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7 Features of Successful Content Marketing Plan

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Creating a successful content marketing strategy

Creating a successful content marketing strategy

Guest post

There are a number of companies and businessmen that have created content marketing plans with little success. A number of possible reasons exist for why a content marketing campaign does not hit the intended goal. This could be because the content lacks quality, or the wrong type of content is used.

In this article you’ll learn the top tips for a successful content marketing plan. Therefore, you’ll avoid the common mistakes of others that have failed before you. With the list of tips mentioned below you’ll realize that implementing a successful content marketing plan can be a straightforward process.

Understand the audience

It’s important to figure out who your audience is and cater the content to them. For example, consider the type of problems they have, what kind of hobbies they take part in and their financial status. The more information you can find out about the demographics of your audience the more relevant the content will be.

Writing content that the audience can relate to allows for high rates of engagement. They are more likely to stick around to the end of the blog post and see the call to action.

Call to action

The point of content marketing is to generate new leads for your business. However, without a CTA the conversion rate for each piece of content is going to be minimal. You need to include the CTA in a variety of locations. For example, if you’re trying to get new subscribers to your email newsletter, then at the end of every piece of content tempt the viewer to sign up.

You can also have the CTA in the middle of the content if it’s in the flow of the writing. This might increase the conversion rate of your content marketing campaign even higher.

Solve a problem

The type of content you put out should aim to solve a problem for the audience. Not every piece of advice that you give should be behind a pay wall. By offering free and helpful information the customer is more likely to buy from you.

For example, if your website is about weight loss, then you could give advice on how to avoid putting on weight during a vacation. Actionable advice that’s targeted is always great for a content marketing strategy.

Consistent output

Regardless of how great your content is, an infrequent posting frequency will not work. Audiences expect regular content to digest – this ensures they will be coming back for more – even expecting it before it arrives.

The best approach is to send out daily content so that followers have a reason to visit your website on a daily basis. Once you have built up a large library of content you’ll also receive a large volume of traffic from the search engines.

Measure the performance

To understand what’s working and what isn’t, the performance of content should be measured. A breakdown of different statistics for every piece of content should be noted and organized. This includes the bounce rate, number of new subscribers, traffic and social shares.

Over time you’ll begin to see a pattern regarding what type of content receives the highest amount of attention. This means you can increase the ROI of your content strategy by focusing on what works. Before coming to conclusions ensure the amount of data gathered represent a decent sample size. Perhaps 1,000 visitors are enough to see how well a piece of content is performing.

Optimize for the search engines

If you are going to create content, then you might as well make the most of it by optimizing for the search engines. The common SEO principles to adhere to is the use of relevant keywords, optimization of meta tags and backlinking to other pages of your website within the content.

The last point is SEO friendly and it also improves the usability for the end user.

Repurpose your content

Working smarter always outperforms working harder. With that thought in mind repurposing your content is a great idea. For example, after writing a blog post you can use a portion of the content for an email or social media post.

This ensures that you are able to make the most of each piece of content created. You can then add a link to the original piece of content if they wish to read the entire piece.

Conclusion

The combination of the 7 tips for a successful content marketing strategy can increase the profitability of your campaign. You’ll see that by using these common marketing tactics the process is simplified. You can even outsource the entire operation to professionals.

Ensuring that your content marketing strategy hits targets is important to the overall success of your business. A well-implemented strategy can be the difference between achieving a consistent flow of many customers, and struggling to get any at all.

The benefits of writing content for existing customers

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Content writing for existing customers

Normally when we talk of content writing we mostly have new customers and new leads in mind.

Although lots of content is published to cater to existing customers in the form of FAQs and support pages, active content writing isn’t normally directed towards existing customers.

You may be surprised to know that 61% small and medium-sized businesses admit that half of their revenue comes from existing customers (source).

According to this Econsultancy report, 82% companies agree that retaining existing customers is a lot cheaper than acquiring new customers.

This infographic says that loyal customers are worth 10x as much as new customers.

