- April 25, 2022
Practical Guide to Content Marketing 2022
55 minutes to read
55 minutes to read
At Granth, a creative branding agency, we run on providing value to businesses through tailored content that reflects their brand value, is palatable to their audience, and yields off-the-charts revenue.
Thanks to our branding and marketing experts, we have compiled this ebook that houses everything about content marketing.
The purpose of this ebook is to tell businesses why content marketing is synonymous with revenue.
This literature houses innate tricks that Granth either uses looks up to or wishes to implement shortly to upscale the growth of our esteemed B2B customers.
I hope you find this compilation of actionable value.
While it may seem a new concept for sure, content marketing has been around for quite some time now.
Sure many people think content marketing has come into play recently with the growth of the internet and digital means of content production.
To be precise, content marketing is a concept that dates back to 1895, when John Deere published his first issue of ‘The Furrow,’ which is an agricultural magazine that also published print advertisements.
John’s magazine had such strong copywriting that every single issue started reaching millions of people within a few decades.
The Furrow is still being printed, which makes it the longest-running branded magazine and one of the primary examples of effective content marketing.
Let us take a trip down history and find out the use of content marketing in different organizations from the 1890s.
1890-1900: Companies like P&G and Michelin started producing content-rich magazines that farmers and agriculturists could use or relate to.
1900-1930: Valuable, incredibly designed, and high-quality travel guides from Michelin helped customers seek travel information to plan their next trips accordingly.
1930s: P&G starts the production of radio/TV programming. This was done with the help of brands such as Oxydol and Duz.
1982: Marvel cooperated to launch their comic book series ‘GI. Joe – A Real American Hero’.
1987: LEGO launches its Lego CLUB Magazine.
2000-2004: Blogs, articles, and reports dominated the internet.
2004-2006: Content marketing was diversified into videos and podcasts.
2006-2012: YouTube and Dailymotion have become popular video distribution platforms.
2012-2016: High-quality content is preferred over anything on the internet. Search engines like Google have become more advanced and focus on quality over quantity. Websites and blogs gain more popularity.
2016-present: Content marketing is used by about 88% of the brands worldwide, with an expected global turnover of about $107,540.6 Million by 2026.
It is not surprising to hear that the traditional marketing methods do not do justice to most businesses now.
The discovery of a target audience and finding the suitable methods to target them is the need for the modern times of hyper-personalization — and content marketing helps you do just that.
Coming to the central part of what content marketing is, by definition, it refers to marketing your business using the right content through a suitable medium.
“It is reaching out to your audience in a way you both connect.”
Content, by any means, is definite of serving its purpose. You have more than one way to do this. From articles, blog posts, and videos to even podcasts in 2020, reaching out to your audience through any of these means contributes to content marketing.
“The purpose of content marketing is to draw people in naturally.”
The marketing part in all this process includes using all this content to reach out to your audience. However, the main difference is that unlike other types of sales and marketing techniques, content marketing attracts people towards you, then you to them.
Understand what all can be considered as content.
Content marketing gives you more than one way to connect with your customers. This is done through different types of content.
Content, be it any type, is one of the most distinguishing elements between companies and their websites. Right from your images to the text on your website, if you are doing it right, you have a clear chance of making your brand stand out from your competitors.
Some of the standard content types are:
While there are many mediums you could connect with your audience, text, and video are generally your everyday go-to for channeling your content.
Marketers all around the world prefer writing content for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is obvious considering they have to run their businesses as it happens to be one of the main techniques of bringing in organic traffic. However, the fundamentals of producing and publishing content are often forgotten.
Ask any top marketer, ‘Who do you produce content for?’ and their answer would be, ‘My content is aimed at my readers.’
Don’t get me wrong, you can and SHOULD produce content for SEO as well, but if that is the sole purpose of your content, I am sorry, but your brand will not last long.
Like every other search engine, Google does not entertain plagiarized content. We all know that. However, that is not everything. Even if you have a piece of content that seems hand-made or handwritten by you but does not provide any VALUE over your competitors, there is barely a chance your content is going to do any good.
Google also considers indistinct content as plagiarized content, as stated below!
Content marketing involves creating, sharing, and distributing content among the common masses. If your content is distinct and valuable compared to your competitors, people will pour in sooner or later.
There are many content marketing strategies. Once you get familiarized with all the content marketing strategies, it is only a matter of time before your business starts generating off-the-charts revenue.
Businesses all around the world have adopted marketing as a primary resort to reach out to people. Furthermore, since marketing is of different types, it depends on the business model and what type of marketing they feel is necessary.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is not much discovered yet. Businesses might prefer social media marketing or PPC marketing, but they never realized that it is the content only that is what they market.
Convincing people to think highly of your brand is what every business wants. Moreover, that is just one of the many benefits that content marketing could bring.
I cannot tell you precisely if your business niche requires content marketing or not, but I can mention the benefits of content marketing. If you find these goals for your business as well, you require the right content marketing strategy.
As mentioned above, content marketing is the backbone of most digital marketing campaigns. Successful brands work to their bone to provide valuable and relevant content that connects with their audience.
As per the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers consider content marketing a core strategy.
Moreover, the reason for this is REVENUE!
Content marketing helps with outreach and brand growth.
It allows SMBs and large conglomerates alike to drive traffic to organic traffic to their app, website, e-store, or physical space.
It does this by increasing your findability online by ranking you better in the search engine results.
Content marketing helps you entice both — the search engine and your prospects!
