Your company website has the potential to become an extremely powerful asset in generating leads and sales for your business. But it’s not always effective to make push for sales on your blog and social media channels. Yes, you do need to ask for the sale. That’s how you stay in business. But you simultaneously need to be reaching out and connecting with your customers by creating a relationship with them as well. Content marketing is a highly effective way of accomplishing this.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is different from traditional marketing in that it is somewhat passive in nature. The emphasis is not on hard selling but is instead meant to increase brand awareness while creating a connection with the audience. Do you remember watching cartoons every day after school on or Saturday mornings? Those cartoons were forerunners to today’s content marketing. They didn’t ask you to buy anything, but they promoted their respective brands – and sold tons of toys and clothes and all kinds of other products.
How Blog Content Helps Your Business
In a similar way, using content as a means of connecting with your customer base, you can offer content on your company blog that attracts visitors to your website and begins a relationship with them. They won’t all end up buying your products and services, but many of them will over time. And many of them will become your biggest fans and will be quick to recommend your company to their friends, family and business associates.
A Simple 3-Step Content Marketing Plan
Your business’ content marketing plan can be as massive and complicated as you want to make it, but at its core, there really are just three main components that will make up your strategy. First, you’ll need to come up with topics for content that will attract your target customer base. Then you need to create content around those topics. Then to increase targeted traffic to your website, you’ll give the process a little push by publishing some of your content on various media outlets and industry blogs that are tightly related to your products and services. If you need help along the way, or simply want to outsource the entire content marketing process, you’ll want an experienced team like Tucson SEO Pros to ensure that everything is done efficiently and effectively.
1. Identify Keywords That Attract Customers
Your content plan starts with keyword research. Keywords are terms and phrases that your future customers commonly type into search engines when they’re looking for information, products and services that companies like yours provide and that are related to your product. Keywords may be individual words or combinations of half a dozen words or more. Generally speaking, the longer the keyword phrase is, the easier it will be for your blog to rank well for that keyword. These are called “long-tail keywords”, and your blog posts should each target one or more of them.
2. Create Keyword-Driven Content And Publish On Your Blog
Next, you take your list of keywords – whether it contains 50 keywords or 5,000 keywords – and you begin creating blog posts that target each keyword. Some keywords are so similar that it will make sense to choose one as your primary keyword for an article, and then include the other similar keywords as secondary keywords. Repeat this process with blog post after blog post, creating multiple pieces of content that provide real value and helpful information to your readers.
3. Publish Guest Posts To Get Backlinks And Increase Brand Awareness
Some of these blog posts won’t be used on your own blog, though. Instead, you’ll start pitching these articles as guest posts to be published on other industry blogs and media websites. Many of those sites will allow you to become a regular contributor to their blogs, which can allow you to grow your audience and spread awareness of your brand much more quickly than if you kept all that content to yourself. Your articles on all these other platforms will ideally contain links that point back to your own company’s website, pushing readers from their sites to your own.
The face of business is changing, and while traditional advertising still works, it’s not nearly effective as it was in the past. Today’s companies are finding that content marketing is a powerful strategy for supplementing more traditional advertising methods and hard selling tactics. Both approaches have their place in your marketing plan. If you’re only focusing your marketing efforts on hard selling and traditional ads, now is the time to start implementing content marketing to further the growth of your brand and your profits.
