What is Content Marketing

Content marketing is another engaging way to drive traffic and sales for your business. Oppose to alternative marketing strategies that are centered around pushing your business offerings on prospects, content marketing is all about trying to get content (articles, pictures, how-to guides, videos etc) that your audience will appreciate.   

The content marketing example of Solomoto (follow us on Twitter & Facebook) is trying to make the lives of our users easier and think what they would like to see. Since Solomoto is an automated marketing platform for small businesses who are pressed for time and resources, our content is geared towards helping small business owners get the most out of their platform use marketing tips.

There are also other things we put out more than just articles we have written to help with business marketing. We also try to share content that is fun, informative as well as sharing content from other sources who know better than us.

Essentially, by providing your audience with relevant content that suits their needs, the logic is that they will trust your brand with handling their consumer needs as well. In order for that to happen, make sure content is what your audience wants to see and relevant to your niche. This is a fundamental to effective content marketing.

Check out this infographic to get a clearer idea about how to break down your content marketing strategy.

(Source: VisualContenting)

Types of Content Marketing

Types of Content you can use for your marketing strategy can be broken down into 2 main schools for the sake of simplicity. There is:

1. Retention

2. Conversion

These two strains should dictate how you produce your content to accomplish your marketing goals. Retention should be all the content that keeps your audience engaged, happy and growing your community. If you are in the food business, it can be recipes that your audience would love or it can be updates to your service or product and informative content that sparks interest in your product.

Conversion is your content that is placed in front of your audience for the convenience of their consumer experience when dealing with your business. Helpful content creates an insulation around the general sales cycle that provides consumer with a warm, engaged approach to shopping.

Of course both retention and conversion can overlap, for example an informative webinar on my service or product, which ends up yielding significant sales. The sales would reflect the conversion side but the content needs to be made in a retention style of production to create value and ultimately sales.

Methods of content and the feel must be established according to what channels you are using to share your content, your niche and your audience. For instance, Instagram is regarded by many marketers as a place where businesses who are not traditionally suited to Instagram (Instagram is centered around aesthetic appeal and industries like fashion, fitness and food typically dominate) can still succeed by approaching it at the right angle.

For instance businesses that are more centered around an office or workspace, can establish a connection with their audience by posting cool pictures of their work life.

Content Marketing Tips

10 Content Marketing Tips:

Blog - If you are in a niche where you have  certain expertise that can help your audience with practical advices, you will need a place to post. If your website doesn’t already have a blog you can use a website like Wordpress, to create a blog effortlessly and for free. Some SEO experts agree that this is a good way to spread your internet footprint and help boost rankings. Since you will have two sites that will relate your business to your niche.

Go Long - Counter intuitively, longer content tends to do better than shorter. I typically aim for around 800+ words, but really the content needs to be natural and relevant and that is more important than the word count.

Brand - Take the opportunity to brand your content, hopefully after some experimentation your content will start to gain larger and larger organic view counts. If that happens we want to be sure your content is branded and shares will draw more attention to your business.

Go Social - Make sure your social media marketing is receiving a boost from your social media marketing efforts. Share your content using the appropriate social media channels available to your business.

Series-ly - If you have a large topic you want to tackle, break the content down into a series of posts to make the content palatable and longer lasting.

Consistency - Try to use Facebook Insights and other tools at your disposal to figure out when your audience is using social media. Post your content at those times consistently so they know not only what and where to find your content, but also when.

Schedule - Make sure you have a post-scheduling tool available to be able to publish your content on a daily basis. If you can’t do a daily basis, or you feel your audience is too small, make sure you don’t take more than a day off in between publishing. Yet, daily is still the way to go. Most successful brands are publishing 60+ posts a month.

Be Trendy - Don’t be afraid to join the rush of internet traffic surrounding a trending topic (i.e elections, massive sporting events, etc), a good place to start is Twitter, where you will find trending hashtags on the left side when you log into Twitter on your computer.

Above the Fold - If you’re producing content on your blog, make sure the image you attach to your work comes before the fold (the bottom of your screen before you scroll down) to help improve your SEO.  

Infographics - Infographics are your friend to conveying a lot of information in a limited space. Notice the infographic above. A good website for creating infographics is Venngage. It is a subscription service, but they have great templates available.

Good luck and let us know about your content marketing experiences.