Category: Content Marketing

Content marketing has gained a lot of limelight in the previous year but it is about time when it needs to be taken seriously as part of a larger plan. Today’s educated consumer is selective in consuming the content. Quality and consistency are the integral characteristics of content marketing. Well, what is content marketing? How does it matter for a small business? Content marketing is a way of creating and sharing valuable content with your target audience to convert them into your customers. If you keep your customers happy by sharing more relevant information, they’ll be loyal to you. It is important to note that content marketing does not give you instant results like other marketing campaigns. You have to work persistently to fulfill your marketing goals and it definitely fortifies your relationship with the audience unlike other marketing campaigns. Furthermore, it is always the best practice to document a content marketing strategy. As a small business owner, it is the first thing you need to pursue in 2015 to generate lasting benefits for your business. Challenges in content marketing Customers are increasingly engaging with digital content through various interfaces. A digital marketer needs to understand the role of digital content, search engine optimization, social media and mobile to get maximum exposure to its content. As a start-up company, it is natural that you have some idea about digital marketing. However, if you are working for a small company in business for a long time, the owner might not be aware of the magic of digital marketing. In such a case, you need to advise and convince the owner about the role of content marketing. Owner’s involvement will ensure that you have necessary resources in place including employee support and money. The chase for content marketing does not guarantee success. Moreover, content can be created in many forms and you are the best judge in deciding what forms to choose and experiment with. Some of the various forms include e-books, case studies, newsletters, infographics, whitepapers, videos, content curation, webinars etc. How to get started? Content marketing can never begin without following the fundamentals. There are two aspects to it – a clear understanding of your goal and following your mission statement. Why do you want to create content? There has to be at least one core reason for that. The possible reasons could be to create awareness about your brand, build an email list, increase conversion rate, increase traffic to your website, increase sales volume per customer and so on. Your reason would become the deciding factor for content creation. The content will be focused to fulfill those goals. Another important factor is following your mission statement. Following your mission statement keeps you from digressing. As a marketer, it is fundamental for your business to have a target audience but in content marketing, you focus your content towards your core audience. Content marketing takes a lot of effort, time and money to consistently create quality content and you don’t afford to go unheard. What kind of information are you going to provide to educate your customer? What action do you want your audience to take after content consumption? Clarity on all these matters will go a long way for your business. What more you need to do? Chart out a clear strategy Content strategy is formed by understanding your core audience, goals you wish to achieve and optimizing content for all the digital channels you wish to exploit. Understand demographics to gain insights into your customers’ content preferences. Conducting surveys for your visitors on blog, website and social media pages helps you to fine tune their choice. Content marketing is not a single man’s job. You need to have dedicated team members who write content for you. It can be in-house or external depending upon your resources. As a small business owner, it is advisable to first start in-house content writing and gradually outsource it under close monitoring. Close monitoring is necessary till the point writers understand what exactly you expect. However, engagement and follow-up has to be in close association with your team members under your supervision. Create epic content Content engagement is not necessarily meant to be educative. It can be used to entertain, inspire, inform and convert your prospects into customers. The content can ideally be created in four forms including texts, images, videos and podcasts. Furthermore, it can be unique content, curated content or crowd sourced content. Unique content – Creating original content is definitely a great step but doing it continuously becomes a major challenge for small-scale marketers. It needs a lot of inspiration, time and skill. Content curation – Content curation is the art of locating quality content for your audience and doing value addition to it through your interpretation. This exercise saves a lot of time for your consumers as they get a lot of information through a single source. Crowdsourced content – Suppose you start a discussion on your social media page and your customers share their valuable views on it. In addition to it, customers love to share their photos, videos and links if given a chance. The content so generated will be termed as crowd sourced. Explore every possible avenue for marketing your content It is wonderful that you are able to get a continuous stream of quality content flowing through your writers. What next? Your content needs right avenues for marketing. Expand your reach on social media networks. Use different social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. to interact and share content with your audience. Invite your customers through email to visit your website. Offer them a free e-book once they register with your website. Optimize your content for search engines to drive more traffic to your website. Build relationship with blog owners who influence your customers and request them to publish your content. Social media – A powerful medium for content marketing Social media is an epicenter for sharing information with friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Consumers

