content would reach there) and eventually they had to back up. Anyway, this is how content used to go viral back in those days.

Listed below are a few ways you can make your content go viral:

Keep creating content: Since there is no exact science to know exactly which piece of your content can go viral (even if you apply the above-mentioned fundamentals) keep producing as much interesting content as you can. If you don’t have much content, there is no chance of your content going viral although in rarest of the rare cases, the first-most blog post or an article written and published can go viral but then again, it’s a once in a million chance. Most of the websites and blogs whose content goes viral have been publishing for many years on an ongoing basis.
Properly know your target audience: I’m not sure when Kim Kardashian posted her epic butt-thrusting photograph she knew it would go viral or not – maybe she knew because if you know that millions of people are following you, even if a very small percentage reacts, it can set off a chain reaction. But one thing is clear, she knew that her fans would love the photograph and they would share it. What turn it took (according to the Mashable link given above), maybe even she hadn’t expected that. What matters though is, it went viral and as many claim, it actually broke some servers. So knowing your audience helps.
Be spontaneous and don’t invariably worry about your content going viral: Again, since there is no exact science to predict whether a particular piece of content will go viral or not, you cannot specifically create content for this purpose. Just keep following the fundamentals because they should anyway be followed for writing, creating and publishing valuable content, use the appropriate channels to promote your content and then move on to your next piece of content. Something triggers the viral effect. It is unknown exactly what triggers it.
Keep in mind that visual content has more chance of going viral compared to textual content: This is not some rule that is written in stone, but visual content always has a greater chance of going viral.
Network with influencers: Influencers, merely because they are influencers, wield more influence compared to people who are even more talented than them. This is a hard reality of the world. Even if you are a PhD in philosophy, if Kim Kardashian, even with her Internet-breaking butt thrust forward in full glory, says something philosophical, it will get more attention and more responses compared to you. So it would make sense if you somehow convince Kim to promote your content rather than you promoting it yourself.

Creating content that is associated with the content that has gone viral

This may seem like piggybacking, but sometimes, some content that is associated with a viral content also can generate massive traffic. I remember once I wrote a blog post about a herd of buffaloes rescuing a calf from crocodiles as well as a group of lions. A few years ago that video had gone viral. I just blogged about it, wrote a couple of paragraphs and then embedded the video from YouTube. I still don’t know how it happened, but in a couple of days, I received 25,000 visitors to that particular blog post. It was my literary blog and aside from making me some AdSense money (around $15 every day for almost a week) it didn’t give me any business benefit but the blog post still remains one of the most popular posts on that blog.

How viral content can generate more traffic for your business

Remember that if your content goes viral and nobody knows who originally the content came from, it is going to go waste. There has to be some association. If it is one of your images that is going viral, somehow people should be able to know that you are the originator of that image. Maybe there is a prominent photograph of yours or your business product or service. Maybe there is some branding message that makes it easier for people to know that it is from you. Maybe it is your company name that appears with a photograph. If it is a blog post, then it should have links back to your website or blog, If it is a video, there must be some information or some tag that lets people know that you are the one who has created it.