Content Marketing – How to make it work harder?

In today’s society there are a huge number of online, social and mobile platforms. This means you are not only competing with a sea of competitors for your customers attention, but also having to do it across a range of channels. It can be a difficult and daunting task especially for small businesses. However, without new customers, your businesses future may not be long-term.

Content marketing plays a big role in your digital marketing strategy. It can be a very time consuming part of a business. However, we are here to help show you how it can do wonders for your business with less work from you and more work from your content itself. Content marketing is so important for a business. We advise you not to ignore it or do it half heartedly. The online presence for a brand is vital for success. It’s time to step up and do your business a favour. 

What is Content Marketing? 

Content marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on creating and publishing content for a targeted audience. It includes blogs, social media, email marketing and more. It’s the one thing that’s going to last in your business. Clients and products will come and go but once your content is out there, it’s there forever. It can drive traffic, get reactions and start conversations. 

The goal of content marketing is to attract the right audience for your business in a way that gains their trust and encourages them to make a purchase. Simply publishing content, even if it’s great, isn’t enough. Once you’ve published your content, you’re about halfway there. You then need to work on getting your content in front of the right people. Just because you’re posting content doesn’t mean it’s working. There is no point having the best product or service on the market when no one knows it’s there. You need to make sure your business is being discovered by potential customers.

How to make content work harder? 

Stretching yourself across search engine optimisation, pay per click, social media and content marketing is difficult. Content seems to create a lot of trouble for some people. Create, publish, then what? Often nothing happens. Does this sound familiar? You may not see any return for a few months and want to give up or write it off altogether. Well don’t. This will create problems for your business as content is the backbone of successful SEO and many other forms of digital marketing. By giving up on content you are making SEO and social media a lot more difficult for yourself. Now is the time to get it working to its full potential. We are going to explore the different ways you can use your content and make it go further.

You may already have your hands full with what you’re already doing and be thinking how can I do more. It’s all about efficiency. You just have to think about it differently in order for it to work in your favour. Publishing is just the beginning of the process. It’s important to make sure you research and plan before publishing. From there, it’s all about promoting.

The trick is to make your content work harder for you. You need to create something that adds value and interests your target audience. No one will be on your website or social pages to just kill time. They will be there for a reason either to solve a problem or to get answers. If your content doesn’t do this, it probably won’t get read. You also need to be sure that what your writing is going to encourage engagement. Is it different to anything else out there? Will your followers want to share it with friends? Once you have attracted the right audience, it’s about continuing to engage with them through different means. 

Social Media 

The majority of businesses will create specific content for social media. However, you can use existing content as inspiration for social media posts. What’s stopping you going back and posting about previous blogs or something you posted about 3 months ago, if it is still relevant of course. Don’t be afraid to go back down your feed and reuse content. The key is to make sure you continue to use interesting, engaging content for your target audience. Make it personal to them. Once you’ve written a blog, make sure you combine it with social posts. If you mention 5 different points in your blog, this can be the base of 5 different social posts. From your social media posts, you can then run paid ads for your post to increase its reach. 

Email Marketing

Content can help with your email marketing in a few ways. Firstly, it will get you sign-ups or subscriptions. Why not add a link for a blog or popular social post giving people the option to sign up. Once you have got people to sign up, you can then use existing content in your emails. Include links, products or snippets of blogs. Alternatively, create an email exclusively for your blog post with a link to your website and the blog itself. Emails are a great way to get your content out to a big audience, make it personal to them and adapt or add to it with further information. You can even take past content and update it. This will minimise work for you but maximise content. 

Blogs 

We have mentioned blogs already but use your content and create a blog post. This may seem simple as the majority of the time the blog post topic comes first. But if you look back at previous social posts, what’s to stop you making a blog about these? Push content through multiple marketing forms and you’ll get more out of it. 

Keywords

Content marketing is one of the best ways to get discovered online. Think about when you ‘Google it’ to answer a question or solve a problem. Everything that appears in your Google search is driven by content. To ensure your content is working hard for you in terms of SEO, make sure you spend some time on your keywords. When looking at these, be sure to choose more specific keywords. For example instead of ‘towel’ use ‘Egyptian cotton towel’. This will make you more unique and stand out in a busy market. Add these keywords into your posts and ensure you have internal links to encourage users to stay on your site. This won’t get you on the first page of Google overnight, however it will put you on the right path.

Successful content marketing doesn’t have to be a painful process. Once you have your marketing plan you can dive in and reach your goals. By combining a variety of marketing tools you will be able to maximise and make your content go further and work harder. Find a few strategic pieces of content and use various marketing techniques to push them. You will see better results for this instead of constantly churning out content everyday with no meaning or engagement. If you need help with your content marketing or have any questions regarding your digital marketing strategy, please don’t hesitate to drop us an email on info@ellis.digital, or give us a call at 01483912900.