Are you looking to grow your business and expand your reputation in the market? Well, creating and promoting high-quality and impactful content is one of your solutions.
You must have heard the phrase, " Content is the King " and this is exactly what businesses should focus on when marketing their brand.
Content for a business can range from press releases to social media campaigns. They all play an important role in building a brand position for the business.
Now, before we create path-breaking campaigns we need to plan the route of the process.
As a business, you cannot go with the flow. You need to create your own path. Content creation is the initial step, your prime intent is to sell and promote your products/services.
For any form of marketing strategy, your foundation remains the same; content. Hence, when we talk about content marketing we are actually considering a broader horizon of strategies to build a brand reputation.
Content marketing, in layman's language, refers to the marketing approach of creating engaging content. This content is consistently created and distributed to the targeted audience.
The primary goal of content marketing strategies is content mapping and eventually generating customer involvement and revenue. In order to achieve this goal, you need to plan out your marketing journey.
We have curated a list of content marketing strategies that might help you build a better campaign for your business. Let's get started!
Need For Content Marketing Strategies
Before we get into the strategies, let's understand the significance of content marketing and how it can help a business' growth.
Cost-Effective
Content marketing is an affordable approach to selling and promoting your brand voice and products/services. Compared to traditional marketing, content marketing targets a wider range of audiences and platforms.
This helps in gaining organic traffic for the business.
Content marketing can relatively provide you with better analysis as well. For instance, if you were to put a billboard or create an advertisement for television it would require a heavy budget.
However, writing a blog or creating posts will cost you nothing comparatively and is more interactive and beneficial in terms of feedback.
A post on Instagram will give you a detailed analysis of how well it performed and the same analysis for a television ad is more abstract in numbers and feedback.
Build Brand Awareness
Content marketing helps in building brand awareness through all the mediums a consumer might be surfing for your product.
As content marketing works on all forms of content, it caters to various platforms. This helps your brand in achieving an indispensable market authority.
Brand awareness helps a business to reach a broader horizon of audience.
This can be attained through creating relevant content that can attract the attention of potential consumers. Will discuss more the potential consumers in the strategies.
Lead Generation
As mentioned above, engaging and creative content attracts many. This increases the reach of the brand.
A user might just click on the link and put in basic information like email ID and you gain a lead. These leads can also be converted into potential consumers if you play your cards right.
Content generation for landing pages is helpful in interacting with the leads. Content with CTAs (Call To Action), helps the visitor in determining how to get in contact with the brand and how to follow the checkout procedure to buy the product.
Brand Reputation
The primary reason for building a content marketing strategy is to establish a brand reputation in the market.
Content marketing helps in building the repo in a unique way where the potential consumers can explore the brand motive through blogs and substance. The business creates an amiable environment to connect with the audience.
Having discussed the significance of content marketing, let's shift our focus to the various content marketing strategies.
#1. Conduct Market Research
This goes without saying that before you create any campaign you need to know your battlefield. Market research refers to understanding the following;
- Who is your audience?
- What do they need and appreciate?
- How can you fulfill this need through your product/service?
- Who are the current competitors in the market for the same product/service?
- What audiences are they targeting and how are they positioning their brand?
- What is the selling point of your brand?
- How can you highlight the USP of your brand in the campaign?
Once you have analyzed your market, you are half done with your campaign.
When creating the campaign the content should promote your brand in a way that allures your audience and stands out from your competitors.
Hence, conducting research is an essential part of creating content marketing strategies.
#2. Segment Your Audience
As mentioned before, you need to know your target audience. This can be achieved by researching keywords related to your business.
The number of searches for that keyword can tell you want the audience requires.
Now, when creating content you are bound to take the audience as a whole. However, that is not the case as your audience is divided according to what phase of purchasing cycle they are in.
Say you create content that is inclined towards brand awareness for new and potential customers.
Now, this content is not feasible for your existing loyal customers. Hence, you need to segment your content according to the customer you are dealing with.
Segmenting your content for blogs and websites can be tricky. The way your content is perceived by the audience is dynamic and subjective in nature.
However, you can create segmentation in your newsletters through content personalization.