Content marketing is the most essential marketing tactic used to deliver content to a focused target group. Whether it is used for social media marketing, SEO content delivery or email marketing, content used needs to be to-the-point, relevant and generate value for the reader. You need to classify your content to align with your target groups to get yourself heard. It is important to share valuable content to get noticed and ensure repeated visits from your customers. A good content marketing strategy does not go in vain and promises to build brand, create awareness and generate sales for your company. It clearly shows that utmost care is required while creating and delivering content. Content marketing needs to be backed by due diligence and well thought-out strategy but many marketers, knowingly or unknowingly, fail in content marketing. This article will highlight ten critical mistakes often made by marketers and what you can do to avoid them. 1. Irrelevance While creating content, a marketer needs to make sure that he is sharing something significant and different. It needs to be used to educate the consumer. It might not necessarily discuss about your product or company but anything what you feel is suitable for your audience. Sharing repetitive content puts off the reader and you are no different from others. Another important thing is to bear your target audience in mind before content creation. Many marketers fail to do so as their focus turns towards delivering superior content full of jargons in a bid to impress their readers or to outperform their competitors. In the end, the content bores and does not create any impact on the target audience. Narrow down the tone to what that resounds with the audience. 2. Non-sharable content The content becomes sharable only when it is able to beat the clutter. A reader impressed by your content will definitely take that extra step to share the content with his friends through social media and email. The information shared needs to be supported by facts and figures & true to your personal experience. Your content needs to include relevant links to be shared on Twitter, Google+, Facebook etc. You can also improve the visual design of your content by creating appropriate infographics (often used for sharing on Pinterest). Make your website and blog content sharable by using tools like “click to follow us on Facebook”, “click to share” and “click to tweet”. 3. Pushing too much content Marketers misguidedly think that posting excessive information will help them to get closer to their audience faster. You need to remember that there is no such race in content marketing. It is a gradual process and takes time to build reputation. If you start posting frequently, you will lose credibility and the readers are very likely to skip your content. Assume that your readers are a busy lot and hardly pay attention to your content initially. Post powerful content at regular but “not frequent” intervals to win your audience. 4. Posting too short a content piece A genuine marketer always values his audience’s time. If you are able to create valuable content of sufficient length, your audience can easily spare you 5-10 minutes. Make sure that you create a resourceful content full of sources and highlights. Short content pieces hardly share anything in detail and are just a waste of time for the readers. In-depth and original content is very likely to get you higher search engine ranking. Moreover, many content marketers are looking for options to monetize their content not for the sake of profit but to recover cost of production and more importantly, gain credibility. 5. Poor content quality The language and expression is utterly crucial while creating content. There is no room for spelling and grammatical mistakes. Proofread your content several times and avoid committing typo errors besides giving care to intricate details like punctuation. Use short paragraphs and sub-headings to improve readability. Use bullet points wherever possible. Poor titles often play a spoilsport for many content marketers. The best of the content goes amiss with an unsuitable title. Carefully think over your title before rushing to publish it. 6. Weak PR skills Content marketing is not just about creating great content with SEO tactics. Marketers need to build relationship with blog owners, social media profile owners and other suitable website owners to reach out to their target audience. Many marketers fail to pay attention to building personal rapport with the owners; and the result is too bad for a deserving piece of content. Nurture these free media openings to post your content and form a symbiosis. Aggressively posting your links on different sites for generating clicks is not how a content marketer needs to proceed. Take time to identify the right partners for building a long-term relationship. Use the power of SEO tactics and PR skills together to step ahead. 7. Choosing wrong venues of content placement Posting your content on Facebook is of no use, if your audience is not on Facebook; and even if they are present on Facebook, they won’t find it an appropriate platform for reading your content or probably sharing it with their friends. Focus on other venues like LinkedIn, emailing newsletters etc. to share content. Besides that, some marketers choose blogs that host low-quality content, perhaps, because they are easy to approach or just to do some good to others. In their bid to help other blog owners with quality content, such brands often end up biting the dust. The problem could be that your audience does not visit those blogs or even if they do start visiting, they might not like to stay longer as the majority content is low-quality. 8. Choosing the wrong medium Content marketing is not limited to creating informative articles and posting them to blogs. It is also not limited to creating videos and posting them on YouTube. The idea is to expand the reach of your content by sharing it on appropriate medium. If your audience is field sales force, delivering content through

The phrase “content is king” is often repeated much to the discontent of many professional writers and editors, pun intended. An often repeated phrase, it has almost become farcical now to mention it. Well-written content isn’t enough. What we really need is professional editing, which is the most important aspect of content creative. A blog or an article or an e-book that is not well edited simply is a bane more than a boon. It is very common to see shoddily written articles that are published in the quest to appear in search results or to generate leads. If the content is rife with syntactical, semantic and contextual errors, it is going to do you no help. With that in mind, it is very important to hire professional editors who can ensure that your quality of content never goes down. If we need to rephrase the phrase, we could probably say “professional edited content is king”. There are many reasons why editing is important even if your budget is not huge enough. In this article, let us take a look at how professional editing is the king and why you need to hire more editors than you probably do at the moment. 1. Editing saves embarrassments First and foremost, editing helps you to make sure that you didn’t mean to say what wasn’t meant to be written. Certain mistakes can prove to be particularly embarrassing. If you are writing for a niche audience or an audience that is located in a particular geographical area, you might want to make sure your content is culture-appropriate as well; and this requires an editor. An editor makes sure that not only is your content free from grammatical mistakes but also context-specific. This helps you to save yourself from embarrassments, which can prove to be very costly in today’s world. 2. Editing makes you look professional A well-edited document ensures that you do not come across as a novice. Content that isn’t professionally edited often looks sappy and sometimes very salesy. Very salesy content can put people off and they certainly will not bother to find out what you are trying to sell precisely because you look (or read) like a salesman. A well-edited document makes sure that your content is engaging, professional and very engaging. This is one of the main reasons why editing is very important even if it is expensive. 3. Editing helps you drive traffic It is a well-known fact that search engines rate content based on the level of syntax and semantics. If your content is rife with punctuation, spelling and grammatical errors, search engine algorithms often place you at a lower level. What’s more, you might even be mistaken for an unreliable website. Google famously announced that when it means quality content, it also means grammatically correct and well-edited content. This is one of the main reasons why you need to make sure that your content is well-edited. It helps you to get that precious traffic which is so very important. 4. Editing helps lead generation When people visit your website, they often look for something that is impressive. It needs to make them intrigued and interested in the products & services you promote. If your content is not impressive enough, they might falsely believe that your services and products are not top-notch either. This is one of the main reasons why you need to make sure that your content is professionally written as well as professionally edited. It helps you to generate leads and prospects who might later purchase what you are trying to sell. What are the alternatives? If you are unable to hire a professional editor for a number of reasons, you could opt to get it edited by peers. While the quality will not be the same as getting it edited by an experienced editor, you can opt to hire someone who is good at writing skills and language to read what has been written. It is certainly not better than editing at all; and if you do not know anyone, at least read through the document yourself before publishing it online. At the end of the day, there is nothing like a well-edited document to drive traffic and leads.