Are you ready to take your marketing game to the next level? This article will be your go-to guide for everything content marketing. From understanding the basics, to creating a strategy and producing killer content that connects with your target audience, we've got you covered.
So, let's dive in and discover how to elevate your brand and drive more sales through effective content marketing!
What's content marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing technique to create, publish and share interesting content with your target audience. You can add value to your potential customers and create engagement, which later, can turn into a sale when they decide to buy your product/service. A good way to start in content marketing is the following:
- Helping your potential customers with information and opinions on a certain topic, which is interesting for them.
- Giving your audience ebooks and whitepapers to solve their current problems.
- Showing them why you are their best option through videos with testimonials, interviews and any other way you can convey positive experiences of other customers with your brand.
In any case, always keep in mind that the contents will have to respond to the needs and problems of your ideal customers. Only then, you can build a successful strategy and relationship. To understand these processes for building a relationship with your audience, we will show you how to determine your buyer persona.
What is the buyer persona?
The buyer persona is an archetype of your ideal customer of a service or product. It’s basically your dream customer. For creating your buyer persona, you have to consider specific sociodemographic data and personal information such as personal tastes or professional behavior.
For example, you can analyze the websites they follow, the brands they love, the items they buy, etc. Getting this information will make your buyer persona a key factor in your marketing and sales strategy.
In fact, when you know what they love and what they hate, you can determine their pain points or their needs, motivation, concerns in life… And when you’re able to solve their problems and make their life easier, you have a market to sell your products or services! If you know their pains, you have valuable information; and it predisposes your buyer persona to buy what you offer.
To deepen even more in your buyer persona preferences, you can gather more information, which will not only help you create the content with the right focus but the whole content strategy. You’ll need, for instance, to categorize your buyer persona in categories like these ones:
- Personal: hobbies, goals, motivations, aspirations, etc.
- Online behavior: what social networks do they use? Do they buy products online? What kind of products? where do they look for information? How often do they do it?
- Work: responsibilities, challenges, influences, industry, etc.
And you can continue building more hypotheses to understand your customers better and offer more specialized content for them.
Why should you start a content marketing strategy?
Content marketing is a well-known marketing strategy and recently, this technique is gaining more and more followers due to its benefits. But above all, it is gaining fame because it meets a series of conditions that Google likes:
- Fresh content due to the constant renewal of articles on the blog.
- Relevant information for the user, which he shares through social networks.
- The user is the center of all content creation.
Is content marketing compatible with SEO?
For publishing your content, you should consider SEO (Search Engine Optimization) because it will help you rank better on Google searches when your potential customers look for your products or services and you just have to work with the right keywords for increasing the chances of appearing in search results.
We will show you the practical benefits of SEO for your content marketing strategy.
- Less competition for placing yourself in the first positions of the search engines if you choose the right keyword.
- Attracting potential customers through relevant and quality content in search engines that can retain them, and later turn them into a customer.
Now, if you're not producing massive amounts of content to be the world leader in a particular topic, you have to deepen a bit more in SEO strategies to make your content relevant.
In this scenario, you can use long-tail keywords. We will explain this concept with an example, the keyphrase “white sneakers” have more searches and are usually more competitive, making it more difficult to get good positions in Google results.
While longest compound words like “white brand shoes” tend to have fewer searches, but are also less competitive and therefore, they are easier to rank in Google rankings. So, if you're beginning with your content marketing strategy, focus on long-tail keywords because in a low competition environment with few searches, it is easier to get a place for your content.
If your company opts for an SEO strategy based on long-tail keywords, you will need a blog. In fact, every small business should have a blog. The blog is the main tool to work your content marketing strategy and it will allow you to work with keywords in an agile way because each article you create has the potential of positioning a long-tail keyword.
What to keep in mind
Simply make it easy for your readers and be aware that working on the contents of your blog responds to your audience´s requirements and SEO criteria at the same time. Never sacrifice your audience’s needs to satisfy SEO criteria.
Creating good content is the most effective SEO tactic anyway. To make a correct web positioning, you need to work the contents in the form of articles and keywords. Keywords are a fundamental component of SEO, but keywords alone are worthless. You must use keywords with relevant and good quality content.
SEO does not only involve including keywords or internal and external links, but also requires monitoring more complex technical aspects. In the long run, this implies constant audits through platforms such as SemRush, to determine aspects such as the following:
- The correct indexing of the pages by the search engines.
- Identify the different elements not yet optimized, from URLs to meta tags and broken links.
- You have to avoid the risk of duplicating content, so you must check regularly that your articles are free and not plagiarized to get better positioning.
And finally, pay attention to trends in your niche. The news, the viral content, the recent opinions of experts, all of this is important to produce content that achieves excellent SEO positioning. Therefore, it is a mandatory task to constantly update yourself about these topics.
Getting started
The first step is to prepare a good content plan and schedule in advance the content that you will upload day-by-day. It will help you plan in the long term and have a greater perspective and create specific content for each of your buyer persona.
The key to success is delivering the right content at the right time. Offer your buyer persona the information they need according to the phase of the purchase process in which they are. Also, remember to do it with the most appropriate format because not only the quality of the information matters but also its presentation.
In addition, it is a great tool to know your client’s better. These are some types of content that you can use in your content marketing strategy:
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How to start your content marketing plan
The first step is to establish where you want to position yourself. Then, consider the options available to you:
- Position yourself for a topic organically. Working with keywords in a structured way can help you achieve a better position even if your business belongs to a very crowded sector.
- Create valuable content for your readers. You’ll have your own channel to offer solutions to the pains of your buyer persona.
- Be known as an expert in your sector. If you work on your content, you’ll be able to create engagement in your readers and make them consult your blog when they look for information related to your sector. In other words, they will see you as a reference.
- Opportunity to capture leads to create your own database. Applying strategies such as offering more elaborate content in exchange for data in forms.
- Make your brand, product or service known. A blog with quality content and a good SEO strategy will help to improve the positioning of your brand, increase traffic to your company’s website, and will make more and more people come to you.
- Social Media. Through your business social networks, you can share specific content. The most common is to complement this channel with your blog. You will give more visibility to your articles and, on the other, you’ll take advantage of already published content to adapt it and share it.
Additionally, you can take advantage of your blog posts to create additional content for different channels and social media. For instance, you can:
- Create attractive infographics and images.
- Produce videos.
- Customize messages for each of your target audiences or according to the social network where you publish them.
- Create audiobooks.
- Among other types of content.
So, your blog posts are not only valuable for your website you can offer your content using other channels to get even more followers. Just make sure you read your audience’s comments to know what they think about your content and what changes need to make in order to keep them engaged.
Wrapping up
Content marketing is just a small part of the marketing tools and you must use it with other marketing strategies like email marketing because they are not separate, all marketing strategies are part of the same goal, attracting leads to your sales funnel.
Every piece of content you post should have a goal and purpose, even if the purpose is simply to inform. That is why you must be constantly researching your niche, visiting forums and thinking about how you can respond to what your audience is looking for.
Be bold and dare to share your content! PUNCHY is here to help you knock out your competitors and win in marketing.
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