Content marketing is the new buzz word in the digital world right now- I know what you are thinking. Another new thing to learn, another new way to do things. But don’t stress content marketing has been around for years and chances are, you are already doing it.
Learning about content can be hard if you don’t know where to start. So we will break it down into three easy key points. Let us help you understand how content marketing can increase the profit margin in your business.
1. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
The first thing that needs mentioning is that content marketing is part of SEO, it’s not competing with link building. High quality content and SEO go hand in hand. Without clever SEO (by which I mean link building and keyword research) how can you have a successful content marketing strategy? And without good, relevant content to freshen up the information on your website, how can SEO work?
SEO is primarily about finding good keywords to focus on and build links around. These keywords are shaped into articles and content with substance. Keywords are fundamental to SEO, and researching to find them, tracking their performance in search engines and creating links from them is key. This is where content helps play an important part in the SEO mix. The best way to use the keywords, is position them strategically in relevant, detailed, interesting and engaging content. Content marketing, is in a nut shell, website copy written using targeted keywords primarily to entertain and engage people, but also search engines.
Google analyses or ‘crawls’ content when it is added to a site, so make sure you don’t add too many keywords in unnatural places. Search engines don’t like short simple articles they prefer articles longer than 200 words that include some detail. If you try to ‘overstuff’ or ‘optimise’ the content your page will be penalised or ranked lower than it would have if you had simply written normally. So do it right and do it well and you will rise in the search rankings.
When SEO and content marketing are done conjunction correctly they go hand in glove.
2. Blogging – or web-logging
The simplest way to do content marketing is by creating a blog, just like this one. Recent figures show companies who blog have 55 per cent more visitors to their websites and receive 97 per cent more links (Hubspot 2015). This data proves just how valuable blogging can be to your web traffic, customer base and business growth.
New content keeps your website fresh and when you create each blog post, you are creating another page within your website to show up and rank in search engines. Tailoring each blog to fit in with your customer profile, will in turn help to attract more customers to your website. Blogs have been rated as the fifth most trusted source for accurate online information (Hubspot 2015.)
Creating original content and giving your customers something valuable that they want to read about, will ultimately help to increase profitability in your business. Keep the blog simple and write about topics that will interest the kind of customers you want to attract. Think outside the box and get creative with your content.
3. Social Media
There aren’t many people who don’t use social media and in 2015 Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn are becoming a big part of our lives. By having a social media account for your business, you are creating a platform you can use to amplify your blogs, videos and website content.
Having a dedicated plan for each social media channel will benefit you and the audience you are reaching out to. Tailor your content to each medium and your audience. Post links to your blog to drive brand awareness and attract traffic back to your website don’t just add the information directly to the Facebook page or LinkedIn account.
You can also encourage your followers to share your blog or video to spread the content to a wider audience.
All three elements blogging, SEO and social media ultimately overlap. Content needs SEO to find keywords that will rank well on the search engines. SEO needs content to flesh out the message and attract readers. Social media helps push the content out to new readers and raise the rankings of your keywords - Twitter is being indexed on search now too! Social needs interesting content to talk, share and favourite and SEO to optimise content it has shared. So the circle continues.
All of these elements mixed together into a content marketing strategy, that promotes your product or services new online markets will enable you to grow your customer base and business. All if this adds up in the end to a higher cash flow. So have a think about how you can apply content marketing strategy to our business and grow your cashflow!
