Having a strong content marketing strategy is more important than ever in 2016. There’s something comforting in the knowledge, despite the many technological advances over the last decade, the need for quality content is higher than ever. This is due to Google’s algorithms, which crawl through your copy and determine where it ranks in its SERPs. If you’ve got an authoritative, well-designed site alongside excellent copy, you’ve got a much better chance of ranking in a competitive position.
With this in mind, we’re away some businesses may be uncertain about how to go about creating a strong content marketing campaign. This is especially true when it comes to mastering the complex world of SEO, which is all important when it comes to landing page content. The following 10 content marketing tips will help you structure a strategy which delivers strong results in 2016.
1. The Ideal Content Marketing Strategy? Be Creative!
Content marketing is about creativity – you need to be compelling in order to earn engagement from the online community. Think of your target audience and what they’d like to see. You can structure your ideas around the best industry practices and allow your creative flair to go from there.
For further ideas, take inspiration from other businesses, but don’t afraid to be innovative. Unique ideas are often well received by consumers, many of whom are growing tired of predictable marketing campaigns they’ve seen a thousand times before.
2. Guest Blog with a Passion
A few years ago, it was a common tactic to write a guest post for other sites and request links within the copy. Guest blogging for links only is seriously out of date in the world of SEO. Matt Cutts (Google’s former head of web spam) a few years ago stated guest blogging wasn’t the best method to go about your SEO strategy, but the practice certainly isn’t dead.
Guest blogging with a genuine passion for your topic is a much better tactic. If you write something interesting and unique you’re far more likely to connect with your audience than if you churn our something generic in the hope of bagging a backlink.
3. Consistently Publish Quality Content
Many small businesses don’t have a professional copywriter to write for their site. It’s straight forward to pay someone to write the copy for your site for a one off, but blogs soon become dormant and social accounts like creativity. In the long run, you’ll need quality content all the time across numerous platforms. Perhaps it’s time to consider taking up a wordsmith!
4. Consider the Many Aspects of Content Marketing
Content marketing isn’t only about writing interesting copy for landing pages – we have social media accounts, PPC ads, SEO, and more to consider. Social media content is arguably as important as your website content, particularly for B2C companies.
Take into consideration the need for video marketing (there’s more on this further below – see point 6) and how you can engage with customers. With any B2C company, holding regular competitions is always a great start.
5. Turn to Your Business as a Content Resource
Whether it’s your customer service team or the questions being left on your Facebook page, you can turn to frequently asked questions for inspiration. This can fuel your blog posts, social media campaigns, and will also help you run your business more effectively.
6. Turn to Video Content for Engagement
If you’ve been active on YouTube with videos, you can look to these for blog post inspiration. Whilst YouTube is still fantastic for engagement, there are new platforms your business can try to gain more customers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook is one key example. Modern marketing is about storytelling, and Facebook’s 360 videos are a brilliant way for publishers and businesses to show off compelling stories. It brings viewers into a new world and promotes engagement through social sharing.
It’s easy to create a 360 video and viewers can view any element of the scene as its playing. This is ideal for many services who can use it to showcase what makes their venue special.
7. Make Your Content Evergreen
Evergreen is another one of those industry maxims which has been doing the rounds for the last few years. What it means is to structure your content so it has the ability to hang around in SERPs being a positive influence. To do this you’ll need to write something with lasting impact, so consider what will stand out in your respective sector. You can also help your evergreen efforts by writing with a certain search engine friendly tactic in mind…
8. Write with SEO in Mind
There are many free tools which let you understand which keywords are right for your content. Understanding which search terms are the most popular enables your content to go live and capture key search ranking positions. Search engine optimisation remains an excellent way to have traffic speeding to your website.
9. Write Quality Content
One of the main reasons for Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithms was to sift the bad content to the bottom of search rankings. Search engine users don’t want to come across bad content, and Google (as a business) wants customers to keep using its service.
This means you have to write quality content. This isn’t about keyword stuffing or other SEO tactics, it’s about writing something of interest which is of use to your customers and will remain relevant. This, of course, refers back to evergreen content.
10. Use Images
The internet is big on images. Stock photography isn’t the solution, it’s imperative your company puts the effort in and produces bespoke images free from actors grinning moronically whilst performing mundane tasks.
Task your web team to create images which represent your brand, and don’t forget to perform SEO on these images to capture search ranking positions.
