content marketing Archives - Page 4 of 4

How to Get Your Inbound Marketing On Point?

Inbound marketing is the art of attracting customers through alternative methods, such as great content or impeccable branding. It is a proven way of generating leads and sales, and often times, it can be less expensive than traditional marketing techniques.

When compared to outbound marketing, it is the less aggressive approach. It is all about earning a customer’s trust and attention, not buying it. Meaning that you can gain new leads and loyalty in a much more organic way. In today’s world where the Millennial and Gen Z crowd has become desensitized to advertising, finding new measures to capture your target audience is the key.

But getting your inbound marketing right takes research, insight and a good understanding of your customer – as well as a deep knowledge of the market you’re in. Creating useful and compelling content is at the heart of it all, and companies will need to redirect investment and focus on making their brand shine if they want to stand out against the competition.

Here is a guide on how to nail your inbound marketing campaigns.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the art of using valuable information to promote your brand, and this information has to have relevance and be useful to a good percentage of your site users. There is one way you can provide useful details to your visitors so that they keep coming back for more and that is by providing educational content on your website.

Educational content marketing is where you not only focus on selling or promoting your brand but rather on educating your site visitors’ about important subjects within your niche.

With educational content, your purpose is concentrated more on educating your visitors rather than just promoting your brand on every post. The visitor wields the power to buy, and instead of forcing a sale on them, why not draw their attention to important issues about your niche and drive engaging discussions with them?

So, instead of selling, why not teach?

That is what educational content seeks to do; teaching your visitors so they can become better buyers. In teaching your online visitors about topics related to your niche, you tend to reach a wider audience, because many online visitors come to your site looking for vital information that will enable them to make informative decisions.

So, in providing educational content, you are helping your visitors to solve some of their problems, provided you publish top-quality educational content to achieve that goal.

For a marketer, very few things beat the joy of seeing their target audience consume their content, enjoy it, and go ahead to act on it. It’s the clearest sign that the marketing campaign was a success. But, as many can admit, this isn’t child’s play.

Successful marketing in the wake of shorter attention spans, which presently appears to be eight seconds, tougher competition, a sophisticated consumer market, among other things, can only be achieved if one adapts to the changing circumstances and correctly applies clever marketing technologies and trends

Case in point is interactive content. Consumers today have a strong desire for control and interactive content gives it to them by allowing them to be part of an activity. A user can respond to questions, explore scenarios, make choices, gain insights, and so on. What’s more, they won’t feel targeted and that’s what sets this apart from other marketing techniques.

Generally, most humans naturally thirst for interaction and the internet has emerged as one of the places they can get it through interactive content. Well, this should matter a lot to your content strategy and here’s why.

Create Link-Worthy Content

We know that SEO is one of the most effective ways to drive high-quality traffic to our website. However, good quality backlinks continue to be the foundation of every successful SEO strategy. They help improve the rankings of your website as well as your content such as blog posts & infographics. One great backlink to your home page has the potential to boost the rankings of every page on your website.

So what is the simplest way to get backlinks?

Sure, you can slip into the shady corners of the internet looking for high-authority websites that will give you an easy backlink, or dive into the numerous black hat forums that let you buy hundreds of links for a pittance. However, as we’ve seen from the numerous horror stories of websites being penalized, you can’t game link building – you need to earn backlinks.

The simplest way to earn quality backlinks is to create link-worthy content. It may sound boring but trust me, it’s a lot easier and faster to earn backlinks this way than spam thousands of bloggers with your commenting or broken link outreach strategy.

Let’s go deeper and see how content earns links, and how you can engineer your content to do all the link building on its own.

SEO for Small and Mid-sized Businesses

As a proud owner of an SMB (Small & Mid-sized Business), you’re bound to have a never-ending task list. You have several duties to take care of 24/7 – between stepping into your store in the morning to turning the lights off before you leave. But dedicating time to market your business online in your busy schedule is vital to your business’ growth.

No matter how many advertisements and flyers you put up, it simply isn’t enough in this all-digital world. Giving your business a solid online presence to make sure consumers can find you online is a must. And adopting a local SEO strategy is a fantastic, easy way to give your business the online presence it deserves.

The internet is a crowded space. Competitors are everywhere. The market is densely occupied by myriad brilliant products.

How can you sell your way to success?

How can you win your customer’s faith when you have to cut through tough competition?

Is that question bugging you too?

Don’t fret. You are not alone!

You need an edge to stand out and a unique voice to give a persona to your business.

The presence of content marketing in the daily life of a consumer has increased drastically in recent years. In fact, 76% of B2C marketers and 88% of B2B marketers implement content strategy into their marketing mix, according to the Content Marketing Institute. However, while many businesses are making use of content marketing, it does not necessarily mean that they are successful at it.

In order to implement an effective content marketing campaign that amplifies your content, it is essential that you create content for each stage of the buyer’s journey. A buyer goes through 3 different stages (awareness, consideration, and decision) before making a purchase. By tailoring your content to potential buyers in each stage of the journey, you are more likely to turn leads for your business into repeat customers.

What is Content Marketing Really About?

In its simplest form, content marketing is the creation and distribution of content. However, it’s really much more than that. In order for content to truly do its job (i.e. “drive profitable customer action”), it needs to be relevant to the buyer that it is intended for. Essentially, a successful content marketing campaign is one that provides value to a specific target.

So how do you make sure your content is relevant for your target audience? Enter the three stages of the buyer’s journey!

The Awareness Stage

When potential buyers are in the awareness stage, they have just identified an issue or need. In order to engage with buyers in this first stage, your content should bring awareness to a specific problem before aligning this problem with various business-specific issues.

To help the customers better understand this issue or need, it’s important to stick to contentthat is educational and can provide further insight. This is not the time to introduce your product – that comes later. For now, the best way to provide value to buyers in the awareness stage is by demonstrating your knowledge on what their pain points are.

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Content Marketing 101: The “How” and “What” in Content Marketing

The internet has become a junkyard for content marketing. One too many people create content just for the sake of having content. Very few do it for the real reason you should be doing it, that is to offer value.

Sameer talks about “what” kind of content you should be creating and “how” you should go about it.

Content creation and content marketing should be a strategic process. It shouldn’t be random and definitely not impromptu. The more well thought-out your plan is, the higher the chances of making content marketing work for you.

If you want to hear the podcast version, please click here.

A Brief intro

Andreea is the founder of the School of Content.
She has been in the content writing business for more than 8 years now and started off as a freelancer.
Has started a Content Marketing Agency focusing just on Romanian clients

Figuring out the right content strategy with each client

Understand needs and expectations of the clients clearly and evaluate whether the content is to be written for the purpose of branding, traffic, leads, sales, etc.
Do a thorough audit of all existing content assets and identify any content opportunities & gaps.
Research the market to see how competitors in the same or similar industries are going about their content marketing. Pick & learn from the best.

Formula to remember:

Why Educational Content Marketing is So Powerful

Why Interactive Content Matters to Your Content Strategy: 3 Points to Keep in Mind

How to Create Link-Worthy Content Without Spending a Dime

SEO for Small and Mid-sized Businesses

Understanding the Buyer’s Journey in B2B Marketing: The Key to Creating Great Content

Content Marketing 101: The “How” and “What” in Content Marketing

What it takes to run a successful Content Marketing Agency – Interview with Andreea