What beginners should know about Content Marketing

New to the world of content marketing? Every successful business in the digital age has a content marketing strategy. If you are starting a business or already have one but do not have an online presence yet, now is the time to change that. You could either contact a content marketing firm to help you with this or get started on your own.

Content marketing involves creating, optimizing, strategizing, analyzing, publishing, and distributing content to get you the most traction possible and build your brand awareness. Content marketing is here to stay, which is why you need to get started immediately. As you get into content marketing, you need to familiarize yourself with the following:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social media marketing
• Inbound Marketing
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Content Marketing Strategy

Your content marketing strategy is the bedrock of your business’ operations and goals. It defines your mission, vision, and future plans. There is no formula to describe your content marketing strategy. However, every content marketing strategy contains the following:

Overall vision and principles

The ‘why’ of your business is critical because it defines everything your brand is about. It determines your current and future plans, the kind of content you will create, the target audience you have to appeal to, your criteria for success, and the risks you see yourself facing. Make sure you define the overarching principles of the brand.

Your objectives and plans

Once you have the ‘why’ in place, you need to come up with a strategy to accomplish your goals. Your strategy, business model details, what your audience can expect from your sid, and your opportunities and threats need to be clear.

Identify your target audience

You cannot create content or have a business model without figuring out who your target audience is. You have to pick a niche and figure out your target audience is based on a multitude of parameters.

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Define your brand

What is your brand about? What message do you want to put out there? You have to state what your brand is all about and what you want your audience to know. You also need to let them know why they should choose you over your competitors.

Types of content to post

You should post content on every platform possible. You need to take care of your on and off-site SEO, focus on creating inbound leads, and so forth. However, here are the primary types of content to focus on to build your brand awareness.

Videos

As you know, videos tend to engage the viewer in ways that other content types cannot. Written material and even images pale in comparison to videos. Posting videos on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube can help you gain viewership, leads, and traffic. However, you will have to optimize your video content for each platform. Be sure to experiment with long and short videos on Facebook and Instagram, depending on your goal.

YouTube allows you to upload as many videos as you want. You can segregate them into playlists and series. Again, you may experiment with different types of videos for different purposes and see what works. However, you do need to consider using YouTube cards links for PageRank.

You can post videos to answer questions, feature new products, unboxing, product reviews, tutorials, to connect with your viewers, and so on.

Audio

Audio has become popular over the last few years, with businesses putting out content on streaming platforms like Spotify. Be sure to register yourself on these streaming services, put out content and repurpose your old content for these services.

Infographics

Infographics help drive home a point in ways that blog posts cannot. Infographics are especially useful when paired with blog posts that discuss statistics and case studies. You can also use Infographics towards the end of your blog posts to summarize the key points. Since Instagram allows you to post only pictures and videos, you can expect infographics to work if you supplement them with informative captions.

Tracking your content

While posting content is vital, you also need to monitor your posts and track your progress to see which posts work and which do not. Analytics is an integral part of an effective content marketing strategy. Here are a few metrics you should keep track of:

Traffic

Traffic is one of the most critical metrics to monitor. It describes the number of visits to your website. If you get a decent amount of traffic, you need to find out how much your traffic is accounted for by your target audience. You can use many tools to keep track of your site traffic. Use an analytics tool to study your traffic.

Pages per visit

Getting visitors to stay on your website requires you to let them know that the other pieces of content on your site are just as good, if not better than the post they are reading. You can do this by backlinking and internal linking your posts. Doing this can increase your chances of retaining your visitors and make them spend more time on your site

Social shares

Here is another vital metric to gauge given the popularity of social media marketing today. People spend large amounts of time on social media, which means that they are constantly sharing your content. You need to find out if they are sharing your posts.

People post stuff on their timelines that they like or evoke emotions. If your content is not being shared, it means you probably have provided them with value yet. Consider tweaking your posts after studying your social shares on all the platforms you use. Facebook and Instagram have analytics tools that you can use for this, namely Facebook analytics, and Instagram Insights.

If you read nothing else, you should still be able to get started and gain a decent amount of traction using the tips you see in this article. The key is consistency and value.