A way of channelizing this content marketing strategy would be to email segmentation of your audience.
#3. Build An Editorial/Content Planning Calendar
Building the best content marketing strategies takes time and effort. When promoting your brand you need to factor in a lot of aspects such as conversion rates, high-quality content, and others.
Content marketing requires a seamless execution. This can be achieved by dealing with all the potential hindrances beforehand.
Planning the workflow of your content marketing strategies is a must. You can follow the prioritization model to enhance your work system.
For instance, when creating content for a campaign your priority should be your audience (potential customers) and your brand voice.
Organizing your campaign journey can be easily pursued by building an editorial calendar.
An editorial calendar helps you to manage the work you are yet to do and keeps tabs on the completed work. This way you can allocate your resources and time in the right way to get the best results for your campaign.
Creating an editorial calendar also helps you to make time for experimenting with your content.
A lot of content marketing tools help you to conduct experiments and tests on your campaigns.
These tests are referred to as A/B testings or split testings where you compare two ideas of the same campaign. This way you know what kind of content will perform better on the public platforms with real-time data and feedback.
#4. Create Adaptive Content
Now that we have discussed all the activities you need to perform before building content marketing strategies, let's talk about what content you should create.
The one thing you must remember when creating content for promoting your brand is to make that content adaptive.
Adaptive content refers to a form of content that can be helpful throughout the various platforms. This content majorly caters to the young audience.
For instance, the content marketing strategies for small businesses will revolve around social media platforms.
These platforms are dominated by millennials and GenZ audiences. Hence, they need to create engaging content and not a formal brochure of their product/services.
Creating adaptive content also helps in making evergreen content. It can be used quite frequently with minimal changes as the relevance will sustain. Adaptability in content also connects to the use of technology on your website.
For instance, if someone has discovered your brand they should have access to CTAs to communicate with your brand. It can be through direct messages, emails, or website bots.
The audience that we are referring to emphasizes the experience a brand provides through technology and customer support.
Hence, creating engaging and adaptive content is one of the top content marketing strategies to allure today's customers.
#5. Targeted Landing Pages
We've covered the aspects that will help the visitors connect with the brand but now we will talk about conversion rates.
No doubt businesses work towards their customers but they also want results and this is how you can achieve that.
Build high-quality landing pages that will help your visitors reach the checkout point. They can take an action towards buying, downloading, or subscribing to your brand.
Landing pages are the post-link page of your website. For instance, if you have added a link in your email and your potential consumer clicks on it he will be redirected to a landing page.
The landing page should give brief information about your business motive and products.
Optimizing these landing pages with SEO guidelines is an essential step toward effective content marketing strategies.
#6. Optimize Your Content
Optimizing your content is one of the primary content marketing strategies. Your content should be created with the thought of ranking high on the Google Search Pages.
To optimize your content, you need to determine your keywords and their semantics.
For instance, you are writing a blog on 'Writing Tips for Copywriters'. Your primary keywords here are;
- writing tips
- copywriters
- writing tips for beginners
- copywriting skills
With these, you can determine your long-tail keywords.
When you type in your keywords, Google will suggest similar topics that are most searched for your keywords. For the above examples long-tail keywords can be;
- how to become a copywriter
- copywriting skills for beginners
- copywriting style tips
This is how you can optimize your content for blogs. For websites and landing pages you need to be direct and crisp with your notion to rank high.
For instance, if you are running an online shoe store. Your website domain and landing page link should include your brand name and product.
This will increase your chances to rank higher.
Along with this, you need to add adjectives that can attract the consumers such as 'affordable, trendy, sporty or phrases like 'buy cheap shoes at the best prices.'
This is how when a user searches for 'affordable shoes, cheap shoe prices, or best prices for shoes', your brand will pop up.
These are just a few examples of how optimized content can do wonders for your business websites and eventually for your sales.
#7. Consistency In Content Creation
Imagine if you were planning to buy a watch.
The rankings show you this amazing website that is optimized and has all the necessary elements and interesting blogs too.
However, it was last updated 3 months ago. The general thought would be that they might not be looking to sell their products.
This is where the key element of consistency shines. You cannot just create an engaging website without actually engaging with it.
