Get Your Content Marketing Campaign Right

 
Content marketing is MUST for 2013.  Find out what content marketing actually is and how you can use it to boost your inbound links, website traffic, and search results.

What is Content Marketing?

As you may or may not be well aware, content marketing is backed by the belief that educating a customer results in a brand’s recognition as a thought leader or industry expert.   According to studies by Hubspot, Junta 42, and King Fish Media, almost three-quarters of US companies with a social media strategy used content in their campaigns per eMarketer.

 
Why Should I Engage in Content Marketing?

The reasons are endless, well not really, but there are a lot of reasons.  Publishing content that is engaging, useful, fills a need, solves pain, and is fun establishes trust, creates credibility, builds reputation, and sets your brand apart as a thought leader in your industry.  It also does all of the above:  fills a need, solves pain, engages website visitors, etc.  There are also the more technical reasons, such as ranking for keywords, creating inbound links, and generating leads.

What Types of Content Can I Publish?

There are various types of content you can create a content marketing campaign around, such as:

• Online Magazines
• eNewsletters
• eBooks
• Microsites
• White Papers
• Reports
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Videos
• eMails
• Virtual Events
• Blog Posts
• Articles
• Vlogs
• Guides
• Reports
• Apps
• Widgets

Get 50 Content Marketing Ideas.

The Most Important Step

The most important step in creating any content is to understand your audience and know your objective.  Once you know what type of content you will be marketing to a certain target audience, you can then focus on optimizing your content for search engines.  Including keywords in your blog posts, eBooks, videos, and other content is imperative to getting your content spotted.

Where to Promote Your Content

Now that you have your content created and optimized for search engines, you need to promote it.  There are various places to promote your content:

1. Your Website
2. Your Blog
3. Your Social Networks
4. Your eMails
5. Your eMail Signature
6. Your Direct Mail
7. Your Print Ads
8. Your Radio Ads
9. Your Television Ads
10. Your Blog Posts

What Are Content Marketing Basic Rules?

In addition to all of the above, a successful content marketing strategy requires a few fundamental guidelines:

1. Express that you’re the expert
2. Use your customer’s language
3. Create content around what you are good at
4. Always be helpful
5. Don’t keep the good stuff to yourself.  Share your expertise.
6. Create content for all your buying cycles, top, middle, and end of funnel.
7. Be innovative, fun, educational, interesting, valuable, visual
8. Always, always, always drive your content to landing page where a visitor can convert to a lead

What type of unique content did your business create that was a huge success?

Tags: inbound marketing