Content Marketing
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Despite its long history of changes, in Google's ranking algorithm if there is one factor where Google's algorithm remains unaltered is the search engines stand on the importance of content. Content marketing is set on the above premise and it necessarily involves creation of content that is not only resourceful but also engaging and its distribution in all the leading online platforms including social media platforms. As far as the search engines are concerned, the content distributed across the web helps them to identify a website as the best fit for the search that is made. As far as human visitors are concerned, content marketing aspires to increase the user engagement and increase rate of user conversion.
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7 Ways To Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
1. Ensure personal touch
The internet is now inundated with information. You just need to name the topic and you have millions of pages to provide you with content on that topic. However, if you want your content marketing efforts to be effective ensure that you are creating content with a personal touch.
2. Sweat on creating quality content
Content has become cheap today but what is scarce is quality content. Here is your opportunity to make your brand stand out from the rest of the competition across the globe. Sweat out to create exceptional content that your audience find it difficult to resist. It is worth putting in some hard work on creating unique content.
3. Use smart keyword targeting
Choose your keywords smartly. To generate more business it is not necessary that you target the keyword with the highest level of competition. If you are smart, you will target multiple low competition keywords and drive equally good or more traffic to your website. Smart keyword targeting is certainly one of the keys to success with content marketing.
4. Ensure easy accessibility of information your customers are looking for
When the visitors come to your website or the other pages, in which you have shared content to promote your products or services they should be able to find the information that they need easily. The presumption here is that you are sharing content that is useful to your target audience. Don’t bother sharing any content that is not useful to the audience.
5. Make the best out of product reviews and feedback
It is not necessary that the content that you generate for your content marketing efforts should always be in the form of articles and product or service related information. You can also and in fact should incorporate product reviews and feedbacks along with other content. This will in turn help you build positive image about your brand.
6. Make content social media worthy
It has been observed that the content that includes some kind of visual aid such as images, animations and videos are more readily shared in the social media than the content that is merely text based. Making your content social media worthy will get you better mileage out of your content marketing efforts and investment.
7. Be consistent
If you really want your content marketing efforts to work and yield the desired results, you need to be consistent. You will need to post regularly to build the momentum and to sustain the momentum you should distribute content continuously. Sending out just one piece of content per month will not yield you any results. Daily efforts are required to see tangible results.
Effective Content Marketing Tool
This is Google's service to help you understand your website's traffic better. This is a free tool. Launched in 2005 Google analytics is becoming one of the most popular free web analytics software. The user interface of dashboard comes with extensive range of features that will help you get deep insights into your website's traffic and how your content is performing. You can configure up to 100 website profiles under a single account. To start getting traffic related data about your website you will need to install the API in each page of your website, which you would like to track.
Hubspot :
Hubspot has been operational since 2006. Hubspot comes with number of inbuilt inbound marketing applications, which your business needs to attract customers and to interact with them. Hubspot focuses on inbound marketing sales software. Pro-marketers is a LinkedIn group that is part of Hubspot with a member count of 8000. According to this company, businesses should not interrupt customers but they should focus more on attracting them through the use of irresistible blog posts, viral videos and even eBooks. Hubspot provides the marketers an all-inclusive marketing package, which includes all possible inbound marketing tools that you will ever need.
If you promote your brand aggressively in Twitter then TweetDeck will help you. This is an online application that will help you manage your Twitter accounts. This free application was launched in 2008. Using this application, you can send and receive tweets. You will be able to review the profiles of people who share same or similar interests. TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter in 2011. This application is very helpful for those who maintain multiple Twitter accounts now that Twitter has acquired TweetDeck you will be able to use your regular Twitter account to login to TweetDeck. This application also supports multi-account feature for shared accounts that are used in corporate or team environment. TweetDeck is supported in desktop, web browsers and by Chrome app.
Buffer, which was launched in 2010 already, has 2,000,000 registered members. This application helps users manage multiple social networks and allows them to schedule posts. You will be able to manage social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, App.net, Google+ and LinkedIn. Buffer is available as both free version and paid premium version. In the free version, you can schedule and send posts. The best part is that this application comes programmed with various predefined timeslots, which are supposed to be the most active time in social media platforms. Buffer is compatible with all the leading browsers, mobile phones including Android and iOS and in Newsreaders like Zite.
Tumblr is a Yahoo venture and it has been operational since 2007. This is a microblogging platform. Even though Twitter is also called microblogging platform, Tumblr allows you to make longer posts. Tumblr integrates two aspects namely blogging and social networking. Users can post blogs, other users can follow your blog posts you can also follow other people's blogs. The idea here is to create a blogging network whereby sharing takes place in a natural fashion. There are already two hundred and eight two million blogs. This microblogging platform receives 555 visitors every month. Exceptional platform to get noticed if you are into content marketing.
Buffer, which was launched in 2010 already, has 2,000,000 registered members. This application helps users manage multiple social networks and allows them to schedule posts. You will be able to manage social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, App.net, Google+ and LinkedIn. Buffer is available as both free version and paid premium version. In the free version, you can schedule and send posts. The best part is that this application comes programmed with various predefined timeslots, which are supposed to be the most active time in social media platforms. Buffer is compatible with all the leading browsers, mobile phones including Android and iOS and in Newsreaders like Zite.
This is a very powerful tool that helps you track the most popular content online on any topic choice. This amazing tool will list the content based on the content's popularity in the leading social media sites including Facebook, Google+ LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter. The software indicates the number of shares and likes in these social media platforms. This is a must have tool for those who use content marketing as one of the major aspects of their marketing mix. Valuable information such as the number of shares, content format, length of the content and the platforms or domains in which it is shared the most.
