In a digital world saturated with content and a constant flow
of information, it can be difficult to stand out. Companies are constantly
dishing out new content in the hopes of elevating their status in the relevant
SERPs and capturing the attention of their audience, all the while feeding the
content machine and cluttering the cyberspace so much that it really takes a
forward-looking brand to stand out and make a name for itself. This is the sad
reality of the modern business world, but that doesn’t
mean that you’re destined to live in the shadow of the more established brands.
You can, in fact, elevate your standing in the competitive
industry with top-notch content, but not by focusing on quality alone – that’s
to be expected. Instead, you need to combine numerous content tactics that
drive audience engagement and you need to be consistent if you are to create
a strategy that will take your brand forward as a whole. Here’s your guide to a
content strategy that delivers.
Aligning the brand with the audience
When marketers and business leaders think of content marketing,
they tend to focus primarily on the factors that make an article SEO-friendly
or readable, but they rarely think about the branding factors that make a
quality piece of content truly stand out from the rest. After all, it’s no
surprise that people will click on a link that leads to a familiar website they
can trust rather than a link that leads to a brand they’ve never heard of
before. This is because global audiences put their trust in authoritative brands, which is why branding
your content strategy should be your top priority.
Rather than focusing on just the quality of the piece, you
should also focus on weaving your brand’s personality, visuals, tone of voice,
and its unique values into the narrative to capture the attention of your
audience, build up your company’s reputation, and establish a deeper
relationship with your customers. If the content you create doesn’t portray
your brand’s unique identity, then your audience won’t have a clear incentive
to keep coming back to your site – because they can find quality content
elsewhere.
Go in-depth on every topic and implement SEO
Branding your content is important, but beyond that, you also
have to make your content relevant to the leading search engines, such as
Google or Yahoo. This is achieved in a number of ways, one of which is to focus
on creating long-form written content that will provide in-depth and relevant
information to your audience, and hopefully answer all of their questions to
prevent them from going to other sites in your niche. You will have to use analytics and audience data to figure out
what lengths work best and to make better marketing decisions overall, but that doesn’t
mean that length is the only factor.
It’s also crucial to integrate relevant keywords into the
content by sprinkling them throughout the article in order to tell the search
engines what the content is about and whether or not it is relevant to a target
audience. Be wary, though, the keywords you use have to be relevant to the
topic and the body, because Google will penalize your site if you try to stuff
extraneous keywords in your articles and blog posts.
Optimize content using only relevant data
Data is crucial for content creation. Without it, you don’t
have the necessary information to guide your content strategy, nor the means to
optimize your content according to the needs and likes of your audience in an
efficient and effective way. Essentially, you’re just shooting in the dark,
which is why you need to track relevant metrics, compile audience data, and
produce actionable reports.
Now, manually creating reports can be a waste of precious
resources like time and employee productivity that could be better used
elsewhere, which is why experienced marketers are nowadays integrating comprehensive digital marketing reporting tools with data visualization into their system to automate the reporting
process and create actionable steps they can use to improve their content
strategy. Once you have this information, you can start to diversify into other
content types.
Diversify your content offering
Nowadays, content comes in numerous
forms, and even though written content is still best for SEO purposes, visual
content is quickly becoming the most popular content form on the web. It’s
simple, really, visual content captures the attention of the viewer and
inspires likes, shares, and comments through its unique ability to keep
engagement high from start to finish. With that in mind, be sure to start
creating visual content forms such as videos and animated videos, interesting images, and
infographics to boost audience engagement across the board and on all relevant
platforms.
Keep the conversation going and inspire action
Creating an amazing content strategy is not just about the
content itself, it’s also about engaging your audience in meaningful
conversation and being the brand that builds and nurtures a community. To
achieve this, you need to share your content on social media and ask
relevant questions, inspire your followers to create user-generated content,
and answer all relevant comments to keep the conversation going. This is what
makes content truly stand out in the saturated market.
Wrapping up
Content marketing is one of the most powerful ways to elevate
your brand’s status and authority, enhance its reach, and build a trusting
relationship with your target demographic. With that in mind, be sure to use
these tips to take your content strategy to the next level and inspire
audiences around the world to become your customers, followers, and brand
ambassadors.
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