Content writing for existing customers shouldn’t be a one-time affair. It should be a continuous exercise for multiple reasons.

Content writing for existing customers isn’t just useful in terms of selling to them more, they also help you expand your brand especially when everybody’s pretty much connected to everybody else.

Listed below are some reasons why you should pay more attention to writing content for existing customers.

Cross selling and upselling

Since these are the most alluring reasons for a marketer or a business person, I’m listing them in the beginning itself.

If you haven’t given him or her any reason to dislike you, an existing customer is more likely to do business with you than a new customer because you are familiar to him or her, the customer has already paid you, and he or she has had a positive experience with you.

If you are routinely introducing new products or new updates you would obviously like your existing customers to try them out.

You may also have related products or services that may help your existing customers draw more out of the product or service they have already purchased.

Zoho, for example, has many products that can be better used when combined with each other. You can combine invoicing with CRM. Since you are using their email and collaboration services you might as well try their sales and marketing tools too.

Giving my own example, if your business experiences better search engine rankings through my content writing services, you might as well try out my SEO content writing services to expand your organic reach or my social media content marketing services.

Familiarity and trust are highly coveted attributes on the Internet. Never let them go waste.

If a customer has done business with you, give him or her your best, and then regularly provide quality content to him or her to give him or her a reason to engage with you consistently.

Promoting your content

You never know which of your customers may turn into a celebrity of sorts. Even if not a celebrity, on an average every person these days has 200-300 contacts on various social networking platforms.

Content marketing is an integral part of marketing these days. You need to promote your content.

Your customers are more likely to follow you on Facebook and Twitter. They have already given you their email ID and they expect you to send them email updates related to products or services they have purchased.

You can use these contact channels to encourage them to promote your content among their own friends.

Of course they should deem your content as useful and relevant so by default you should consistently publish high-quality content.

Without building your own network no matter how much high-quality content you publish, it is very difficult to promote it.

Your existing customers are your ready-made network. If they like your product or service, they will eagerly promote your content among their own contacts.

Getting SEO benefits

Search engines like Google give lots of importance to the sort of buzz your content creates. Your search engine rankings improve if more people access your content through social networking websites and through other blogs.

Many of your existing customers may be bloggers or social media influencers. If they are happy with your product or service, they won’t have any problem sharing one of your links on their own timelines or on their own blogs.

This will improve your search engine rankings.

Being there when they need you

When people buy something from you they get into a partnership. If you are a serious entrepreneur you will agree that this might be a long-term or even a lifelong partnership.

If your product or service has many uses (MS Office products, for example) your existing customers may regularly turn to you when they need to know something about the features they cannot use or cannot find.

This is a conventional form of content writing and many businesses already do it in the form of, as already mentioned above, support sections and FAQs.

Many businesses encourage online forums – Google has one – where customers provide help to each other.

If nurturing an online forum isn’t an option, you should publish answers to as many questions and queries as possible on your website.

This will increase and strengthen your customer loyalty. They will know that when they seek answers, you will provide them. They will know that when they have a problem related to your product or service, you will be there to help them.

Encouraging them to stick with you

This might be greatly relevant to subscription-based businesses.

No matter how great a set of features you provide to your subscribers there is a great chance that they are going to leave your service either for another service or they simply lose interest.

Sometimes they just forget that they have to renew their service.

Sometimes they lose track of why they subscribed in the first place.

You can keep them interested in your service or product by continuously providing quality content. Your constant communication keeps them hooked onto your product or service for a long time.

Email marketing

It takes a very long time for businesses to build a verified mailing list.

Your existing customers, since they have already purchased from you, have not just given you their email ids, they have also permitted you to send them regular updates.

Email marketing is an integral part of content marketing.

In fact, your content marketing is incomplete if you are not distributing your content using a mailing list that you have ideally created through your website or blog.

If you are sending just promotional messages to your existing customers they will sooner or later get fed up and unsubscribe from your updates and that will be the end of everything.

