What Can You Do To Elevate Your Content Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing is so much more than just writing up some information, a listicle or some other kind of content and uploading it to your website. Did you know that content marketing involved complex strategy that aims to support your other marketing channels? If you are simply just writing a blog post and not aligning it with your other marketing strategies, it probably isn’t doing you a whole lot of good.
The two main channels that content marketing aims to support is social, specifically paid social, and SEO. Creating engaging content that actually provides users value is the first step but there are many ways you can align it with your other strategies to have a more well rounded content marketing plan.
SEO + Content
When your content strategies main focus is to support SEO, there are some best practices to follow in order to get the best results. Every month you should focus in on one topic that will become the focal point of your content cluster. This means that every post you write should relate to this topic or concept.
When creating a content cluster you should be sure to review what topics are trending and what you think people may be searching for. There is no defined number of posts that should be in your content cluster but the more the merrier. The more content you can create around this topic the more likely you are going to get exposure and help your rankings.
Related: How Content Clusters Benefit SEO
After you have your general content cluster topic sorted out the next step is to research keywords. Once you find the keywords you want to focus in on, you will want to use a platform like MOZ to gain further insight about what words you can rank for. SEO focused blog posts typically run anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 words, they are usually keyword heavy and contain a lot of detailed information.
Additionally, throughout the blog post you will want to internally link to the other blog posts in this cluster. This encourages users to click through to more pages of your site and help familiarize them with your brand. If they click through to multiple pages it improves the quality of the visitors, it shows that they aren’t just clicking to your website and then bouncing (exiting) from the page but instead are engaged.
Content + Paid Social
The content for paid social is typically different from the content created for SEO. When creating content for paid social the goal is to create fun, engaging and shareable content. You want to introduce your brand to new users in a fun and lighthearted way.
One way we drive new users to our client’s sites is through content like quizzes that relate back to the brand. This is a low pressure way to encourage new people to explore your website without it feeling too transactional. These kind of content pieces are considered top of the funnel, as they focus on driving new users to the site rather than pushing existing customers to convert.
Related: Why You Need to Integrate Your Content and Social Ad Strategy ASAP
One great way to develop engaging content is by making a quiz. Try to brainstorm a topic that relates back to your brand, but it doesn’t necessarily have to have an exact tie to your products or service. For example, for our client Out of Africa, a wildlife park based out of Arizona, we created a quiz that focused on telling user’s who their spirit animal is. At the end of the quiz we included a call to action encouraging them to meet their spirit animal in person at the park.
By creating fun content for users to look at or engage with, you are creating an experience for them. At the end of the day we must provide users with value and opportunities to engage with our brand. Quizzes are also great because people love to share them with friends and compare results. Not only is this a good way to grow your website traffic, you can also use this as an opportunity to grow your email list.
Use a call to action at the end of your quiz that includes having users fill out their email. For example, you could say “Enjoy this quiz? Join our email list to get updates on our latest quizzes.” You always want to give users the opportunity to explore your website further, this is why including calls-to-action and internal links to other pages is considered a best practice.
Related: The Top 3 Reasons Your Content Marketing Strategy is Falling Flat
Content marketing takes many different shapes and forms depending on what your business’s goals are. How do you leverage content for your marketing goals?