A great piece of content connects with your target audience, both B2B and B2C.
I mean, it is self-explanatory.
If you produce a great piece of content that not only appears valuable to your audience but is engaging as well, you are bound to invite more traffic to your website as the content is shared.
Furthermore, while the content cannot do anything significant on its own, content marketing is what makes it reach people.
Think about it. You have a very entertaining podcast episode that you shot for an entire hour with great conversations that you think people will enjoy.
Unless nobody is listening, it does not serve its purpose. This gap between content and people is bridged by content marketing!
Creating exciting content from your end and the proper marketing channels helps your businesses generate more leads. However, that is not all, since the generation of more leads means more revenue as well.
Value to the Search Engine + Value to the People = REVENUE
However, numbers speak for themselves, and we would like you to frame a picture in your mind based on the stats that we are about to share with you.
Here is what the data suggests on content marketing and its potency to drive revenue:
Want more? Here are a few findings from Hubspot!
So, now that we know that content marketing drives revenue, let us understand the HOW.
Let us get into the nitty-gritty of ways content marketing helps businesses generate revenues:
As I mentioned above, the more valuable your content is to your audience, the more authentic your business becomes. The production of high-quality, niche-specific content makes your audience believe that you are an authority in your field. This eventually makes you an expert in your field.
Leads mean a lot to a business and are considered a top priority for almost every marketing campaign.
For a business to do great, they need new leads that could become potential customers in the future. Content marketing helps people to find your brand through valuable content.
With additional resources like micro conversions on your site, you can encourage more sales on your website. Businesses need leads to make sell and content marketing is one of the best ways to do that.
Unique and valuable content is what people (and search engines) love. When you have high-quality content on your website that not only is SEO-optimized but satisfies the search intent of a user, your content is most likely to be ranked in the top search results.
The key to SEO-friendly content is simple – Do not overdo it.
When a user is typing in a keyword and your content ranks towards the top, they will reach your page. Moreover, while their queries are addressed, the chances are that they might even end up converting with any of your products/services or even eBooks.
This one might be obvious by now. Brand authority is a significant sales factor. The better your audience recognizes you, the more sales and conversions your business could achieve.
Your content broadcasts your delivery and interaction with your audience. The better you do it, the more people you could retain and add to your fan base.
For every blog post or video that you produce, people will be keen to try it or just read it. Even if you cannot convert each of your users (which is impossible), having more people interacting with your content is still one of the best things a business could ever ask for.
Being an expert in your field, people will resort to your content most of the time to extract the information they do not have yet. This means your content is due for attention since people share what they love.
If your content not only solves a problem but also provides additional information that people did not even expect, your readers will likely share this content on their socials. This means more customers and more leads for your business.
Sure, your primary concern should be to produce content that is helpful to people. However, if you can create shareable content as well, you are already way ahead. In this ‘digital era,’ gaining traction through social media is one of the easiest ways to build your brand.
Now, as we already realize that content marketing is a vital success factor for our businesses, we understand the different types of content marketing and how they could benefit our business.
Content marketing, as we all know by now, is distributed across a variety of mediums. This means your content could be served as:
and whatnot.
However, what you should remember is that not every business could use the same type of content. For example, a YouTuber cannot depend on a website or a blog to gather an audience and then direct them to his YouTube channel.
You could understand the different types of content marketing and try to adopt the one that complements your business the most.
Here are some of the most common types of content marketing:
Do you know that about 90 million Americans listen to podcasts every year? That is a HUGE number and a potential marketing space.
According to WSJ, Joe Rogan recently signed a deal nearing up to $100 million with Spotify. The licensing agreement is one of the largest such deals in the rapidly growing podcast business.
Podcasts have become a very diverse niche. From education, business, and entertainment, podcasts could be directed to anything you find yourself interested in. The best part about them is that you can practically raise an audience interested in the stream you prefer talking about.
This is one of the main reasons why businesses have started producing podcasts.
Economic Times, one of India’s most prominent newspaper agencies, has launched its podcast. While the podcasts are generally 5-10 mins long, they sure have infused the interest of all their e-readers by launching almost one episode every week.
While it can serve as a distinguished revenue stream, it could also allow your audience to connect with you on so many levels. Podcasts help in building business-audience relationships, build brand awareness, and even promote the products and services.
Blogs bring about 57% more traffic to your website than any other stream that you could bring in from any other medium.
Neil Patel, one of the most prominent marketers of our time, generates most of his revenue from his blog. So do Brain Dean and Kulwant Nagi!
If you have a dedicated blog section, it could be one of the most powerful resources that could bring in direct traffic to your website (which eventually brings in more sales as well).
Blogs not only are a great traffic source, but they even help you in inbound marketing and share information with your customer. Depending on the type of blogs you produce, you could build a similar-interest audience that could convert somewhere down the line.
Remember this – Use your social media accounts to provide value over promoting your products.
Neil Patel is excellent with his social media, where his primary focus is to offer people value rather than pushing his products and chrome extensions.
Different international brands have a huge fan following on social media. While it is hard at first to build a social media presence, it is worth it.
A solid social media profile invites more people towards your brand through sharing, mentions, and promotions. Moreover, when you have finally build a social media profile, you can feed them valuable media that usually talk more about your niche and less about your products and services.
On a general basis, videos retain your audience more than text. Producing videos regularly helps your business more than you could imagine.
Video marketing helps in boosting your conversions, improving the return on investments, and building an audience from an entirely different platform.
