Establishing your brand online is an exciting challenge that requires attention to detail in several areas.
Ultimately your goal is to be found online by as many potential customers as possible, and then to offer a seamless and valuable customer experience to convert as many potential customers into loyal, repeat customers as possible.
To set the ball rolling your website needs to be well-planned and structured and cover all the search engine optimization bases including design that makes navigation easy, mobile responsiveness, good page download speeds, up to date and accurate meta descriptions, title and alt tags and so forth.
A key component of your website’s SEO is content – your site content needs to be accurate, descriptive, comprehensive, and well-written, as Google’s crawlers rank content as one of the most important factors in elevating your website in search results.
Once you have these crucial website elements in place it’s time to consider your active marketing strategy which can include paid marketing on Google and social media channels, email marketing, using influencers, affiliate marketing and other channels to target specific audiences.
One of the most effective digital marketing strategies is content marketing, in which you create and distribute valuable, relevant content for your target audience, placing this consistently on your website and other digital platforms (for example, your business Facebook page, TikTok, Instagram or via email).
How is Content Marketing different to my other website content?
Content marketing is less of a ‘direct pitch’; instead, you’re providing truly useful and insightful content to help your target audience learn new information, find answers to questions, solve problems, find an item they’re looking for or upskill themselves in some way.
Content marketing can take many different forms including:
· Written content in the form of blog posts, eBooks or articles written for use on other websites
· Infographics
· Videos
· Podcasts
How do I go about developing a Content Marketing strategy?
Before you get to the content creation aspect of the strategy, you’ll need to create the framework for your strategy:
· What do you want to achieve? Are you aiming to:
o Grow your brand?
o Develop a new audience?
o Boost sales and revenue?
o Increase brand loyalty or customer engagement?
o Build your business’s reputation as an authority?
You can have more than one goal but it’s best to be focused on clear goals and KPIs, and to have measurement tools in place to assess the impact of your campaigns, whether that’s an increase in site visitors, more enquiries or sales, an increase in subscribers to your email lists and so forth.
When it comes to the content aspect of your strategy the key elements of a successful content marketing plan are to be found in the words ‘relevant’ and ‘valuable’. To create meaningful content around your business’s main activities, you need to:
· Know who your target audience is
· Know what information they’re looking for
· Know where they’re looking for those answers (on Google? On social media?)
· Decide what type of content you’re going to create (written, video etc.) and what channels you’re going to distribute on
· Create content that answers those questions for them
· Select a budget if you’re going to use paid promotion to amplify reach
· Publish!
You should develop your content using the following guidelines:
· Tell a story and make it recognizable and relevant to your audience
· Use friendly, appropriate language, imagery etc. to make your audience feel at ease
· Offer information that your audience can use immediately (and at no cost, ideally) to improve their lives, solve challenges, learn something new etc.
What impact should Content Marketing have on your business?
Primarily the purpose of content marketing is to find and grow new audiences that you can develop longer-term relationships with and communicate with on a more regular basis.
By earning their trust as an authority on whatever it is that your business does, you’re creating a position for your brand as an authority and therefore are far more likely to gain new – and more importantly, repeat – business over the course of time.
Useful KPIs to apply to your content marketing strategy include:
· Improved brand awareness and authority rating
· Increased customer enquiries, website visits and other engagements
· Growth in social media platform audiences
· Increased sales
· Cost of sale efficiency
· A larger, more loyal customer base
· A direct positive impact on your bottom line
To find out more about developing a meaningful and impactful content marketing strategy, speak to the team at Realnet today. Call us on 01223 550800 or email info@realnet.co.uk for more.