Email content writing for existing customers means sending them useful information – information that is relevant to them and would prompt them to stay with you and respond to your messages.

Even if you don’t want to use your major content marketing and content writing resources on existing customers, occasionally targeting them should be an integral part of your marketing.

Can you use content curation as a viable content marketing tool?

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curation for content marketingIn my previous blog post, 10 ways to write highly engaging content, I briefly touched upon the topic of content curation – collecting useful information from all over the Internet and compiling it into a single link.

Can content curation become a viable content marketing tool for your business? Or will you be sending traffic to your competitors?

Many content marketers believe that if you curate lots of content you are mostly sending traffic away from your website rather than drawing traffic to your own website by creating high-quality genuine content.

Although the importance of high-quality genuine content can never be understated, there are some instances when you can use content curation to boost your content marketing. For example, you can use content curation when

  • You don’t have enough time to create your own, high-quality, genuine content
  • Someone else has explained better what you have always wanted to explain to your visitors
  • You want to present as many viewpoints as possible pertaining to a topic or subject
  • You want to create a repository of opinions for solutions pertaining to a particular topic
  • You want to introduce authority into a topic

See for example this Content Marketing Institute blog post – What does engaging content mean?. As you can see, instead of presenting her own views on what is engaging content through the entire blog post, the author has collected opinions of various content marketing and content writing experts on what engaging content means.

This blog post titled How to add value with content curation rightly says that there is a huge quantity of content on the Internet with limited shelf life. By the time people find useful information it is outdated or they no longer need it.

Since you must be in the thick of your subject matter, you may have access to many resources that your visitors may not have. So, there is a greater chance of you coming across great, useful information. Instead of simply consuming that bit of information, you can mention it on your website along with the original link, the way I’m doing with this blog post on content curation.

This further explains that content curation doesn’t just mean collecting lots of links and creating a big list of useful links. You can also use just one link and then quickly create a small blog post with your own input, again, the way I’m doing with this particular blog post on content curation. In fact, I often do that. When I cannot come up with a good idea for a blog post, I simply search on the web for some ideas, and when I find an interesting link, I write a few words about that link and sometimes, it turns into a complete blog post.

Another benefit of linking to outside links is it is appreciated by the original publishers. If they like your response, they promote your link among their own followers. This helps your content marketing.

The never changing fundamentals of content marketing

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the-fundamentals-of-content-marketingThe content marketing fundamentals never change, whether you started using content marketing for your business back in 2004 or you are playing with it in 2017. These fundamentals are

As you can see, these are the fundamentals, no matter what technology you use, no matter what sort of content you publish, and no matter what audience you are trying to reach. Even when people were painting on the walls of their caves, they were using these content marketing fundamentals to convey their message and leave the glimpses of what was happening to them, for the future generations.

Let’s read a bit more about these fundamentals of content marketing

Publish relevant content

Every business niche has its own relevant content. When you come to my content marketing blog, you expect to read about content marketing, content writing and general related topics of how to promote your business through content marketing and content writing. This content is relevant to you if you want to use content writing as a marketing tool or if you want to hire someone who can help you use this tool. Sometimes I also write on search engine optimization but ultimately it is connected to content marketing.

The importance of relevance is always going to be there no matter what format of content you publish.

Publish content that provides solutions and solves people’s problems

We are all looking for solutions. People come to your blog because they seek some advice or some bit of information that they can use to solve some problem that they have. If they repeatedly find solutions on your blog or website, if you are constantly solving people’s problems, your content marketing is going to succeed. You need to give them a reason to access your content repeatedly. You need them to crave for your content and share your content. This only happens when they find your content useful.

Publish content that is engaging

This is a redundant point but I’m going to cover it anyway because it is one of the most important aspects of content publishing and content marketing and almost every, in fact, every content marketing expert talks about “engaging content”.

By engaging content, we mean content that stimulates people and encourages them to actively consume your content, participate in the ongoing conversations around your content, and even contact you to share their own opinions about your content. This way, you have engaged them. You have created interesting content to get them interested.