Distributing your videos through a variety of platforms is what helps your brand the most.
Internshala’s YouTube channel is an excellent example of video content marketing.
By putting every feature of the platform to use and using other video platforms like IGTV, they have maintained a solid social media presence.
We will talk about videos and their distribution more ahead as we talk about some of the best content marketing strategies.
Before we even talk about the right content marketing strategies your business should adopt, there are a few prerequisites your business needs to consider.
Just like every other type of marketing, content marketing also happens in stages with a particular aim in mind. For example, with blogs, you aim to build an audience around a niche. The same goes for podcasts and videos on YouTube.
When you are producing new content, you need to have a goal for what it is for. Content without any directive is like writing an exam without any knowledge of what the exam is for.
You might clear it, but you do not know what purpose it shares until you get the results.
Content marketing is similar to where you need to target what you are even putting out. While it is essential to aim with your content, it is also evident that a solid content strategy is not easy for most organizations.
About 63% of businesses do not even have a documented content strategy.
Every marketer knows who his target audience is. Before you even sort through ideas to produce content, you need to understand who this content is even for.
Knowing whom you are marketing your products to has a considerable impact on your campaigns. Marketing your products and services to relevant audiences is very important. Identifying your target audience helps you produce the right content and serve it across the proper channels.
Finding your target audience is way more accessible now, thanks to Google Analytics and other tools that help you determine your audience’s age, gender, and other specifics.
Reaching your target audience and walking them through a buying process is a 3-step process. This includes:
We will talk more about the customer journey in our next chapter.
One of the most common selling points for an organization is to have a strong message about what they stand for.
It is an essential fundamental of a great content strategy plan and makes it easier to focus on the highlights of your business.
An ideal content marketing mission features:
If you own a website or blog, keep a page dedicated to mentioning your goals and vision.
You can also give out specific details about your venture. Videos are a great sales driver, as we talked about earlier.
The more clarity and create your brand displays, the stronger your point appears.
Business objectives help people figure out what you are all about. While every business approach is to make sales, try to do your business primarily about considering the needs of the customers and delivering what you promise them.
Planning a dedicated process for content creation purposes is one of the most important things.
Moreover, while you are planning to market your content, you should also know that:
When you are getting started, you want to make a difference in a concise amount of time. Let us be honest; you cannot!
When you are starting to produce content, DON’T aims higher, at least not in the beginning.
If you start targeting keywords and topics that already have much buzz going around along with more competition, your content is just going to get lost in oblivion. It will not even be discovered in the top 50 search results for that keyword.
Let us say I own a WordPress and digital marketing website that’s going to make guides on all these main topics like ‘SEO Guides, Affiliate Marketing, Digital Marketing’ and whatnot.
If you start targeting these keywords right from the beginning, it will not make any difference or bring in any traffic, no matter how good your content is.
That is why you should start picking up smaller topics first. If you create valuable information around topics with low competition, you can easily rank in the top 10 in the search results. Sooner or later, people would link to your content.
THIS BUILDS YOUR DOMAIN AUTHORITY.
Moreover, in time, more domain authority means you can rank higher in the search results.
Having a great content promotion strategy plays a significant role in your marketing campaigns. Promoting your content through a suitable medium is going to help you meet your marketing goals.
Some of the standard content promotion methods are:
We will talk more about these promotion methods in the coming chapters.
If you do not know about content, it is time you discover it. Content mapping is considered an effective method to devise a great content marketing strategy.
Content mapping allows you to understand your audience’s behavior to create content for every stage of their journey towards buying your products or services.
Buying a product just from discovery is not something that everybody would do.
Instead, people would discover your website, then examine your products, think for a while, maybe get convinced with a retargeting ad, and then they might buy.
Well, the entire buying process is different for specific groups of audiences. However, what is expected is that content marketing strategies are just top-of-funnel strategies that play an essential role in your customers’ buying process.
Content marketing is a very diverse niche that could help you with conversions, revenue, and ROI.
While content marketing has a lot to offer, there are not many ways to measure it. What I mean is that measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy is not that easy.
You do not have any method to track your product sales from the people that learned about your business from the content you are producing.
Overall, this could affect your content marketing campaigns and their effectiveness.
A buyer undergoes many thought processes before they decide to buy anything.
You could distribute it in the following segments:
Here is an example!
I am searching for ‘Does my brand need a meaningful tagline?‘ in Google, and it shows me Granth’s blog post on the same topic.
So, I click on the result.
At this stage, I read the entire post and essentially become aware that Granth is a media platform that exists and features valuable content.
This fulfills the demands of the awareness stage for a reader.
The awareness stage is one of the most primary steps towards buying a product for a customer.
In this stage, a customer becomes aware of your product or platform. While they may not necessarily buy anything at this stage, they still get to know about your product/service. This puts the thought of your product in their minds.
So, why does it matter to you?
There is barely anybody who would buy anything without even knowing about the brand/business selling it. If people do not know anything about your business, they cannot join your audience base.
People need to know whom they are buying products from; it is part of everybody’s psychology.
This is why most advertisements cannot do any justice to businesses because people do not even know about these businesses.
For this purpose, content marketing plays a vital role in letting your audience know all about your products and services.
OK, so let us state an example.
I am an affiliate marketer and want to learn more about a different affiliate marketing program, Warrior plus.
So, I quickly hop on to my computer and type in ‘WarriorPlus review’ in Google.
Out of the different search results, what do you think I would click on?
The first search result, right?
