Digital Marketing is at its peak at this time. Do you agree?

This means more consumers are likely to purchase online rather than to a physical store and the current times are making that all the more rampant.

Your online presence should be felt and heard.

It’s high time you draw out a Content Marketing Strategy. But what is Content Marketing? Let’s find out.

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is a facet of your Content Strategy which involves creating different formats of content such as:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Podcast
• Infographics
• eBooks, etc

Its main focus is the distribution of these contents out to the market to attract an audience directly to your brand.

These carefully created content should emulate your brand messaging and personality. They should be cohesive pieces of content that will -

• Invite and introduce your target audience to your brand
• Establish credibility and authority in your niche AND most importantly -
• Build relationships with your customers

Content Marketing helps in creating an experience for your audience while piquing their interest in buying your product or service. A great way to establish your authority on the industry you’re in.

Given the current climate, Content Marketing is getting a lot more traction now more than ever. Business owners big or small are considering having this strategy these days.

Why?

Because it’s still proven to be the most effective way to scale your business into the market. Although it takes time to get results, if done correctly, you’re going to gain more than organic traffic- you’ll have your target audience at your behest.

4 Strategies That Work

1. Streamline your Brand’s Objectives

By streamlining your Brand’s objectives, you’re paving clearer pathways for how to create content for your business.

It helps that these are shared with all your team members. It makes identifying them much easier.

You can start by establishing the following components for your brand:

• What do you want your brand to do for your audience (Mission)
• Customer Persona
• Where do you see your brand going (Vision)
• What is the purpose of your content
• What forms of content you want to create for your audience
• How and when will you publish said contents

Once these are identified, it will be easier for you and your team to come up with valuable content to share with your audience.

Pro tip: You can bring your team together for a fun virtual team-building activity while brainstorming these components.

1. Create Content That’s Simple and Easy to Consume

One of the reasons why your audience comes to you is because they correlate you to a solution to the problem they have.

Having this in mind, you must keep your content simple and easy to consume. You don’t want to bombard them with a lot of information.

Articles should have a word limit, videos should be shorter all the while packed with useful tools to help them solve a particular problem.

All these are going to be easy to identify once you’ve completed strategy #1.

1. Always Ask Your Audience What They Want to Hear From You

Another strategy that works is getting your content ideas from your audience.

After all, they’re the ones guzzling over your posts, videos, podcast, etc. Why not ask them directly what they want to hear/read/watch from you. Right?

Not only will you get rad ideas, but you’re also engaging them and indirectly having them involved in your process.

1. Create Actionable and Re-purposeful Content

This strategy is two-fold. It can benefit both you and your audience.

For your audience:

Always hand out valuable content. It has to have actionable items for them to take away after reading/listening/watching it - otherwise, it’s just noise, a waste of their time.

That’s why quality is more important than quantity in this case. A once every three weeks thought-through content is better than a daily series of mediocre content.

Craft content that will make them think - if this is what I get for free imagine what I will get for paying for their service/product?

For you:

Create evergreen content that you can repurpose along the way. This is a great strategy to keep in mind.

With re-purposeful content, you don’t have to always think of brand new ideas. Plus, you can be assured that whatever comes out of this previous piece of content, you’re assured that it’s still in line with your content strategy.

Why Work with an Agency to Optimize your Content Strategy

In a perfect world, you can run your business and write/create marketing content for it as well. But the truth is, you can only do so much.

But hey, if you have the time to learn the ropes of content marketing, by all means, please do it yourself.

But running your business can become overwhelming and it’s just a fact.

Creating content for your business involves a lot of strategizing and planning. Therefore, it needs time - time that you do or do not have.

Most brands who use content to market their business are just shooting blanks and create a ton of content without context or a clear path.

That can do more harm than good.

This brings me to the discussion of whether to hire an agency to do these things for you.

Hear me out:

Hiring agencies can link you to an expert to do this for you and would turn out to be a sound investment that’s proven to get you results.

How?

1. Agencies, given you’re hiring the right one for your business, can provide you with professionals who specialize in your industry who know their way around your target audience. This will compel them to make content that will resonate with your customers.
2. You will have access to the industry’s top-of-the-line tools and technology which help augment your digital presence.
3. They also provide reports and data on how these contents are working for you on different platforms. These pieces of information can identify so much about what your audience looks for.
4. They can create a content strategy for you that you can utilize for the foreseeable future.

Conclusion

Creating content for your brand is one thing and having a Content Strategy in place is another. Not only will this help your brand scale in the market but it will solidify your credibility which can only mean more conversion from an audience to a customer.

According to Neil Patel - “Stratabeat even found that 80 percent of business decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles, versus an advertisement.”

You see, through these different contents your audience so happily consume, you’re dodging the threat of Ad Blockers and effortlessly reach them while giving them so much value for their time.

For more data on how Content Marketing is THE Marketing - please click here.