Content isn’t just what you write to rank higher; it is everything that conveys a message to your target audience. To run your business successfully, you need to talk to your clients, customers, and readers, and what you say to them is your content. It means that content marketing is a program that revolves around creating, publishing, and distributing your content to make it accessible for your target audience.
Similarly, content marketing is all about using content – regardless of what form it takes – to meet your marketing goals, which could be retention of existing customers, acquisition of potential customers, or making people aware of your products and services.
Running a successful
Distribution Tips
To get started, you will have to use a Content Management System (CMS) first. Once you setup a blog, you are ready to take your content marketing strategy a step further. Now, you need content that you can share on your blog and across other platforms available online. Here are some techniques to create content that works.
Blog Posts
You can write blog posts on your own or hire a professional writer or blogger for the task. If you are doing it yourself, you can try using different types of posts. For instance:
- How-to Posts: You can teach your audience how to do something. These posts work well in organic search, especially when you make the right use of long-tail keywords.
- List Posts: These are curated examples that can be entertaining and informative.
Thought Leadership Posts: These posts highlight shifts in an industry and help change the way people think about something. - Infographics: You can share visual content on your blog and tell a story with the help of interesting images.
- Comment Marketing: It helps promote content and even build relationship. Here’s how to do it right:
- Look for authoritative blogs in your industry. Use your main keyword to look for relevant blogs – you can even try Google’s Blog Search. Check the analytics before selecting the best blogs.
- Go to the blogs and leave replies in comments section. Take part in conversation and establish some credibility first. Later, share links to your blog posts or other important content to further the conversation.
Premium Assets
You need to share interesting content on your blog, but you cannot always hare longer, more time-intensive pieces on your blog. These pieces can still help your content marketing campaign and generate contacts or leads.
For instance:
- Ebooks
- Webinars
- Research Reports
- Tools and Templates
Visual Content
You can always share infographics on your blog to make it more interesting and increase traffic, but other types of visual content will also play a role in the success of your marketing campaign. For instance, you can use slides to share on SlideShares or you can create videos to upload on YouTube.
You can even embed these videos in your own website or blog and get traffic from YouTube and other channels where you have uploaded your video or posted a link to your video.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is a perfect way to make your content live on sites other than yours. Here is how to do it:
- Look for high quality sites and blogs with good Domain Authority and Page Authority.
- Start commenting first and establish relationships.
- Share exciting blog post ideas with webmasters or editors of those sites.
- Do not ask for links first because you are building authority.
- Write a perfect post, get it published on that site, and then promote it everywhere else to establish your authority.
Social Media
While social media is more about building relationship than straight-up promotion, it is still vital to share your content on social media channels to build a brand and establish your authority.
- Select the right channels considering where your audience is. Twitter is great for a younger audience, whereas Facebook is good for most age groups.
- Know the right time to share your content. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have build-in analytics that you can use to identify the time when your audience is around. Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer are some other tools available for help.
- Be very careful when using hashtags and always use hashtags that are the most relevant to your industry.
What’s more, you can also share your content through emails, but your first need to make an email-marketing list, which you can do by giving away free e-books, tools, and stuff like that.
Making Content Go Viral
If anything that you have created – a YouTube video, tweet, Facebook pot, or anything else – that becomes popular overnight, it will work wonders for the success of your content marketing campaign. You can also add diversity to your campaign by creating and distributing different types of content, but you also need to pay attention to certain things to make content go viral.
For instance:
- Keep your content short. Even a video longer than a minute may become boring. The same is true for blogs. Use dot points, images, subheadings to make content scannable.
- Create posts that people can relate to, and they will share it happily. It could be anything like a special drink you had on your wedding anniversary or anything with a human angle.
- Maintain a genuine feel to your content. A behind-the-scenes video is much better than a video talking about your products alone.
- Never create content that makes anyone feel foolish.
- Share content that evokes high-arousal emotions, including excitement, awe, or amusement.
Content Marketing Tools
Without adequate knowledge of content marketing tools and techniques, you can take your campaign nowhere. Content marketing is a tedious and tiresome task, so it is important to automate some processes with the help of certain tools.
Social Media Management Tools
You will have to be active on social media to run your content marketing campaign successfully. Here are some tools for assistance:
- Sprinklr: It is a great choice for a management system that helps you to connect with CRM systems, engage with customers, publish and manage content, and build custom widgets.
- Tweetdeck: It helps track brand mentions and hashtags and lets you schedule tweets and manage multiple Twitter accounts.
- Hootsuite: It lets you manage multiple social media accounts and allows you to track brand mentions, analyze social media traffic, and schedule messages.
- Buffer: You can use this to add photos, articles, and videos automatically on your social media account.
- Traackr: It lets you manage influencer relationships and helps demonstrate the effects of these relationships.
Distribution Tools
Once you have created your content, you will need a tool to distribute it properly. Here is how to do it:
- Brightcove – It lets you add custom video players to social media profiles, websites, and mobile destinations.
- PR Newswire – It helps you distribute news releases to make it accessible for over 700,000 journalists and blogger contacts.
- Cadence9 – It lets you manage content marketing by helping you to plan content using an editorial calendar. You can assign tasks publish workflow, and administer content with ease.
- Papershare – It informs marketing teams and multiple channels when new content is published.
- PixxFly –It helps automate the distribution and syndication of content you create.
In addition, you can try some other content marketing tools as well. ClearVoice for instance is a good choice. This workflow software helps you collaborate with content creation and publisher communities. Outbrain is there to help you amplify the audience for infographics, videos, blogs, or other expertly crafted content. And of course, HubSpot is a great choice for its incredible support and a wide range of tools for creating and monitoring blog posts.
Measuring Success
It does not make any sense to spend hours upon hours in creating and distributing content without having a clue about how well it works with your target audience. To ensure your campaign is going in the right direction, you will need some analytics for your blog and website.
Google Analytics is always a reliable option, but you can find other robust closed-loop solutions as well to keep an eye on your content marketing performance. Similarly, Facebook and Twitter has in-built analytics that you can use. Moreover, you can consider sales-qualified leads, response rate from CTAs, etc. to measure success.
Your goal could be anything from increasing the number of visits to your site and generating leads to improving search visibility and earning new links. You could have secondary objectives as well. For instance, your main objective could be to obtain 3,000 product sample requests and reach 50,000 new users. Secondary objectives could be to improve social engagement, increase traffic, and gain coverage on high-profile sites.
Whatever the choice, be sure to have 2-3 metrics to measure consistently. Having too many goals will lead to prioritization difficulties. Alternatively, you can work with a content marketing agency with knowledge and resources about how to measure your performance in relation to multiple metrics. These professionals can help you from start to the end of your content marketing campaign. Just look for the best in the business and your content marketing campaign will work fine.
Images “Brown notebook with Content marketing word and pencil with speaker icon on wood table, Technology concept / Shutterstock.com“
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