Content Marketing: Strategic, Educational and Effective!

Content Marketing: Strategic, Educational and Effective!

Content is King

While social platforms are queen, quality content is what powers these strong networks. Learning how to effectively utilize a company blog to educate your audience and move customers through the sales process is an affordable, long-tail marketing plan.

The difficult part of implementing a content marketing initiative is deciding what to write about. You don’t have to chose one specific topic, like if you are a yard care company, you wouldn’t just write about the new fertilizers and lawn mowers you are using. These are topics that would be relevant to show you are using top-notch equipment and could be an effective post, but really you should be focusing on valuable tips. If you can show your company as a thought leader in the industry, not only do all of those posts you are writing help your site gain rank in search engines, but you have also shown why you are the right choice for lawn care.

There are millions of topics to write about on your blog, though most importantly remember to keep a similar tone. The tone is your brand, it is your image and readers will expect that similar attitude for each new post. After deciding what to write about and how to sound, now is the tricky part, how to divide the work.

Pawan Deshpande, founder and CEO of Curata has published an article on Boston.com explaining 5 tips to ease the daunting task of populating an organizations traditional marketing channels read his suggestions below:

  1. Find Your Niche: It might seem obvious that an organization will publish content that’s relevant to its own industry, but go beyond that. Is it possible to carve a niche within the industry for your organization? Is there an untapped issue or trend that your company can own and become the leading expert? Maybe there’s an opportunity to put a new spin on content that feels overdone dated. No matter the opportunity, be sure to define the space you’re working in and have a clear focus, ensuring that all of your content helps drive your organization’s goals and objectives.
  2. Share the Load: You may have a team or you may be the sole marketer in your organization, but regardless, you may feel the responsibility of content creation rests squarely on your shoulders. While you should certainly drive and manage the effort, content can seem stale and monotonous if it’s only coming from one point of view. Enlist colleagues from different departments to contribute to your content efforts. This will help keep content fresh and offer new perspectives.
  3. “Color” your Content: When most people think of the term “content,” text usually comes to mind and can feel like a time-consuming initiative. Text is certainly a critical part of content, but don’t underestimate the value of an image, such as an infographic. Images can often influence an audience even more than text, as it may be more attention-grabbing right off the bat. An image can be the lead point of a particular article, or it can complement your text. It’s a great way to keep your content exciting and different for your readers. Furthermore, infographics are often shared by the original reader, especially with encouragement, which means that a reader’s audience is now seeing your content and spreading your message. Remember, if your image is not developed by your organization, be sure to cite the original source.
  4. Curated Content: As mentioned before, today’s marketers are facing an enormous resource strain. Curated content helps eliminate the challenge of limited staff and budget as it is an effective way to keep populated with fresh content. For starters, identify a blog post or article that you want to share with your audience and write a short excerpt that includes your commentary, including a summary and thoughts on why the content is relevant. Similar to including images, be sure to link back to the original source in order to curate in an ethical manner. You should also be sure not to share the full text of the original article without permission from the author.
  5. Invest in Technology: With the advent of content marketing, there is also a slew of software to simplify and streamline many of the laborious or complex tasks. For example, there are now specialized tools to help manage the workflow of content production, the outsourcing of content to a team of writers, the distribution of content to multiple publishing channels, and the curation of content. While you can implement a content marketing program with existing tools and technologies, you can greatly improve your efficiency and efficacy with such tools.

You can find the full article here. Thanks for reading and please comment with some of your strategies for populating content marketing channels.

About 

Digital marketing agent by day and amateur crime fighter by night. This ninja ginja writes about technology trends, social media advancements, and light commentary on our digital culture. Founder of Tower Agency, Roger can be found working hard in the office or playing hard outside.

Positivity is a virtue and there is no shortage with this young entrepreneur.

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