Ahref is a backlink tracking tool. You will get excellent insights into your own backlink profile and it will also help you understand the backlink profile of your competitors. This is a paid back link checker tool and the price starts at $99 per month. Depending on the plan that you choose you can track anywhere from 5 campaigns to 250 campaigns. As far as keyword tracking is concerned, it again varies from 300 keywords to 20,500 keywords based on your plan. The results can be easily exported for later reference in the .csv format. Unlike other backlink checker tools, Ahref comes with many advanced features.
Hootsuite.com lets you capitalize on the social media platforms. You will be able to connect instantly with and manage almost 35 most popular social media platforms from a single interface. Using this application, you will be able to engage your audience effectively by scheduling your posts for better performance. The application comes with its own analytics tool using which you will be able to gain insights into how your audience behave in the social media platforms and identify social media behavioral pattern, which will help you, design your social media campaigns more targeted and hence make your campaigns highly effective.
If you want to reach individual customers or target audience through your customized content then email marketing is the way to go. Mailchimp will help you setup and run highly effective email marketing campaigns. This company has been operational since 2001 and it is one of the highly reputed and trusted email marketing services. You will be able to get loads of information about the receiver's behavior. The company boasts of sending out more than ten billion emails per month. The company has crossed 10 million active users. The daily mail volume has crossed 600 million mails sent out on behalf of its customers.
Evernote is a versatile app that simplifies life. It is not just one thing that the app does. It is an organizer, it allows you to store everything that you could possibly think of in digital format, archive the records, a note taking tool and much more. It works seamlessly with all the latest popular platforms such as Android, iOS, Chrome OS, Windows, BlackBerry and even webOS. This app is available as free version as well as in the paid version. It can be synchronized between devices including your laptop, tablet PC and smartphone. It could be used as an excellent productivity tool.
Easel.ly :
Easel.ly is a powerful tool for creating infographics and sharing it online. This is an open source application, which lets you create very professional quality infographics. There are already number of preset templates available in this website, which the users can select and get started easily. This open source platform has crossed over 900,000 users and more than 2 million infographics have been created using this platform already. You will be able to share the infographics that you are creating in the social media platforms too. When compared to the other content sharing platforms Easel.ly is a new comer launched only in 2012.
If you want to discover any concept or content in the social media sites Tagboard will help you discover it fast. Already thousands of brands are making use of Tagboards to enhance their visibility. Tagboard.com is founded in 2011 but the platform has seen exceptional growth in the past five years. You can search for the required content using hashtags. If you have any keywords to monitor then Tagboard.com is the way to go. Very helpful when you want to keep track of your content performance in the social media platforms. Very easy to use but very powerful social media tracker tool.
WordPress is an open source blogging platform and to date it is one of the most popular blogging platforms. More than being a blogging platform, it has today become one of the most effective content management systems available to us. Many websites make use of this content management system to create self-managed websites. This is considered the bloggers' friend. Millions of blogs are created using this blogging software. This of course is a free software and it is well supported with thousands of plugins that further enhance the features of the blogging platform. WordPress is also one of the most search engine friendly blogging software.
Slideshare allows you to share slides online. If you want to reach your target audience through your PowerPoint slides then here is a platform that will help you reach thousands of visitors. Slideshare was launched in 2006 and since then it has been attracting thousands of users. The following file formats are supported, PowerPoint, PDF and OpenDocument. Slideshare is viewable in the desktop devices or in handheld devices. This platform has over 38 million registered users with a monthly traffic rate of 70 million. Slideshare was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012. This is a great place to share your niche related PowerPoint presentations and get the deserved attention.
Outbrain though it projects itself as a content discovery platform it is an excellent place to promote your content. Though it is not all that popular, it has been online since 2006. This platform helps marketers attract targeted traffic through sponsored links. The platform allows users to recommend content and tap on the impulse purchase tendencies of the users. As per the company's report more than 35,000 websites have installed this tool. More than 150 billion recommendations have been made through Outbrain. The company claims fifteen billion views per month. This tool uses behavioral targeting to place the right content to the right users.
5 Reasons Why Content Marketing Is Important
1. Content marketing is a powerful way to get the attention of Google
Google is essentially a content-based search engine. In this context, content marketing becomes an obvious ingredient in making your brand successful online. Google sends almost 70% of the total online traffic to websites. If you want to impress Google then content marketing is the door that you need to knock.
2. Content marketing fills the place of your salesperson
If it is a brick and mortar store, you will have your sales representatives to talk to your customers. If you are trying to reach customers online then the content you distribute will play the role of your sales team. Your brand related content, which you have shared, is probably the first point of contact for many of your prospective customers. The stronger you are with your content marketing efforts the better it is for your brand.
3. Helps you build brand value
Quality content effectively distributed across the right platforms will certainly boost the brand value. By adding product reviews and customer feedback in the mix, you can build a very positive image about your brand. It will entice the customers to decide favourably towards your brand and thereby increase the conversion rates.
4. Improves brand loyalty
When you engage in aggressive content marketing efforts, you are automatically increasing your brand visibility. The competition level in every niche industry is very high today. Customers could easily be hooked on to a new brand. By constantly feeding your brand related information, you could to a large extent avoid losing your existing customers to your competitors.
5. Increases the number of doorways through which your customers could access your brand
It is very important that you give your customers multiple options to access your business. When you distribute content aggressively across the web, each piece of content that you distribute serves as the doorway for your customers to access your brand.