The most important reason as to why I clicked on the first search result was because not only did it satisfy my query of finding a review of warrior plus, but the title even begged for me to look through the answer of ‘is warrior plus legit’?
Moreover, yes, the great Google snippet was also one of the main reasons why everybody else would click on this result.
This is one of the best examples to depict the power of great content + SEO.
You might want the same thing with your content. At this point, a buyer knows about your website, and if it suffices his search intent, he might be willing to hop on to the same website the next time as well.
Try keeping your bounce rate low by publishing great content. You can dominate the SERPs with your great content.
In your site analytics, figure out what blog posts are performing the best. Try to replicate the same. If you are willing to build awareness about your brand organically, try producing great content. Moreover, if you want to produce great content, try producing content covering every topic around the keyword a user could potentially search for.
You can also figure out why some of your blog posts are not really doing great and could quickly fix them by comparing them against the top-performing pages on your site.
The whole point is to measure how your site is performing. The better your content is, the higher you could rank.
As I mentioned before, SEO is your best friend when you want to gather organic traffic over paid traffic. 57% of B2B marketers consider SEO as the single most significant factor for generating leads.
Moreover, while SEO could be a great option, that is not what content marketing is all about.
There are other things like video content, social media, and email marketing that could help you with your content marketing. We will talk more about producing top-quality content ahead in this eBook.
Content that Drives Awareness
A variety of content types could be used to drive people towards your content. Here are some of the common examples:
Blogs – Produce content that grabs your readers’ attention with enough information to fulfill their search intent.
Guest Posts – Collaborate with other bloggers and writers to produce content that makes their readers find out about your venture.
Podcasts – Host podcasts or appear as a guest on different podcasts related to your niche.
Videos – Produce high-quality videos that align with the taste of your brand.
Social updates and mentions – Produce sharable images. Make images that could be tagged by people as well.
Now, as I am still on Granth’s blog post, I reach the end and realize that there is a CTA I might be interested in.
As I click on the link, I am taken to the branding page of Granth.info
Here I could see that I am offered branding for my business and other services like Content, Graphics, Publications, or translations that Granth offers.
This is my consideration stage as a customer. I try to understand whether I need these services and if they would fulfill my needs or not.
Believe it or not, but there are many thought processes involved in buying a buyer’s buying decision.
At this point, people have heard about you. However, they might take time to consider, and then maybe they will buy.
While content marketing tells other people that your brand exists in the first place, it is also a great alternative to guide the people through the consideration stage.
If you are helping people make decisions, it is far better than just keeping your product hanging in there and expecting the people to make their decision, which, let me honest, they will not buy.
You can increase the retention of your existing customers at the point to help the new users make the decision.
“A mere 5% increase in your retention rate can increase profits by 25% to 95%” -Bain & Company.
Content that increases retention
Here is what helps:
Pay close attention to newsletter sign-ups, returning visitors to your site, form submissions, and other micro conversions as well.
eBooks and newsletters are some of the best ways to convince your audience.
How?
Let me tell you!
eBooks are a great free resource from your end to the customer that they could use as a reference to understand more about your products and the type of businesses and vision you have.
While eBooks could be paid and considered a significant revenue stream, they could even be used to bring in more conversions and sales with them, especially when they are free.
You could also use them to gather more email subscribers that could help you with email marketing. We will talk more about email marketing in the coming chapters.
Newsletters, on the other hand, could create an ongoing conversation with your subscribers. They might not be ready to make a purchase just yet, but they could consider it.
Moreover, when they are in the consideration stage, it is your responsibility to help them decide. You can match the features offered with your products, offer customized reviews, and match it against its competitors to make your audience hang on the positive side and maybe, buy the product.
If you can stay in contact with your subscribers and prospects during this phase, you might have a far better shot at convincing these people.
Newsletters could help you do the same.
A user that’s interested in your product could convert. I mean, that is why they are there in the first place, right?
Try using your converting power with tools like newsletters and eBooks to help make your audience the decision as to if they should buy from you or not.
Your audience could potentially compare your product with that of your competitors, have a critic’s vision, and try to convince themselves not to buy the product. They more likely, scrutinize your product and project before they even spend a dime on your business.
If you successfully convince them to purchase, you have already done the best for your business.
So I am still on Granth’s branding page. It is up to me to find their services worthwhile to try to connect with them, buy their product, or click away and look for an alternative.
Furthermore, if I find their service necessary for my business, I click on the ‘Contact’ button and get in touch with them about their branding service.
This is my finally buying/non-buying stage – the decision stage.
Now comes the final stage, which every marketer is curious and worried about.
What is the buyer going to do next? Is he going to buy the product, or is he just going to ditch it, save it in the cart, maybe and never look back?
When you are offering content, you have to consider that people not only want information from your website, but they could even consider buying anything when you have something to offer.
Suppose I am searching for ‘Where can I find the best electric guitars?’
HOWEVER, at this point, I am sure I am looking for an electric guitar. I just want to find where I could get it?
This means that if the site I am clicking on has a few guitars of their own to offer, I might check them out.
When you are producing content, you have to think about offering people the information they want and pushing your products and sales to them.
The abundance and correct placement of Call-to-actions (CTAs) could help you a lot.
If you are adding CTAs, do not push them too much. The minimal use of CTAs could help you, but if you litter your content with them, it might just not do it.
If you even offer product trials, they are a far better selling option and could result in people settling for the product they are trying in the first place.
