How Can I Utilise Content Marketing For My Business?

In the increasingly competitive business world, marketing has become a prerequisite for marketplace success. Content marketing is one area that involves the development of things like blog articles, e-books, infographics, checklists, etc. These are then shared across predetermined business PR channels, generating interest in the brand and the story it is telling. What follows is a list of seven highly effective things which your business can do to establish and manage a successful content marketing system:

1. Boost The Information On Your Website

Content marketing is about telling your brand story, and it should aim to guide the readers to as many touchpoints with the brand as possible (where the story is being told). One of these touchpoints, where potential customers will find much information about the brand, is on the website. A business website should say everything that a brand would want to say to a customer if they had their undivided attention for 10 minutes.

2. Get To Know Your Audiences

Before content marketing can really be used to benefit a business, the brand needs to look at the audiences that it hopes to resonate with when content goes out. This can involve looking at past content engagement rates to see what people enjoy, and building customer personas by looking at the traits of individuals who engage the most with the brand and its published content. If you know who you’re talking to, your message has a better chance of hitting home.

3. Optimise Your Marketing Channels

Content marketing is an excellent idea to boost traffic to your website, but also to your social media channels. Is your business paying attention to what is being shown on its social media profiles? Content marketing often directs readers to find out more about the brand (by visiting the Facebook business page or checking out the brand’s Instagram profile). If there are information gaps in these locations, your content marketing won’t be as effective.

4. Choose The Content Types You’ll Use

Content marketing isn’t about trying to pull together as many pieces of content as possible, every day, and posting them out at rapid-fire rates. When it comes to content, it really is better to focus on quality over quantity. This requires a narrowing down of content channels, where you should choose to focus primarily on the one or two content sharing avenues that are actually giving you a return on your marketing investment.

5. Facilitate The Content Development

We get it-you’re a business owner and doing things yourself most often means that they get done the right way. However, when it comes to marketing – especially content marketing – this is not the case. People who aren’t experienced in content development won’t know the tricks and tips that ensure a piece of content is read and appreciated. Brands should partner with experienced content developers before attempting to develop content themselves.

6. Create A Content Posting Calendar

When should you be posting content as part of your marketing campaigns? How many times per week would be best? These questions can be answered by looking at engagement rates of past content sharing. A content marketing strategy must include a posting schedule, which outlines the days of each month when content will be posted, as well as what types of content to post and the specific times that the content will go live.

7. Monitor Engagement And Optimise

The final piece of content marketing advice for any business is this: don’t load it and leave it! Planning, creating, and sharing your branded content is only half of the job. It would help if you now watched how the pieces of content perform – in terms of engagement – and spot opportunities to improve your content and the overall strategy based on how members of your target audience are interacting with your promoted content.

Content marketing really does add value to any marketing mix, and collectively all brand content gives the customer an experience that either impresses or dissuades them.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Find out how to avoid the latter with our accredited Copywriting & Content Marketing course!