Over 11 hours each day.
That’s how much time Americans spend reading, watching, listening to or interacting with content.
With four billion active internet users, your audience is online, regularly looking at media including social media feeds, blog posts, videos, news reports and websites. About 80 percent of those internet users are scrolling through social media, so pay attention to where your audience is online and provide them with valuable information leading them to your business. This will help you build familiarity, likeability and trust.
How do you do this? Content marketing – creating, publishing and sharing relevant content for your targeted audience online – is a key way to capture the attention of your customer base.
While it may seem like a big concept to comprehend and execute well, we’re here to help with best practices for content marketing:
- What information should you be providing?
- What channels should you focus on?
- How will you know it’s reaching your customers?
Top Ten Best Practices
- Tie your content back to your business goals. Make sure it’s not only valuable to your prospective clients and customers but has an obvious connection back to your strategy. Remember to align your call to action with both the content and your business goals.
- Solve the customer’s real problems. Don’t focus the content on you and your services, instead, focus on their needs. As you’re sharing valuable insights, dig into specific recommendations and helpful ideas rather than staying at a high level. If a prospective client is seeking answers to their issues, give them actionable steps forward.
- Create content for all stages of a buyer’s journey. Remember to use content to attract new visitors to your online presence, convince hesitant buyers to move forward and encourage customer retention via brand loyalty.
- Stay consistent and current, with everything from posting regular content to your brand voice across all channels. If the topic is an ongoing trend or something else that stays relevant over time, be sure to keep it updated with more recent developments.
- Have personality in your content. Rather than formal, long sentences, aim for short words, mostly short sentences, and short paragraphs with lots of white space between. Creating content that seems human and friendly is easier for your audience to connect with. Bring your brand voice to life!
- Track content effectiveness. Not only views and interactions online, but how many are converting to true leads and then to customers. Pay attention to which blog posts are the most popular and show up highest in search engine rankings and capitalize on that. Expand your strategy as you learn what works best for your clients and business development.
- Make your content delivery method diverse. Remember, your audience might consume your message many different ways. Use both short and long blog posts, publish articles you write or are mentioned in, create inspiring graphics, rely on video and use live video tools on social media to push out your message.
- Share news relevant to your clients’ industries. Do their research for them. Highlight regulatory changes, market trends, new best practices and research findings. They’ll be able to use your insights to inform their own work, which further connects them to you as an expert in the field.
- Optimize for your historic content as well. Especially if you dig into the most relevant topics in past months and years and continue to share them, you may find your organic search results and leads increase.
- Repurpose your content in more ways than one. Take a podcast and turn it into a series of blog posts. Pull a quote into a shareable graphic. Design an infographic around a concept. Make a video on the same topic to share online. Ideas like these will help get your message out for your audience to see it more than once.
There’s no wrong time to begin increasing your content marketing. However, if you’re looking for good timing to launch a new and improved content strategy, here are some suggestions:
- New company leader – position them as the expert and add content around their skill set.
- Launching a new website – a great new branding effort goes together with quality new content to showcase your work.
- Adding a new product line or service to your offerings – a more robust content strategy can help you educate a new audience sector as well as nurture them into leads.
- Expanding your target market verticals and aiming to collect more leads and convert new audiences – support these efforts through expanded content marketing.
Whether you’re launching a new content strategy, updating your existing content marketing or looking to make improvements to what and how you push out content, providing valuable information to your customers online is key. We’re here to help you reach the right audience in the right place at the right time; contact us for content marketing insights and guidance!