So, you’ve decided to start a content marketing strategy! Awesome move. When it comes to creating content for your brand, there are almost too many options to know where to start. Blog articles, eBooks, infographics, whitepapers, listicles… the list goes on! However the first (and most important) thing to think about is what you want your content to achieve.
When it comes to digital marketing, having amazing content serves a number of different purposes. Some of these include:
- Educating the audience about your product or service
- Establishing your brand as an authority within your industry
- Converting readers into sales or email sign-ups
- Improving organic Google search rankings
- Developing brand awareness and loyalty
It’s important for you to prioritise what you want to get out of your content (as well as what you want your audience to receive) before you dive in and start creating. Let’s take a look at some different types of content and what they could mean for your business.
Blog articles
Writing regular pieces of content for your blog is a great place to start if you’re new to content marketing. Blog articles work as an excellent way to push traffic to any larger assets you might develop, such as eBooks, and are also a great way to inform your audience about upcoming events or promotions. Examples of structures for blog articles include how-to’s, listicles, reviews, or news snippets. Skip the essays though! I’d recommend keeping blog articles around the 500 to 600 word mark. You do want people to actually read them, after all.
Blog articles are also your best chance when it comes to content of improving your search rankings. No matter whether you’re writing the articles or someone else is – you should be taking advantage of this opportunity, and making sure that all articles are thoroughly optimised for search engine preference. Do some keyword research to make sure you’re targeting the right phrases, as well as using effective and sensical headings and subheadings for Google to scan through.
eBooks and other downloadable resources
Otherwise known as ‘premium’ or ‘gated’ assets, these are basically more time intensive pieces of content that you don’t give away for free. They’re not located on your public blog, and instead people access them through signing up to your email database or making a purchase, for example. This means that these pieces of content have to be very high-quality, so that the consumer doesn’t feel they’ve been ripped off or scammed in the process of receiving it.
They may take more work, but this type of asset is an amazing way for building a contact database, securing leads and building brand loyalty. If you’re positioning your knowledge and expertise as valuable enough to not be accessible to the ‘general public’, this builds your industry authority and thought leadership.
Other examples of premium content include downloadable eBooks, templates, guides, mind maps or quizzes.
Email newsletters
Email newsletters are also known as email nurture sequences or email direct marketing (EDM’s). They’re used for ‘nurturing’ your audience and keeping them engaged with your product or business at the front of their mind after they have signed up to your platform.
A great way to get people to sign up to receiving your email newsletter is to have a pop up on your website offering a discount code if you’re an eCommerce platform or some kind of other enticing offer.
Once people have signed up, they’ll be lead through an email sequence (I’d recommend sending one email a week through a platform like MailChimp) that informs, entertains and engages the audience with news, events or other information.
Email newsletters are also a fantastic way to build brand loyalty, as they offer a personalised and ongoing method of communication between business and consumer. Just make sure that you’re writing them to not be too long, be snappy and to the point, and to include as much relevant or useful information as possible.
This is just a snippet of the options when it comes to content marketing. It terms of developing a strategy, there’s an absolute smorgasbord of pathways to choose from. But if you play it right, you could find that content marketing could be the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to building a relationship with your customers.
Ceycodes offer content marketing services for all kinds of businesses and service providers. Have a chat with us today about developing an amazing content strategy for your business that could have you reaching heights of customer engagement you never thought possible.