Content that sells
Not every visitor on your site is going to buy from you. However, you can still ensure that the content you produce makes a strong selling point.
Some of the vital selling factors are:
Remember, people are in the middle ground of whether they should buy a product or not. You have to push them a little with your effective methods, which the proper channels and methods could easily do for you.
From this point onwards, things get interesting. I would be sharing some of the most exclusive tips for your next content marketing strategy.
However, before I begin, let me tell you that all the chapters from this point onwards to the end contribute to your content marketing strategies. You would not want to miss any of those.
Do you know that about 72% of consumers prefer video content over other means of content?
Videos are one of the most concentrated forms of communication and marketing. About 38% of businesses rely on video content since 2017 to market their brand to their audience.
If you are aiming to build a brand, video content is always one of the best solutions.
Let me tell you how you can practically make your video content the most effective and how you could bring in more viewers with every upload.
Video introductions are a great way to label your brand and make your videos distinct from your competitors.
I mean, whenever a viewer watches a video with an intro he knows about, he immediately understands that it is a creator he knows.
Intros have a significant emphasis on retaining people to your videos.
However, if your intro takes more than 7 or 8 seconds, you might face trouble getting new people interested in your videos.
In fact, on YouTube’s blog, they believe that the first 15 videos have a HUGE impact on how many viewers continue to watch or not.
In this era of Netflix, YouTube, and great videos to watch, viewers have become very picky about what they would like to watch—getting them to watch your videos until the end is a big deal.
While you want your videos with an intro, try to start with the video before showing your intro. This means that if you display a specific part of a video and then play your intro within the first 10 seconds, you cannot only make your audience seemingly interested as to what happened next, but you can even brand your videos as well.
Do not explain why your video is important or what you are going to talk about.
Instead, jump right in and start your video. Intros are not necessary, but hey, that does not mean you cannot use them. Just be subtle with them.
Here is a good technique for short videos that goes something like this:
There are many video platforms out there that you could try and could be monetized as well. HOWEVER, there is no better platform than YouTube for your videos and let me tell you why!
Source: Broadbandsearch
With around 2 billion users worldwide, YouTube is the most popular video platform. The best part is that it is so advertiser-friendly that you could have a separate revenue stream from YouTube.
Even Facebook has its video platform, called the ‘Facebook Watch,’ which is a direct competition to YouTube. Moreover, yes, it is even monetizable. Nevertheless, the stream quality, the video player, and other features of the Facebook watch are not as flawless as that of YouTube.
If you want to share videos independently on your website without embedding videos from YouTube or Facebook, you can do that.
However, you should also consider that serving videos on your website takes the storage space from your website’s server.
If you are on a limited storage space from your server, you will run out of space sooner or later and might have to jump to a different platform unless you are paying extra every month to enjoy unlimited server space.
Furthermore, since you are serving videos independently, this also affects your pages’ loading speed, which puts the pressure back on the website. Moreover, hear it from here, Google usually does not rank the slow-loading pages at the top of the search results.
Another fantastic thing about YouTube is its recommendation system that works on Machine Learning technology.
Have you ever just seen a video recommended to you by YouTube that was made a few years ago?
This is one of the best features of YouTube, which pushes the videos of similar interest to a user, even if they are many years old.
You can see this happening on Facebook or Instagram since all the videos recommended are very new and barely made a few days ago.
As I mentioned, YouTube works on the Machine Learning algorithm, promoting videos to people based on their category interest.
This means if you are watching David Dobrik’s vlogs on YouTube often, his videos would be promoted to your feed more than anything else.
The same happens in your ‘suggested video’ feed.
If your video is of similar interest or niche as that of the video people are watching, chances are your video would be recommended in the suggestion box as well.
This means that even if people have never heard of your brand, they can still click on the video and watch it.
Moreover, the best part is that most of the video plays on YouTube are from suggestions rather than searches.
Optimize your videos to be displayed in the suggestion box. This means that you can optimize your keywords, metadata, and description the same way your competitor. This helps YouTube push your videos to people interested in your competitor’s content.
I already mentioned how important blogs are for your website.
Websites with a blog section receive 57% more traffic than websites that do not have one.
However, blog writing is an essential skill because there is much to it other than just putting out organized content and expecting results.
Content creators and bloggers have different concepts of using keywords. While some of them might prefer stuffing keywords, some just mention them a couple of times within the whole body of the article.
However, the optimal use of keywords is the key to excellent content creation.
Keywords depict what the content of a page or website is all about.
Usually, a keyword has been mentioned within the content; the better Google understands what the page is all about.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that you stuff keywords into your content.
Keyword stuffing is a common problem on most websites. To convince search engines that their content includes all the keywords a user might search for, they would only include all of them in the first paragraph.
One of the best strategies is to mention your focus keyword at least once in the first 100 words of your blog post. This lets Google understand that your content features relevant information to the keyword a user searches for.
While all this contributes to On-Page SEO, it also is one of the best strategies for excellent keyword placement.
You can also optimize your titles, metadata, and meta descriptions with the right keywords for excellent content marketing through your blogs and websites.
Visuals are a great help, no matter if it is just a blog or a tremendous website. Your visuals count as images, videos, graphs, and even templates.
When you include visuals in your content, you give out references to your viewers that help them understand your content better.
If you have a tutorial or a step-by-step guide that potentially involves using many words, you can use images as a reference to help your viewers in the walkthroughs.
Infographics are considered to be great visuals. They potentially display so much information that you cannot even use images for that purpose.