It is just like speaking in front of a live audience. You provoke them. You ask questions. You ask counter questions. You debate them. You create controversies. You create adulation. The moot point is, engaging content gets your readers or your audience involved, whether in a positive sense or in a negative sense depends on the relevance of the topic. When you engage them, they remember you and whether they like you or not, they come back to your website or blog.

Publish content that is shareable – people not just feel like sharing your content, but it is also easier for them to share it

Sharing means endorsement. When people share your content with each other it means they like it and find it useful. This helps search engines. Although algorithms are very advanced these days, it matters how people think of your content. So when your content is shared it means it is appreciated. It solves the proverbial problems.

Sharing should be easier. These days it means all the sharing buttons should be incorporated into the webpages and blog posts that you publish. Also, your content must be formatted in such a manner that it makes sense with least interference. This means, when people share your content, they shouldn’t need to modify the title and the description because in themselves they should be able to tell a lot about your webpage or blog post.

Publish your content regularly

The never changing fundamentals of content marketing mean when you are publishing content, you are building a broadcasting channel, and when you have a broadcasting channel, you need to broadcast on an ongoing basis. This is one side of the story. The other side is that in order to enjoy good search engine rankings due to content marketing and content writing, you need to feed the search engines with an unending supply of content – yes, as long as you operate your business on the Internet, you need to provide content to the search engines to be crawled, indexed and ranked.

This means you need to publish your content regularly. Now, regularity doesn’t mean you publish every day. Although publishing everyday might be very good for traffic and social engagement, for some businesses it doesn’t suit. So, define your own regularity. Maybe it’s okay to publish 3-4 blog posts or webpages  every week. Or maybe one blog post or webpage every week. Or maybe randomly. The important thing is you need to update your blog or website regularly, on an ongoing basis. It shouldn’t feel like an abandoned blog or a website.

Analyze your content and do the needed modifications

Beyond doubt, when you are publishing content on your blog or on your website, your ultimate aim is to draw traffic. This means you need to analyze your traffic and see what sort of traffic is being drawn by the content that you publish. Sometimes you end up drawing wrong traffic. Even tiny things can mean a sea change.

You can analyze your content by a web analytics tool like Google Analytics that tells you what sort of traffic your content is drawing. If most of the visitors landing on your website or blog are using wrong keywords, you are not publishing the right content. If your website or blog is attracting at least some amount of traffic that uses the right keywords, study those pages and blog posts and then generate similar content.

Or maybe your existing content is relevant but you are not using the right language? Analyze constantly so that you don’t end up with a ton of useless content.

Keep your existing content relevant and updated

Millions of webpages and blog posts are being published every hour and then these webpages and blog posts are being crawled, indexed and ranked by the search engines constantly. So, even if initially it was possible to find your content, with so much of newly generated, fresh content available, your content is pushed back and it becomes difficult, and sometimes even impossible, to find it.

Search engines want fresh content. Even your visitors need to have a compelling reason to visit the same URL gain.

You can keep your existing content relevant by updating the webpages and blog posts with newer information, better-researched data, and even with changed perspective. Even if one sentence is changed, mark that link changed and resubmit it to the search engines.

Use the right channels to promote your content in front of the right audience

Every channel, every broadcasting medium, has its own audience. Facebook users like particular content, Twitter users like different content, and LinkedIn users want to find content that can help them in their businesses, professions and careers. If you want to give beauty tips, better focus on Facebook and refrain from posting that sort of content on your LinkedIn timeline. If you want to rake up political or cultural controversy, fire off a few tweets.

It’s very important to choose the right platforms. Even the Google search engine is a channel.

These are the never changing fundamentals of content marketing. Just as the applicability of wisdom transcends time and cultures, so do the fundamentals of content marketing. Your content may change, how you distribute that content may change, the tastes and preferences of your audience may change, the format of your content may change, but these fundamentals never change.

