Content marketing should be the cornerstone of your brand awareness strategy. Great content is the best way to attract visitors to your website and ensure your target audience knows what you offer and where you stand in terms of your ethos and values.
To make the most of your marketing efforts you need a solid strategy that involves everything from keyword research and content creation through to social media promotion and performance tracking.
If you don’t know where to start, a content marketing agency will guide you through the process. While it can be difficult to understand how a content strategy is pulled together, speaking to the experts will help you approach it logically so that it all makes sense and becomes second nature to you.
Engaging content can come in many different forms, including blog posts, videos and infographics, but what they all have in common is that they’ve been designed for maximum search engine optimisation. Such quality content must be crafted by experts who understand all the elements that go into a content marketing strategy to produce results.
The aim of content marketing is to increase brand awareness and drive leads to your business. Approaches will be nuanced for each business, which is why a comprehensive content marketing strategy is vital to ensure the best results. At the centre of all efforts, however, is content that engages the target audience and performs well in search.
When it comes to the process of content marketing, there’s a lot of planning that needs to occur before any content creation can begin. A content marketing agency must work closely with its client to ensure it understands the aims and objectives of the organisation before a content marketing strategy can be designed and implemented.
The main steps to a successful content marketing strategy are:
This information gathering stage includes conducting keyword and target audience research; establishing aims and goals; and identifying the content types and formats that will be most effective at increasing brand awareness.
Taking everything you learned from your research and planning, it’s time to ideate content topics and themes. These should address search intent and have the potential to engage the reader and drive traffic. Build a content calendar around these ideas and decide on the best formats to present them.
With the foundations in place, you’ve got everything you need to create great content. The content writing team should be well versed in search engine optimisation and writing for your target audience. Quality content must meet high standards in terms of spelling and grammar, so ensure everything is checked thoroughly.
Publishing your content is just as important as the other stages of the process, as you can easily undermine its search performance by overlooking certain elements. Make sure you’re publishing articles at an appropriate time and scheduling them if necessary. Tag, categorise and include metadata in your content, and ensure your site is optimised for mobile and desktop devices.
In order for your content to reach its full potential you need to promote it. Increase your brand awareness by sharing your blogs and articles on social media and using digital PR techniques. Outreaching to bloggers, journalists and influencers is an effective way to put your quality content in front of your target audience.
Understanding how your content is performing plays an integral role in your strategy. Not only can you see where you’re achieving results, you can also identify and amend anything that’s preventing your goals from being fulfilled. There are lots of tracking tools available and you should choose one that focuses on the most appropriate metrics for your goals.
Investing in content marketing services is a way to build your brand reputation over time. Each of the actions you take as part of your content strategy will contribute to your digital presence, helping to drive sales brand awareness. Consistent, quality content improves your domain authority and provides a reason for users to keep coming back to your site.
When you think about it, you’ve probably seen a good content marketing example already this week. An effective marketing strategy will weave quality content into the brand experience without audiences even realising it. This engaging content could have come in the form of a social media post or email marketing and will have helped to boost brand awareness for the organisation that distributed it.
A successful content marketing strategy is based around all of its key elements working together. This is why it should be comprehensively researched, documented and implemented, otherwise you’ll be left with disparate components that don’t pull in the direction of your aims.
As the name suggests, content is at the core of content marketing, but even the best written pieces cannot fulfil their potential on their own. Properly researched, well-constructed articles, blogs, ebooks, whitepapers, videos and animations can really bring a content marketing strategy to life and form the basis for social media posts and outreach activity.
An important part of your strategy will be content distribution. What this looks like will depend a lot on your industry, your target audience and where they can be found online. Get this right and your content marketing efforts will help to raise the profile of your business and provide inbound leads.
There are three main types of channels for content distribution – owned, earned and paid – and you don’t have to focus on just one. In fact, a strategy that tailors a content type to a channel that is part of a wider distribution plan incorporating owned, earned and paid elements is most likely to be a success.
The most obvious owned content distribution platform is your website, which should include a blog as part of your content strategy. But there are a number of other channels that also come into this category, such as your email newsletter and social media profiles. You have a high level of control of what you publish on these channels, so make sure you’re maximising them.
Earned content distribution is where it becomes clear that what you’ve created is of a high standard. That’s because it’s being shared for free across social media and forums, linked to in blogs and articles, and mentioned in round-ups by third parties. These can include journalists, bloggers, influencers and even satisfied customers.
Putting some of your budget into paid content distribution can be a wise decision as it can help to bolster your content strategy as a whole. Options include paid social media ads, sponsored content and pay-per-click ads and it’s worth thinking about the content types that will perform best with each one before making a selection.
Creating a successful content marketing strategy involves a number of tasks that both evaluate where your content is at already and allow you to plan for the future. The aim is to bring all the elements together to form a comprehensive structure that guides the reader through your buyer funnel to become a marketing lead.
To do that you must perform a content audit that establishes which pieces of your existing content are achieving results and which ones aren’t. They must be categorised to better understand where they fit into the structure of your strategy. From here, you can work out which content types are missing from your website and social media, and begin to formulate a plan to fill the gaps and create a good user experience for potential customers.
This inbound marketing strategy must be based on clear goals, persona research into your clients and an effort to answer user intent on search queries. While all of this can seem daunting to the uninitiated, agencies put together content marketing strategies every day and can break the process down into manageable tasks.
Content marketing agencies take the stress out of your digital marketing efforts. They offer a wide range of services and every organisation – whether it be a small business or a large corporation – will require a different combination to achieve their goals.
Usually consisting of a number of departments, a content marketing agency offers everything you need to meet your business marketing goals. That includes developing strategy, creating content, distributing it and measuring the success of your digital marketing efforts. A good digital marketing agency should be able to cover everything from written content to social media marketing and email marketing and help you understand the practices that will help your business reach its goals.
Understanding that you need marketing services to build your brand is a good place to start, but don’t worry if your knowledge beyond that is limited. A content marketing agency should be your partner in creating a strategy and implementing it, and as the experts they will guide you through the process in a logical fashion.
Look into different content marketing agencies and ask them lots of questions. It’s important to see if they’ll be a good fit with your business and if you feel you could work productively with them. Here at Axonn we are committed to understanding your digital marketing needs and working with you to improve your brand reputation, increase your inbound leads, and grow your business.
Here are some of the questions to ask when comparing content marketing agencies:
Having an ongoing relationship with a content marketing agency will mean you can continue to develop and improve your digital marketing. Concepts such as SEO are constantly evolving and thinking you can just ‘tick content marketing off your list’ is shortsighted. After the initial content strategy has been put in place and content uploaded and distributed, you need to maintain a consistent flow of new pieces to remain relevant.
Continued content creation will not only help to bring visitors to your website, but will also ensure your digital marketing executive has interesting posts to share on social media.
Content creation gets a lot of attention, but there’s more to successful content than simply publishing it. There are steps you need to take minutes, hours, weeks and even months after it’s gone live to ensure you’re making the most of it. Firstly, you need to ensure your content gets seen, then you need to […]
Putting the words Google and artificial intelligence (AI) into the same sentence is enough to spread fear among many digital marketers. After the initial concern and a little digging, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) doesn’t seem so scary. After all, as marketers we’re used to change. Our industry is evolving all the time and standing […]