Infographics could even account for blog posts in most cases, and when you have to display such information in a short space, infographics are the best ways to do that.
The last thing you would want to add to your content or websites is stock images.
Stock images are those pictures that you could get from any royalty-free store and are free for personal use. Right from PNGs to clip arts, hundreds of websites use these images.
Since Google does not prefer duplicate content, they do not prefer the use of duplicate images as well.
The Google image section is a separate image search section that features unique images as well. However, as they do not prefer displaying duplicate images anywhere, they will not entertain the same on websites and blogs, which could eventually hurt your SEO.
Your website could potentially be buried or lost in oblivion if it features the stock images that everybody else uses.
If you are an organization, try hiring a graphic designer to take care of designing the images. Moreover, if you are an individual blogger, try making your thumbnails in PhotoShop or Illustrator.
51% of internet users use their smartphones to access the internet.
That is a massive number to target and an enormous market to share your content in.
Along with other search engines, Google has focused on targeting mobile users the same way as desktop users.
As mobile usage rose, Google decided to focus more on mobile platforms.
Google does not prefer displaying such websites in the top results of SERPs if they are not mobile-friendly. Serving your content on cross platforms allows you to gather more users and conversions.
There are a few options you could ensure on your own to make your website mobile-friendly:
The best SEO solution, however, is having a responsive design. A responsive design can adjust itself according to the different platforms you visit the website on.
Quality content dominates the search results, social media, and even your video platforms.
The more quality and value a piece of content promises, the better source of information it is considered. When people find something informative and exclusive, they are likely to link to it. Moreover, we are talking about 500-600 links altogether at least.
The bottom line is that exclusive content is considered far better value.
So how do you produce top-quality content?
Easy!
Google trends do not need any introduction. The big G has blessed us yet with another tool that’s a blessing for content creators.
You can use this tool to find the topics trends you are interested in.
It shows you the growth or decline of the popularity of the same topic, and you could use the same for your benefit.
It even displays the relevancy of a topic over a due course of time, like over the past 12 months or even a year. The best part is that you could even compare two or more entries with Google Trends and compare how popular they have been against each other.
While Google trends is a great tool, it still has a few downsides. One of the most significant downsides is that it does not suggest the best topics.
What I mean is that you need to know about the topic in order for it to show you the results. You can, however, resort to the suggested keywords that could help you find similar interests and produce content out of them.
In the ‘Related Queries’ section, you can find the breakout keywords, which means that these keywords have a great chance of gaining popularity in the coming time.
Use them wisely, and you are golden.
There are a bunch of keyword tools out there. I am sure you know about most of them.
Ahrefs and SEMrush stand at the top.
Moreover, yes, these tools are the best for a great content marketing strategy.
I am never against these tools and never will be. They are so popular and widely used that they help you match your keywords and methods with your competitors.
You can thoroughly analyze your competitors, figure out what keywords are helping them out and where they are getting their backlinks from. If you could adopt similar strategies, you could even outrank them with unique content.
Other similar tools include LSIGraph, something that helps you input Latent Semantic Indexing keywords in your content.
While these keywords should not exactly be your top attraction, they could be included in your content.
In the long run, these keywords help you rank and potentially perform even better than your competitors.
Just use them to make your content better. Do not revolve your entire content around them.
Let me complete the sentence. Guides perform better than usual, regular articles, and content.
A well-curated and produced guide has a FAR BETTER chance of ranking.
Why?
Because guides involve every kind of information about a topic.
Let us talk about this eBook for a second. If we had to post it in our regular blog list, we would have titled it something like ‘CONTENT MARKETING: AN EXCLUSIVE GUIDE.’ This is because all this content forms a guide that people could use to learn EVERYTHING about content marketing.
There is no need to find more content on the internet when they see this guide since we have featured every content marketing strategy here.
The same is the case with your other regular guides.
Suppose your competitor is writing an article on ‘Low Carb diet.’ They have much information in their content but have not focused on every relevant topic.
You could use the same thing to your advantage. Try curating guides where you feature almost every single topic related to the low-carb diet. Try adding different diets that could help your body, what extra you could do, what workout methods you could adopt, what YouTubers you should watch, what additional resources they could use.
There is a LOT to cover. You just have to dig deep for that extra information.
I understand that guides take time. Sometimes, they take months together. However, when they are done, not only do you have a solid chance of ranking at the top of the search results for your keyword, but you could even get hundreds of backlinks because people find your content informative.
Since ranking on top requires you to do something different and distinct, why not start here?
Do you know that about 87% of marketers use email marketing to disseminate their content?
This means that email marketing is considered one of the strongest and effective methods to reach out to new people and your audience.
Email marketing might seem like a very traditional method to distribute your content. Nevertheless, about 80% of marketers claim that it is the most effective content distribution method, making it an exclusive content distribution platform.
Most websites use a traditional email collection template that asks the users to enter their emails at the end of every blog post.
Alternatively, you would see people collecting emails by displaying pop-ups where the users enter their email addresses.
Both of these methods ‘were’ effective at one time. Now, they are a mere highlight of pages that do not add any value to your campaigns.
Since almost every website follows the same method of displaying the newsletter sections, you could try something out of the box.
Try to make a separate newsletter page on your website. For an effective email marketing campaign, you need a designated email collection page.
Businesses with 10-15 landing pages tend to increase conversions by 55% compared to those with fewer than 10 landing pages.
Moreover, those with more than 40 landing pages increase conversions by over 500%.
