Smart Marketing Relies on Understanding Good Content; Maximizing its Potential Drives Sales

Understanding content marketing is a vital part of business in today’s digital world. Fortunately, content marketing is an easy to learn and do.

Content marketing is making use of blogs, articles, videos, graphics, and social media to draw customers in, get them interested in your product or services, and keep them around for more. The goal is to drive traffic to your site or sales funnel in an interesting, relevant way and get the conversions you are after.

Best-bet Content

Make your content work for you. Posts about song lyrics and pictures of puppies are great, but not if they don’t make sense for your business, nor link back to something relevant on your site. Create your content based on:

• Knowing your audience: target the specific demographic you’re looking to capture.
• Being informative: make the content you’re sharing informative and valuable to that target audience.
• Creating fans: make engaging, emotion-provoking, action-soliciting content. When someone is moved emotionally or intellectually, it creates a relationship between your business and the consumer.

You don’t want to come off as too much of a salesman when it comes to the content that you’re creating, though. Your content needs to focus more on engaging the visitor rather than selling them. Eliciting an emotion or an action (like getting them to share that picture or like your post) will build a relationship with them, and that’s a big part of the main goal behind a solid content marketing strategy.

Your Content Marketing Tool Box

Your website is probably already loaded with awesome content that is ready to go. Take those pages, descriptions, or pictures, and start putting them to good use instead of just sitting there in a dark corner of your site waiting for someone to stumble upon them. Great places to share content you’ve got, and to get links, and traffic, back to your site, are:

• Facebook: write and schedule regular posts on Facebook. These can be short, but should inspire curiosity, and link to somewhere on your site that the user can discover more.
• Blog: create a series of informative blog posts that are pertinent to your business. Remember; don’t focus on sales here, but on engaging, informing and entertaining the user. Inspire sharing when you can.
• Twitter: though the medium is meant to be brief, Twitter is a great way to drive traffic where you want it. Use it to regularly link to your blogs, or other content on your site you’d like to feature.
• Instagram: a particularly great tool, Instagram can be used to easily create beautiful content, with the bonus factor that you can link in the text area to more information about what’s being featured. It’s also incredibly sharable, and an easy way to build an audience that will follow those links to the rest of your content.

Applying strategies

Get your content ready, make a schedule for your various media to appear, and start employing some smart content marketing strategies:

• Integrate content into the user experience: interlink on your website, make things interactive, and engage the user (and potential customer).
• Make use of what you already have: turn your informative pages into blogs, grab those pictures and start posting them, and take your videos out for a spin on Twitter.
• Don’t focus solely on keywords for search engine optimization (SEO): keywords and phrases are important, but it’s also painfully obvious when articles and blog posts are written with SEO in mind instead of just plain, good information. If you’ve done your homework, your SEO strategy is well in place and your content will reflect that. By using natural, varied and semantic keywords and phrases,  you will optimize your user experience.
• Avoid clickbait! It looks cheap and reads poorly.

By using much of what you probably already have, some tools of the trade, and a good strategy, you’ll be able to take your content marketing plan to the next level, and use it to gain and keep a loyal, engaged, customer base.