Congratulations! You’ve just built your brand spanking new website from the ground up. You chose a ‘brandable’ and catchy domain name, a mobile-friendly theme design, and you’ve placed the necessary information on your site about your company.
You’re About page tells the story of your business and brand, your Contact Form is ready, Product pages are ready to go, and maybe you’ve even thought of some Frequent Ask Questions to start with. What now? Does it end there? No! Of course not, you’ve only jumped a few hurdles thus far and there are more waiting for you.
Starting a website has been made so much easier these days due to amazing Hosting solutions and web building tools available to would-be business owners. But building it is only a fraction of what is needed to make a website successful.
Before you decided to launch your website’s visibility there is one thing you need to consider and it is your Content Marketing Strategy. Content powers a website like fuel powers a car. Rolling out an iron-clad content marketing strategy is integral to your business’ success.
Table of Contents
Having a Content Marketing Strategy
Your website is now live and indexed for search engines to find but a brand new website straight out of the box is not going to attract anyone without having lots of really great content. That’s where your Content Marketing Strategy comes in.
In order for you to attract customers, end users and visitors to your site you have to pepper your site with really compelling content that either solves a problem they have offers them some sort of benefit or teaches them how to do something. Using a combination of all three is Content Marketing Strategy gold.
Build your Audience
Planning out your content ahead of time gives you the chance to tell a story and show your brand’s potential. Consider yourself an expert in your field. Whatever niche you’ve decided to brand yourself in you need to position yourself as an authority and produce content that will drive traffic to your site. Content Marketing is all about telling exciting and compelling stories. Businesses that have a story and journey to share with their audience have a better chance of success.
It is a strategy you can implement over a long period of time that solely focuses on building a strong relationship between your brand and your target audience by creating captivating content of a high-quality that is relevant to your audience on a consistent basis.
By establishing this relationship with your audience you put them in the position to always choose you over the competition. Having a solid content marketing strategy will always win out over one-off advertising because content marketing shows your audience and would be customers that you care about them beyond just making money.
Now more than ever holding your audience’s attention long enough to convince them to convert is more precious than anything, meaning their attention span is your most valuable asset. Keeping this in mind will help you create a winning Content Marketing Strategy that catapults your website to success.
Tips for building your Content Marketing Strategy
Be Authentic
We live in a world where being fake is praised in media, however, your audience is not going to come to you if they don’t feel you are being genuinely authentic. People can see through plastic so don’t be fake. Everything that your company says or do should be consistent with who you are and what your brand speaks to. Know your brand’s truth and lead with it. A study found that 50% of customers make purchases on their trust and belief in the brand.
Blog Away!
It is important for all online businesses to have a blog section on their website. This is the perfect place to roll out great content for your audience. You can tell your company’s story, give great tips, how-to articles, make announcements, and so much more. The possibilities are endless with a blog. Blogging is the biggest part of content marketing so without it, you have no strategy. Businesses that blog and create content consistently receive 67% more leads than those that don’t have a blog. What’s more is that 87% of consumers put their trust in the information they read on business blogs.
Blog Consistently
Having a blog is one thing but in order for it to work for you and be a successful aspect of your content marketing strategy, it has to be done consistently. Aim to post a new blog post 2-3 times a week. Create a schedule for blogging and stick to it. Plan content ahead of time to stay organised and on track.
Know your Audience
This is universally known in the marketing world and still holds strong to your content marketing strategy. You need to know exactly who your audience is, why you’re writing for them, what their problems are and how best you can address them. This means you need to have done a bit of marketing research into your target audience. If your business is product driven then you need to know the kind of people that need your product and then create content that builds and those needs.
Create Quality Content and Boost your SEO
Yes you’ve guessed it. Having high-quality content and lots of it helps to boost your site’s SEO. Search engines like Google give higher search indexing to sites that have a lot of content available to their audience. But having a lot of content is only part of the story. Sites with a higher quality content rank higher on Google. This means if you want to have better SEO rankings then you must consistently produce content that is over 1000 words with quality images. This shows search engines that you are interested in only giving quality to your end users and so they bump you up on the search results lists.
The goal of any website is to constantly appear on the first page of Google Search Results.
Types of Content You Can Use on your Website
Content can come in many formats and these formats are adaptable for any niche or subject matter. A great Content strategy uses a myriad of content formats. Here are some of the most popular ones and their definitions.
1. How to Articles
The how-to content is very popular and works well because it solves a problem that your audience has and teaches them how to do something with actionable steps. These type of posts can be paired well with graphics that help to boost the quality of the posts. Video tutorials can also be added.
2. Review Articles
Review content is great for outlining the usefulness of a new product on your website on a product you’ve used from the competition. Either way writing reviews help to give great advice to your target audience. This advice can always end with a call to action to purchase the product being reviewed. It is also great to be used with Affiliate Marketing.
3. Guides
A guide is similar to the how-to but is more comprehensive and usually falls under long-form blog post. Writing high-quality guides can boost your credibility with your audience.
4. E-books
Write an e-book for your audience and tie it in with a blog post. You can offer it as an opt-in or freebie or you can sell it for a price. Creating an e-book is a great way to show off your expertise and give high-quality content to your audience.
5. Content Curation
This type of content takes a bit of searching but it is easier because it doesn’t require that much creation on your part. With content curation, you collect high-quality content within your niche and provide it to your audience in a list or whatever format you like.
The Take-Away
As a website owner, your success is ultimately hinged on the effectiveness of your Content Marketing Strategy. Your website will be that much more successful if you focus a lot of time and energy in creating engaging content that converts. To do this you have to ensure you have a great understanding of what content is effective and what content isn’t. Make sure you are creating a mix of content and adding visual content to give a better user experience. Create strategies to repurpose content for your audience. Make certain your content is optimised for social media sharing. As we said earlier you want to produce content efficiently so be sure to plan ahead of time. Having a written plan for your Content Marketing Strategy is the logical next step once you’ve built your business.