Having a separate landing page for email collection contributes to most of your conversion goals. These pages help you to gain:
Your viewers could be sent to your landing page through various CTAs, ads, or just the website navigation. These pages do not have to be distinct; they just have to be attractive.
If done right, these pages could help you get more conversions than you could ever accomplish with standard conversion techniques.
For an excellent email collection strategy, do not ask people to hand out their emails just to deliver ‘exclusive tips.’
Instead, provide them something of value they can get after they submit their emails to you.
A great example of this is providing 5-10% off coupons in their emails.
If you have an eCommerce site, try offering a particular discount coupon that your subscribers receive only when they submit their emails.
This not only helps you gather more email subscriptions but also provides them discount coupons that could encourage more sales and conversions on your site. This is a win-win for everybody.
Another great example is to offer free ebooks with your email subscription.
If you hand out a free ebook to one of the topics your users could be interested in, it is a great deal. Not only do they ready your content, but you get a bag an email subscription.
When users are given ebooks or coupons in exchange for their email addresses, it is a great deal, and most of your viewers would be willing to convert.
One of the most effective methods to build your email subscription list is to offer PDFs for the content your users are visiting.
This means that you allow them to download a free PDF version of the article or guide they are visiting in exchange for their email addresses.
This, instead, is an excellent method to gain email subscribers fast.
However, there is a problem with it that you will not deny.
Whenever you audit your content or even make the slightest changes, you would want to update the PDF version, which takes so much time to replace, re-upload and update your post.
If you are OK to let it slide and could ensure your PDFs are updated, do that.
If not, you can try Topic Upgrades.
Topic upgrades are a better solution than content upgrades as they let you offer something specific to the topic rather than a resource specific to the post.
Either way, they make your PDF downloads and content updation much easier.
We mean it when we say that if your emails are exclusive, your email marketing campaigns will be far better than any of your competitors.
If you want to build an email subscription list, well, you do not just want to send them the links to your latest blog posts and articles, do you? I mean, that is boring if you think about doing that. Plus, if they want such information from you, why submit their emails when they could just go on your website and read it for themselves?
Overall this concept is a failure.
What works is EXCLUSIVE CONTENT.
Try to make some part of your emails as exclusive content that you do not even talk about on your website or blog.
These emails are laden with information that your readers expect from a high-quality website. Furthermore, if you are delivering exactly what you promise, your emails have up to an 81% chance of conversion every time.
Email marketing is a great way to reach out to people with a similar interest as that of your niche.
However, the only thing that determines if your marketing was a success or not is creativity. The more creative methods you implement towards gathering emails, the more successful your campaigns will get.
The bottom line is that if you miss out on email marketing, you are practically giving away a large portion of your audience.
It is no doubt that social media is a great alternative to get more people interested in your brand.
With more than 40% of the world’s population active on social media, it is only necessary to have a great social media strategy to reach out to the audience you always wanted.
Social media is a vast space with billions of users and a potentially huge market to target.
Moreover, if you want to run ads, you could have great control over what information to display.
If you are also willing to run ads on social media like every other company, you will face extreme competition.
Throughout the last few years, social media has undergone a drastic change. The ads that were visible once in a while dominate most of the sections of our social media.
At a time when you thought that you could retain a large audience just based on spending money on ads, welcome to the age when you have so many competitors that eliminate the thought of mediocre ads.
However, there are still a few things out there that you could do to make your ads and campaigns stand out from the rest.
Let us say I hop on to Nike’s Instagram profile. While I know about Nike products, I do not want them to just talk about their sports gear or products. I expect them to have a distinct profile that talks about their brand less and other things more.
As I mentioned value in email marketing, the same goes for social media as well. Your audience does not want to hear about your products because they can visit your site for that purpose.
As you grow an audience of your own, marketing to such an audience over and over becomes easier and way cheaper than you could ever ask for.
Your audience follows you because they are more inclined towards your content than your product.
Sure, your products might seem attractive to them, but if you make your social media all about your products and services, chances are people will be bored and move to something less ‘boring.’
So, spend some more time entertaining your audience, provide them value, and all you would get in return is an excellent customer-business relation and, yes, cash!
If there is anything that never gets old, it is the videos. Video content dominates all the platforms now.
One of the most potent methods to grow your audience and convince people that your brand is outstanding are videos.
Suppose your videos are successful in retaining your audience’s attention and keep them around till the end. In that case, the chances are that a significant amount of your audience could convert.
When including video content, you might want to target a particular platform accordingly as well.
In a parallel universe, a viewer will sit through your entire ad and watch it whenever it pops up.
An average video viewer has an attention span of about 6-8 seconds. If you managed to capture his attention at the very beginning of the video, the chances are that they might sit through the entire thing.
Video marketing has had a significant impact on building brand recognition. With growing platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, most viewers might be hanging around there, so it is only a good idea to target such platforms.
When your video content is adapted for advertising, one of the best strategies is to keep your videos short and to the point. Short videos are always on point and considered to be far more effective.
Thanks to Facebook and Instagram, live videos have become more accessible to use than ever.
So far, we have already understood that people love video content. They can remember it better and have more chances of engaging with them than texts and images.
Maybe because of the visuals or the fact that another human is telling you something remotely, people love videos, and you can use the same to your advantage.
To put videos to your advantage is something that you could easily do, and the truth is that it could make you a lot of money.
However, something that’s more powerful than videos is LIVE VIDEOS.