You need to update your content and your website from time to time. This is where our suggestion #3. Editorial Calendar comes in handy.
You need to plan your next content marketing strategy once you are halfway done with the previous one.
The change of design and interface you experience on the websites for brands such as Zara, Sephora, and H&M are not created overnight.
The marketing teams plan their content according to the new collection or upcoming events like the Christmas months before.
You can experience this on their social media accounts as well. The posts and their vibe change according to the campaigns which are more often than not executed monthly.
Creating content consistently plays an important role in attracting and maintaining your consumer interest in your brand. They will look forward to your new product launch or new collection.
Another way of creating regular content is through newsletters and subscribed content. This also helps in building a connection with your consumers. This content, as mentioned before, is for segmented audiences who have access to your premium memberships.
Hence, to create relevant content and brand reputation in the market you need to come up with impactful content consistently.
#8. Opt For Native Advertising
We have all come across native advertising on social media platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Google. Native Ads are often seen as deceiving content marketing where the quality of the content does not matter.
This notion is debatable for a few brands but all-in-all Native Ads are a great source of attracting leads and potential consumers.
To give a brief, native advertising is paid promotion of your brand on various digital platforms.
For instance, the small yellow icon at the start of a link on Google that says 'AD' is a paid promotion. Chances are you have clicked on an ad link a million times.
Instagram also promotes paid posts and stories which you might have engaged with a lot of times.
Native advertising is a transition from banner advertising. However, here you can analyze;
- How many people saw your ad?
- How many of them reacted and took the action of clicking the link?
- How many left without taking an action?
- How many people clicked the link but left your website instantly?
Native ads give you tangible information which can be utilized to enhance your user experience.
Remember, native advertising only works when your content is catchy and stands out from the rest of the crowd.
It also requires you to have high-quality landing pages. The ad can get you leads but your targeted landing pages can convert them into consumers.
#9. Social Media Engagement
We have mentioned before how businesses use social media platforms to build their brand reputation. Let's discuss how the same platforms can be used to engage with your potential consumers.
Platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn help you build a connection with your audience beyond your sales objective.
You can create content that will stir a discussion within the community which will eventually help you gain brand awareness organically.
For instance, you can create interactive posts on current topics, giveaway posts for your products, and testimonials of your consumers.
These platforms also provide a gateway for video content through reels and shorts. You might find them cheeky but 'Louis Vuitton' reaches 7M accounts through their reels.
Social media has grown into a profitable forum to promote your brand and build authority in the market.
You can get an instant analytical report of engagement for your campaigns as well. An online presence for a business is one of the major content marketing strategies in today's scenario. Most small businesses start their journey on Instagram today.
#10. Benefit From User-Generated Content
Considering you follow all the content marketing strategies and are able to convert a lot of visitors into consumers you will have a community to give feedback. This feedback could be given through their personal entities or on your website.
User-generated content basically refers to the reviews and feedback you get from the general public.
They might mention you in their blogs, posts, video content, and others. This content can be utilized by interlinking their article or mentioning them in your Instagram stories.
These feedbacks help you to build trust in the brand in the market which might result in audience interaction and sales. Testimonials are your treasured content that needs to be promoted for your brand reputation.
#11. Omnichannel Distribution Of Content
We've discussed the various types of content that can be created to promote and sell your products/services. This alone tells us that content marketing is not restricted to any form or style of writing.
Content styles that fall under the umbrella of content development are all parts of content marketing strategies. Hence, the distribution of this content is executed through omnichannel platforms.
Omnichannel distribution refers to creating and marketing content across different platforms. This helps in brand position and to reach a wider audience than your traditional means of marketing.
However, you need to create content according to the platform interface.
For instance, Instagram allows you to write 2,200 words in a single post whereas, Twitter allows 125 characters. So the content size might differ but the synthesis must remain the same i.e. the motive of your brand.
With this, we conclude our list of the best content marketing strategies that can help you expand your business. Hope this article was helpful for your strategies.
This is a guest post written by Kulwant Nagi. He is a founder of AffiliateBooster, a WordPress plugin to help affiliates to add conversion-optimized elements.
