Content drives many of the decisions that customers take online. It makes people aware of who you are, educates them on what you do and provides enough information for them to make an informed buying decision.
Taking this a step further, there are some important questions to ask.
What does the content journey look like?
What types of content do your prospects like to consume?
And how does the content you create help to solve customer problems?
Section 1 What is Content Marketing
Being an online business owner means that you don’t have a store for people to get to know you, for them to see your products or talk to you about your services.
Therefore, in the online world, your content must work hard to establish credibility and build trust. Great content is the foundation of any successful digital strategy.
Audience challenges, user intent, value and quality are just a few of the things to keep in mind when researching and writing content.
But to gain a deeper understanding of content marketing, we must understand what it is.
Essentially, it’s the publication of content, whether that’s a written blog post, a long form guide, an ebook or even a video to educate and inform.
Every piece of content that you publish should be linked to a goal.
Goals drive all of your marketing efforts. Ask yourself, what are you trying to achieve by publishing an article, an ebook or a guide? Is it to teach, motivate or engage? Or is it to increase brand awareness or boost conversions?
Without clearly defined goals you will struggle to make your content work.
Before you start to write, identify your goals.
Here’s a simple checklist you can use to keep you on track.
Education
Will your content be used to teach something? When customers are educated about a product or service, they are better informed and more likely to buy.
The types of content that you could create to educate include a Frequently Asked Questions post, an in depth product guide, a product review or a video tutorial.
Engagement
How can you start a conversation with your content? Can you create something controversial, emotive, inspirational or newsworthy? When you create content that really engages with the audience, this shows that your company has a human side, even more so if you inject a little personality into the content that you create. Remember, prospects buy from people rather than brands so keep this in mind when creating any type of content for engagement purposes.
Brand Awareness
How will you make your brand visible? Quality content can help you establish authority in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Consistent content that speaks directly to your target demographic will position you as an expert in your industry. The more expertise that you develop the greater trust you will build amongst your audience. And when the prospect is ready to buy, the first company they will think of is yours.
Credibility and Trust
People will only buy from those that they Know, Like and Trust. This is known as the KLT factor. When you regularly publish valuable, helpful content that teaches the audience something in a different way, or educate them about a topic that is new or interesting, they will gradually begin to trust your company much more. When you create information such as case studies, guides and articles, visitors will gain an understanding of your style, expertise and experience. Most importantly, they will start to picture what it would be like to work with you.
Customer Retention
While it’s great to attract new customers into your sales funnel, it’s even better if you can maximise the lifetime value of the customer and turn them into long term clients. This is one of the best sources of business growth and you can increase the likelihood of customers staying with you for the long term. Many businesses invest huge amounts of time creating for prospects and to attract new customers, but rarely consider content for existing customers. Make the product or service work better for customers. Share useful guides, articles and how to’s to optimise the effectiveness of their purchase. Don’t leave your best advice, information and content for new prospects. Remember your existing customers are just as important too.
There are many more content marketing goals but these will help to get you started. With your goal(s) in mind, what’s next?
Tools. These are essential for content planning, writing and design.
Section 2 The Content Marketers Toolkit
The right tools can give your marketing efforts a boost. They will allow you to craft expertly researched, well written and professionally designed pieces of content.
This is what we would recommend in the content marketers toolkit:
BuzzSumo
Best For: Researching Content and Popular Topics
A must have tool for any online writer. Enter a keyword or search term into the BuzzSumo website and you will be presented with a list of content titles that have received lots of social shares and links. You can use this to see the standard you should aim for, how it’s written and who is linking to the guide or article. BuzzSumo can save you a lot of hours trawling through competitor sites and blogs trying to gain an overall picture of what is proving popular. This information will give you an insight into what types of content resonates with your audience.
Answer The Public
Best For: Finding Topic Ideas
Generating ideas for your content is one of the most difficult components of content marketing. But with Answer The Public your task is made much easier. This will show you what people are searching for. It contains a vast database filled with questions and information that people are actively looking for in your industry. Simply enter a keyword and you will be presented with thousands of potential topic ideas. One of the great things about Answer The Public is that the results are based on real questions people are asking on Google.
Best For: Keyword Research
For blog content to make the most impact it needs to be found and to be found you need good SEO. Use Google search to find what people are searching for. There are three ways to do this – Google suggested search, ‘People Also Ask’ and if you scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see ‘Related Searches’. This a great way to research keywords because it shows you what people are asking – and what ranks in Google.
Flesch Kinkaid
Best For: Checking the Readability of Content
Content readability is important. Readability is a term used to describe how easy a piece of text is to read. Typical readability formulas will explore many different things such as syllables, sentence length and complexity of words. Content marketing is used as a way to share information. If your writing style is stopping people from engaging, then readability might be the problem. A readability score will tell you what level of education someone will need to be at to read a piece of content easily.