Viewers could watch a live video an average of about three times longer than traditional videos.
This might be because people love watching a video where the other person has to be as transparent. If they make the slightest mistake, it is not editable, making it a great way to connect with your audience.
Call it honesty or transparency; this is what consumers love to watch, which you could deliver.
Consider going live on your socials every week or so. Answer your customers’ questions and try to connect with them as much as you can.
Seek out new platforms for your social media campaigns. Sure, some platforms could help your campaigns better than others. Honestly, there is no harm in trying them all.
If you are running ads, try to specify budgets to specific campaigns and compare your stats. The platforms that perform the best for you and help you bring in more conversions are the best choice for you.
Since an effective content marketing campaign is heavily dependent on great marketing, you might want to improve your content quality.
Moreover, I am not just talking about a good alignment or making the text fit on all screens (which is also very important); I am talking about taking the extra step and making your content EXCLUSIVE.
So, what could you do?
If you want more traffic in 2020, you have to be the source of information. As I mentioned already, the more valuable your content is, the more backlinks it will receive.
Such posts contain new and exciting data that features excellent content overall.
This means that if you want more traffic, shares, and those high authority links from your content marketing, try being the source of information with your content.
Introducing new topics and trends have a significant impact on your incoming traffic. People always mention you when they talk about the same topic or trend since you are the one who originated it.
When you are publishing data from a high-quality industry study, your post could have a considerable advantage.
If you are publishing the first content on a new topic, you always have the opportunity to rank on the top for it forever. The reason is that there is no information on the topic yet.
Finding new topics for your website or platform is hard, but if you can do that, it will bring in a lot of new users and audiences.
Furthermore, it even has a significant impact on your sales and conversions as well.
The birth of a new topic or trend results in hundreds (or even thousands) of similar posts or other media.
And the best part?
All of them mention your content in their posts.
Nothing bores people more than a long article with a LOT of words and not many images.
When you are publishing information, try to use images. And not just stock images, but images that people could refer to.
Posting images and graphics that back up your data and information is one of the best methods to keep your readers on the site.
Not only that, but you even have a beautiful post that makes people stay on your website. The more time they spend there, the lower the bounce rate you have.
Moreover, the less bounce rate you have, the more Google understands that your content is worthwhile and is eligible to be pushed to the top.
On the other hand, visuals even make people understand your content better.
If you are adding stats and numbers to your site or even mentioning A/B testing, visuals help a great way to represent your data. Sure, the text is excellent, but your readers always skim through your content. Images make them stop and look at what they have to say.
You might not even have much content, but never forget to add reference images and graphics wherever you can.
Hiring a graphics designer is always one of the best ideas to visualize your information and, primarily, design out-of-the-box, shareable images.
However, not everybody has the budget to do so, or not everybody comes into your price range.
However, you can always resort to online tools for this purpose. There are tools like Venngage that help you design stunning templates and images full of information.
We love using it and are sure you would too.
Similarly, you can even use Canva and Chartblocks to create appealing graphics and display your statistical information in the form of templates and share it in your content.
Podcasts could be posted on YouTube for free. However, that is not the only audience that you could have. You can even gather an audience from Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or SoundCloud.
However, to do that, you need an RSS feed of your podcast. Usually, most platforms offer it for free, like SoundCloud, but require payments after 4-5 uploads.
If that is what you want to skip, for now, try hosting your podcast from Anchor.
The Anchor is a great free tool to host your podcasts on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The best part?
As soon as you post the podcast link, it automatically becomes available on every platform.
Making videos is not easy. You might be prepared with great thumbnail and descriptions, but let us be honest, facing the camera might be a different, scary story.
Keep a script in hand that could help you talk when you forget your lines.
Pre-written scripts help you deal with confidence-related problems, especially in the beginning days of your video making.
Having a great script means that your final video will be on point since you have had much thought into it, and no time is wasted on fillers and other things.
Second, I focus on using YouTube as your primary platform because it loads for every platform that your users are on.
If you have a secondary video player, Apple users might not watch the videos because of permission issues. Alternatively, it might face trouble loading on slow connections.
The bottom line is that YouTube is one of the best platforms for video marketing, and if you are willing to take your content marketing game to the next level, YouTube is your go-to platform.
I have thousands of tips for unique content creation in the form of blogs. However, let us pick the important ones.
Speed – Speed is one of the most critical factors for a higher position in search results. On average, if your site takes more than 4 seconds to load, the user is more likely to move on to another option than wait for your site to load.
A bad user experience will not help with the rankings.
Use the PageSpeed Insights from Google to find your site’s page speed and figure out the issues that affect your loading time.
You can also always move to a fast and reliable web host.
Serve cross-platform – Serving your content across different platforms helps increase traffic because most users now use mobiles to access the internet.
There are a few things you could do from your end to make your website mobile-friendly:
Optimized URLs – URLs also play a significant role in helping rank a piece of content.
Every blogging platform allows you to customize your URL. To optimize your URL’s,
Securing your site with HTTPS – Having an HTTP:// version of your site is not safe, at least not in 2020.
An ‘HTTP version is more likely to hurt your site’s bounce rate, credibility, and CTR. Google moved to HTTPS back in 2014, where it mentions that HTTPS:// sites could rank better in the search results.
You can even install HTTPS on your site by getting an SSL certificate.
If you do not have one yet, head over to LetsEncrypt and install one for free.
If you’d like more information on content strategy and how it can help you to grow your business, visit Brand Bucket to kickstart your branding journey!
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