CONTENT MARKETING

YOUR GUIDE TO...

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” Content Marketing Institute

Content marketing is rapidly evolving. Producing generic content and just sending it out is no longer a marketing strategy for any business that hopes to stay competitive.

In this guide, discover the benefits of content marketing, gain insights into how to use it successfully and find out what the future holds for content marketing.

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INTRODUCTION

“82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading their custom content.”

Demand Metric

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INSIDE THIS GUIDE:

Introduction 2

The benefits of content marketing 4

Top tips for successful content marketing 5

The future of content marketing 7

More on-site content

This may seem obvious, but more time spent on content marketing means more content for your website. This means your customers will have more reasons to stay on your website, more opportunities to become familiar with your brand and will invest more trust in you, leading to higher conversion rates.

Higher visibility in search engines

Every new post you add to your website is another page Google is going to index. More pages doesn’t necessarily mean more search traffic, but having more quality pages indexed can grant you more opportunities to rank for more search queries. If you target the topics that your customers frequently search for then you should have no problem appearing for those searches.

Higher domain authority

Writing a lot of high quality content will increase the perceived expertise, authority, relevance, and trust of your site. If that content earns more inbound links from external sources, your website’s domain authority will increase even further. A higher domain authority is strongly linked with higher search rankings, so the more quality content you produce, the more organic search visibility you’ll stand to gain in all areas of your site.

Improved brand reputation

When people read your content, they’ll be building an impression of your brand. If they find what they read helpful, informative, or enlightening, they’ll think more highly of you. Furthermore, if they see your content published on external sources and on their social newsfeeds, they’ll perceive you as a more trustworthy, established thought leader in the industry.

THE BENEFITS OF CONTENT MARKETING

“Among content marketing’s greatest strengths are its practicality, its simplicity, its multifaceted effects, and its timelessness.”

Forbes

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As content marketing is always evolving, it is important to review your strategy and content to make sure it is the best it can be.

Combine the written word with visual content

Traditionally, content marketing has focused on written pieces only. This is because it is very easy to create and share this type of content; it can be used on a website, emailed directly to customers or downloaded as a PDF.

However, businesses will need to be more creative in the way they present content to make it stand out. That means combining text content with video, audio, interactive components and visuals.

Creating multiple forms of visual content gives your visitors the option to consume the content in the format they prefer. It also gives you the ability to share it on more platforms. Users can share the other forms of visual content via social media, which can potentially increase reach and engagement.

TOP TIPS FOR SUCCESSFUL CONTENT MARKETING

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Examples of using infographics to portray key data within an article.

Some of the ways you can use visualisation to make your content marketing succeed include:

• Infographics that highlight key statistics mentioned in the article

• Short introductory videos that explain the purpose of the article

• Full-length videos that present the contents of the entire piece

• Interactive elements, such as maps and graphs, that allow users to explore the information discussed in the article

• Interactive slideshows to browse the key points in your article

Focus on reader retention

If you have built an audience that reads your emails or visits your website regularly, it is crucial that you spend some time thinking about reader retention.

Some of the best audience retention techniques include:

• Provide a regular stream of quality, useful and relevant content

• Engage in a dialogue with your readers via the comments section or on social media; this will help you build a relationship with your audience

• Make it easy for your readers to obtain and subscribe to your content

• Create a seamless experience for readers to find your top content and related posts

• Offer incentives for readers to keep coming back, including competitions, giveaways, discounts on products, or access to special content

• Use email marketing to reach your users directly. Contact FIG if you would like help creating and sending out eshots.

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An example of how Creative Bloq integrates its most popular content into its blogs and articles. This box appears at the right-hand side of the content.

Make content that is highly targeted

As you might have noticed, there is a huge amount of content available online. There are billions of blog posts and articles covering nearly every topic known to man. For this reason, it is becoming increasingly important to avoid writing about generalised topics. Chances are there is already an article or blog post out there which tackles the same topic in great detail.

Instead, look for topics that are specialised to your audience or related to current affairs. Always carefully tailor your content to match the background and knowledge that your audience already has. If you focus on creating highly targeted content that your audience can’t get elsewhere, it will be considered highly valuable.

Embrace user-generated content

Take advantage of user-generated content by encouraging your audience to engage with your work. Ask for feedback via Twitter, encourage comments on your blog, ask people to share your post via social media and so on.

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Promote your content

Making fantastic content is a waste of time if it can’t be found. In addition to promoting your content through email marketing, social media and press releases — consider using paid promotion such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads. This will help increase your visibility and drive more traffic to your website.

Content marketing development should be more than developing content for just the sake of it. Each piece of content produced must be tied to a certain goal (organic traffic, conversions, lead generation, brand awareness, etc.)

Analysis phase

Before you begin your content development plan, you’ve got to have an idea of what you’re working with already. In other words, you need to know how your existing content is performing in order to identify any gaps or areas of opportunity.