Flesch Kinkaid is the most common readability checker and your content should be around level 8 on the ratings scale. This will give you a reading level of between 13 and 14 years which is where your content should be.
When content is too difficult to read, your audience may not understand what you are trying to say. This can lead to poor engagement. The readability of your content is important because it will determine how well people absorb and retain the information you have to share.
Canva
Best For: Graphics
You don’t have to be a graphic design genius to create impressive graphics for your content marketing. Canva is home to a vast collection of templates for all kinds of publication from blog graphics through to social media posts and ebook covers to professionally designed media packs and slide decks. Your creative masterpiece can then be downloaded in a variety of formats such as a PNG, JPEG or PDF to distribute as you wish.
Google Analytics
To assess the performance of your content marketing efforts, monitoring metrics is important. Always check Google Analytics to see what’s happening with your traffic. It will show where traffic is coming from and what visitors do once they land on your website, as well as providing data on the performance on your content.
Section 3 Types of Content Marketing for Beginners
Writing is one of the most difficult things to do when it comes to content creation. It can be daunting, challenging and frustrating. Whether you write content yourself or you outsource it to a freelance writer, it’s good to know what types of content you can create.
Authoritative Guides
If you want to become known in your industry, build credibility and establish trust, the publication of in depth, authoritative guides is an absolute must. You can publish these as long form pieces of content or in the form of a downloadable product or even an ebook. Guides should explain a topic in detail, break it down into small segments and make it super easy for the reader to follow.
Social Media Posts
What platforms are you using on social media? Are you publishing content to the right channels? Where do your audience spend most of their time? What types of content do they prefer? If they like video content then YouTube would be a good fit. If they prefer image based content, then Instagram is a good option. Each post should be designed to generate engagement with your brand and meet a specific goal. Understand your audience and their challenges and aim to build a loyal fan base of 1000 true followers.
Emails
There’s no better place to engage with your audience on a more personal level than through email marketing. That said, avoid making all of your emails about sales. Share valuable information, distribute quality content, help people solve problems and show the human side to you and your business.
White Papers
A white paper is an in depth piece of content that follows a very specific framework. It will provide background information, recognise a problem and then identify a solution, usually connected to your product or service.
Articles
A blog is one of the most powerful tools in your content marketing strategy. It is a way that you can reach your audience and create quality content based on the topics that they care about. You can use a blog to create lots of different content from short Q&A posts to tutorials, product reviews and more.
With all the different types of content that you can create, it doesn’t mean to say that you have to use all of them. Test different content types until you find one that performs well. You can always expand to publish more content types later on.
As you start to publish content, it’s important to track performance so you can adjust campaigns as you go.
To do this you must understand metrics.
Section 4 Content Marketing Metrics
With your content strategy starting to take shape, and a steady stream of quality content being published
Traffic
What channels are proving most beneficial for your brand? Does the majority of your audience come from social, search or email? The analysis of traffic sources will allow you to identify the marketing channels and strategies that are working for your content marketing. You could also identify where there is potential or where a small change in your strategy would make a huge difference.
Social Metrics
The key metrics that you want to keep an eye on through social platforms include click through rates, subscriptions and conversions.
Also keep track of comments. It takes much more effort for a visitor to your page to leave a comment than it does for them to like a post. This will reflect how engaged your community is.
Building a name for yourself online is about establishing a strong presence through social platforms. As you build your community more and more of your content will be consumed by your followers and if it’s really good content they are more likely to share.
Links
As one of the most important factors in ranking a website on Google, pay special attention to quality links and where they are coming from. Building backlinks is an important part of SEO. The more links you have pointing to your website, the more credible you appear to Google and the higher up in the search engine rankings you will move.
Time on Page
Time on page is a key metric to track. You want to keep people on your pages, posts and website as a whole as possible. The longer they stay, the more likely they will be to buy. There are lots of things that increase time spent on page such as quality of the content and usability. If visitors land on your website but spend only a little time on each page it may mean that your content is not captivating enough and may need some work.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate refers to the number of people who bounce from your website after landing on the first page they reach from the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). There can be many reasons for this such as user experience, slow load times or poor content. Reduce bounce rates by making sure that the content on your web page serves user intent.
Conversions
If people visit your website and consume your content that’s great, but what do they do next? You must guide your visitors to take some action. This could be joining your mailing list, downloading a free guide, reaching out to you by phone or email or making a purchase directly on your website. Use a Call to Action (CTA) to direct people where you want them to go.
Every action that a user takes on a website should lead them further towards a sale.
Effective content marketing for beginners requires understanding what you want to publish, where and who you want to target.