5 ways to beat your competitors at SEO with content writing

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beating-you-competition-with-SEO-content-writing

The biggest challenge that you may face from your competitors might be on the search engines. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, you need to beat your competitors at SEO. Although you can take various actions – for example read 10 tips on how to write SEO content for your website – the best way to beat your competitors is through SEO content writing.

Why search engines-based content writing enables you to beat even your toughest competitors?

The beauty of content writing is that it makes your presence on the Internet unique. Only you can write the way you write. No matter how hard your competitors try, they cannot be “You” – only you can be “You”. This is why even smaller companies on the Internet can pose big dangers to their bigger counterparts.

What is SEO content writing and how it helps you beat your competitors?

Being a content writer often hired by clients who want to improve their search engine rankings through content writing, I have written a lot on the topic. You can read this blog post that says SEO content writing actually improves your search engine rankings or you can read Does SEO content writing improve your search engine rankings?

Anyway, there are thousands of companies on the Internet that provide you “SEO content” to help you increase search engine traffic to your website and many of these companies can actually help you.

SEO content writing in isolation doesn’t help you improve your search engine rankings – many factors play an important part. But SEO content is definitely one of the most important building blocks. It’s like, if you don’t have content, what will the search engines crawl, index and then rank? Obviously you need content.

And what sort of content gets ranked well? Good content. Well-written content. Content that is appreciated by people. Content that gets recommended. Content that people link to.

So, having good, relevant, topical, well-written and well-formatted content is a must. Everything comes after that.

Briefly, these are the 5 ways to beat your competitors at SEO with content writing:

  1. Create unique content
  2. Solve problems better than your competitors do
  3. Create content around less competitive keywords and phrases
  4. Rewrite content published by your competitors in a better manner
  5. Keep your existing content up-to-date

Now let’s go through these points one by one, in detail

1. Create unique content

Unique content automatically gives you an edge, because being unique, only you have it, or very few people have it. How does this help your SEO? On the same topic, the search engines like Google want to present different perspectives to their users so that they may find content they are not aware of, but may be useful to them. So well-written unique content is often ranked higher by search engines.

2. Solve problems better than your competitors do

This is a brute-force way of legitimately beating your competitors with better SEO content. If you solve problems better than your competitors, even if you don’t rank well, initially, compared to them, more people will visit, share, and recommend your links, eventually giving you an SEO edge over your competitors.

3. Create content around less competitive keywords and phrases

You don’t have to write content around keywords your competitors are already ranking well for. There might be many keyword variations your competitors might have ignored, or somehow couldn’t have achieved better rankings for. You can try different spellings. You can try different phrases for the same expressions. You can try bigger phrases. You can try local variations your competitors might have ignored.

Find out the keywords and phrases your competitors haven’t been able to rank well and then create good-quality content around them. This will definitely give you good search engine rankings for these less competitive keywords and search terms.

4. Rewrite content published by your competitors in a better manner

This basically is the same as point 2 but here what I mean is, you can also create the general content similar to what your competitors are creating, just in a better manner. You have the talent. You have your own unique way of writing. You can even have the same titles if you are daring enough while completely rewriting the webpages or the blog posts. Turn smaller subheadings from your competitor’s website into complete webpages of your own. You can even create multiple webpages out of a single webpage, or combine multiple pages into a single webpage or blog post.

5. Keep your existing content up-to-date

Google likes to present its search results fresh out of the oven. If your content becomes stale, if it grows old, Google begins to ignore it in favor of newer webpages and blog posts.

Make updating your existing content an integral part of your SEO content writing strategy. Whatever webpages and blog posts that your have created, are your business assets. Keep track of them. Monitor them individually. Don’t just forget about them once your have created them. Revisit them to check whether there is some reason to update them or revise them. Even if you feel like changing a few sentences, changes them and the resubmit the link to Google.

Beating your competitors with SEO content writing might not be easy, and it may even prove to be a challenge, but if you want to take them up on this challenge, with strategy and hard-working, nothing should stop you.