As a startup, you are probably aware that marketing is important in order to gain more exposure for your brand, product, or company. In the rapidly growing and advancing digital era, content marketing has become more relevant in order to draw in customers, clients, and visitors over a variety of platforms. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action.
1. Have A Goal
The first step to content marketing is to always have a goal, as a business you should even create micro-goals. Any strategy starts best by identifying your companies goals and how you’d like to obtain those goals. The ultimate objective of any business is to, of course, generate sales and boost traffic, but you need to be more specific, which is where our micro-goals come into play. Our micro-goals are the steps that lead to more sales, but our content will be built around these particular steps.
You want to be able to offer content that is entertaining and interesting to read so that your readers are compelled to share it with others around them. The more your readers opt to share your content, the more exposure you will gain and you will find yourself in front of new viewers. While entertaining your readers is important, educating them is even more so. Your readers will see your content as useful and helpful to any they know who are also interested in your particular industry. In creating in-depth educational content, you will also be able to show off your knowledge within your industry and in doing so, be able to explain the benefits of what you do or sell. If you are able to write both educational and interesting content, you will then be able to convince readers to provide their information before they are able to access any further content. This will in turn, begin to help you generate leads and increase your email list.
2. The Content
The most crucial thing to remember when it comes to content marketing is that you should always focus on the client and their needs, do not base your content on what you want to write about. To begin brainstorming ideas for your posts, you want to think about answering questions, specifically posts that will answer the most frequently asked questions which concern your business. You want to showcase the human side of your business by telling personal stories, how you got your start in the industry or sharing behind the scenes looks at your business and the people involved within it.
There are various systems in delivering personal content to your audience, by way of:
- blog posts
- ebooks
- guides
- white papers
- case studies
- quizzes
- infographics
- slideshows
- videos
- apps
- podcasts
- social media posts
- social media custom graphics
While there are many options to choose from, so you want to try and focus on three forms you feel most comfortable with before beginning.
2B. Content Curation
To put it simply, content curation is defined as the gathering, organizing, and online presentation of content related to a particular theme or topic. Content curation-based websites can be useful to people who are looking for a quick overview of current content within a particular category. You can fit content curation into your marketing plan by using a few different methods, such as weekly curated blog posts, weekly email newsletters, or sharing the content on your social networks.
3. Get Your Content Seen
The most important aspect of content marketing is to make sure your content is seen and shared. You want to share your social networks and place content in areas that are natural for it. You also should get your post included in a link round. While you want to get your content out there, make sure you are consistently creating high-quality content that is in line with your goals.
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