Planning and scheduling phase

A critical part of the planning and scheduling phase is making sure you’re targeting the right keywords in your content. In other words, you need to regularly revisit your keyword strategy – instead of simply relying on the keyword set you’d identified when first starting out with your content program.

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Topic analysis: What topics/categories tend to drive the most visits? The most social shares? How can you use these insights to help guide future posts?

Content length: What is the average length of the posts? Which content has received the most social shares?

Top linked content: Which posts are currently driving links? What are the topics/categories that drive the most links?

Top posts driving internal traffic: Which posts are driving the most internal traffic? What categories do they relate to?

Top conversion paths: Which posts are driving conversions?

Traffic: How has the content performed over a set time period? What have been the peak traffic periods and what may have accounted for them?

Organic search visibility: What keywords rank for the content? What are the broad keyword categories/subject areas?

Top landing pages: Which posts in particular drive the highest traffic? What categories do they relate to?

Top-converting posts: Which posts are driving the highest conversions?

Post frequency: How often do you post content and how does this compare to competitors?

With so many exciting digital developments in content marketing, here are some to consider when creating your digital content strategy...

Artificial intelligence

AI has the potential to change the content marketing landscape. It can be used to better understand keywords, enabling you to develop content that resonates with your audience. AI can also be used to help format content for SEO, discover relevant content for curation, and automate content distribution.

Internet of Things (IoT) and new devices

Users are no longer restricted to their PCs, laptops, and smartphones as far as interacting with content is concerned. The challenge for content creators will be developing content that will be able to respond to each of the various devices within the IoT space.

This way, content marketers will be able to provide customized content based on location, monitoring data, and real-time alerts straight to the device. Marketers will even be able to send content based on proximity data, for instance, clothing retailers sending messages about dressing for warmth during the winter period.

THE FUTURE OF CONTENT MARKETING

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AI can be used to help format content for SEO

IoT content can be based on location, monitoring data, and real-time alerts and more.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

VR will likely ease its way into content marketing to fulfil the growing need for visual content. Content marketers will get the exciting opportunity to push content optimized for VR, which is largely unchartered land.

These semi-immersive activities support brand storytelling, and offer consumers new reasons to interact with brands - the perfect way to bridge the gap between accessible content, and full-on virtual reality campaigns.

Live streaming

Live streaming offers content developers and marketers the platform to come up with more in-demand and live content, which still remains a vastly unexplored area.

Plus, with Facebook jumping into the live streaming arena, more users are likely to appreciate content that is modelled around live experiences. Live broadcasts provide an unedited look at brands due to their raw, spontaneous nature. Whether it’s through sharing behind-the-scenes footage, live events, or hosting a Q&A, live video is integral to establishing a true connection with an audience.

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Content marketers will get the exciting opportunity to push content optimised for VR.

A still from the GE live video stream

Live broadcasts provide an unedited look at brands due to their raw, spontaneous nature.

Example of live streaming used in content marketing

In July 2016, GE used the livestreaming app, Periscope, to launch a week-long campaign entitled #DRONEWEEK. It allowed viewers to have a drone’s eye view of some of the company’s least accessible facilities where jet engines, locomotives, wind turbines and industrial machinery are made.

Improved search engine algorithmsSearch engine algorithms are finally becoming fully automated as far as updates are concerned. Most content marketers design their online marketing campaigns around manual search algorithms. These are often updated manually and such updates are communicated promptly to the online community.

However, self-updating algorithms will make it harder to predict what the rules are for maintaining organic visibility. For example, RankBrain, a machine learning algorithm, scours the internet and fine-tunes search results, making it harder for content marketers to “cheat” their way to organic results.

E-commerce and social media

On their own, e-commerce and social media marketing have been explored by content managers for years. But the real game-changer is going to be social purchasing as more social media sites begin integrating aspects of e-commerce. Social media is currently one of the leading platforms that content creators use to distribute content and build audiences. With such sites becoming more focused on revenues, their focus will shift from content consumption platforms to becoming e-commerce hybrid sites.

As such, content marketers will need to find alternative platforms for interacting with their audiences since opportunities for organic visibility will have diminished considerably.

Extending brand reach through micro influencers

Part of a successful digital content strategy involves nurturing a growing community of followers - something that can be facilitated through partnerships with brand advocates - or micro influencers. Existing customers with anywhere from 500 to 10,000 followers on social networks, micro influencers have significant influence, and an authenticity that can be tricky to harness with more well-known personalities. Encouraging and leveraging content from micro influencers shows the community that they’re valued, as well as increasing brand reach and, in turn, increasing the likelihood of conversions.

Programmatic social ads

Publishing on certain social channels without using paid promotion is a disservice to good quality content. Programmatic ads offer the chance to really personalise content, tailoring it to an individual’s experience and increasing the chance of conversion. This practice is supported by new functionalities from social platforms, such as Facebook’s ability to retarget users based on the percentage of a video watched.

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