Being a contemporary business, trying to keep in line with marketing trends and build successful campaigns, in order to get more customers and increase sales, you must be paying much attention to content marketing. Because let's be clear on one thing, this rapidly growing segment of the marketing mix is what people really care about.
Content marketing only gained its huge popularity and impact over the past few years thanks to the total domination of digital marketing over traditional marketing techniques. As a result, it comes to no surprise that many businesses still don't feel much confident about building an effective content campaign and keep asking the question "What content is good content"?
Targeted
Very simply put, nobody will view your blogs, videos and images if the content doesn't relate to them. The first and probably most important feature of great marketing content is being well researched and targeted at the right audience. Once you've identified your target market you need to know where is the best place to reach them and what are they interested in so that you craft your content according to their interests. Here's a hint, if you are a life or home insurance company it will be kind of pointless to put marketing content on SnapChat, because the main user group of the app is between the age of 14 and 25. People this young hardly think about that sort of things.
Valuable
Good content also provides valuable information to the customer. Most of us look for answers to various questions online and we usually find those answers in forums or blogs. Providing informative, accurate and relevant content will boost your website traffic like no one's business. Once a reader has found something helpful on your site or social media page, they will likely come back for more and share their newly gained knowledge with others.
Engaging
Useful content is good, but making it interesting to read or watch, brings a whole lot of difference. Being creative when writing a blog, building your website, putting together a
video or even posting on social media is key to a successful content marketing campaign. If you sound like an encyclopaedia, chances are people will not be much interested in what you have to say. Learn to speak the language of your audience and make them eager to see more from you by creating content that touches their emotions.
Optimised
If you are sure the content you've been posting covers all of the above three and you still can't see the desired results, then what you are most likely lacking is optimisation. A well performing content has definitely gone through SEO. This includes incorporation of keywords and phrases, most searched related topics on Google, meta description, as well as some technical aspects, like txt files, which tell crawlers what content to show and hide. SEO can be quite complex but if done right, guarantees you a prime spot on the biggest search engines.
Original
Speaking of being visible on Google and other search engines, all the SEO in the world won't be enough to push your content up the pages if it's not original. Just like in high school and university, you get penalised for being a copycat in content marketing. Of course, you can use information from other articles posted online to create your own, but you are not allowed to use identical content. Besides, failing to be unique about what you display to your customers may seriously harm your relationship with them. Buyers like genuineness and if you can't be genuine with your content, what else are you being dodgy about?
These are just the main five pointers, which should give you an idea what to focus on when you are building your brand's content marketing campaign. If you follow the guidelines you can rest assured that content will soon turn into cash.
