The internet is full of content- text, pictures, video, podcast, you name it. And note that it is not always the bloggers who provide all this content. Businesses and nonprofit organisations use content to drive new traffic to their website and increase engagement with their existing audience. Content marketing can help you drive traffic and (most importantly) help engage with your stakeholders without a need to pay for an ad. Besides, no amount of paid search results and social media marketing is going to help your organisation unless you have useful and engaging content to offer to your audience. In fact, this is what I have always pointed out in my blogs. Don’t be dead on the internet. The internet is a very lively place with content getting update every nanosecond and you’d be gone with the wind if you are not updated on the internet.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing Institute has a very comprehensible definition of the term and they define it in the following manner.
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
That’s probably way too many highlights for one sentence. Let’s discuss them one by one.
Content Marketing is a Strategic Marketing Approach
Perhaps, the biggest reason content marketing did not help your organisation could be because you didn’t know what goal(s) you wanted to achieve from it and didn’t have a strategy with your content. So, how do you build a strategy?
Your strategy should include SMART objectives. Do you want your visitors and followers to subscribe to your newsletter, engage in comments or make a purchase? Define measurable goals that you would want to achieve within a time frame. Plan your content for the next three to six months and make adjustments with time and analytics.
Use Content to Create Value
Use your content to build a stronger relationship with your stakeholders rather than using them for some sales pitch.
Too many small businesses use their content for the sole purpose of SEO, their content is no more than some sales pitch and they don’t update their blog sections often either. While targeting keywords do give them results in term of new traffic, the quality of the traffic and the engagement turn out to be quite poor. Our recommendation: don’t do that.
Be genuine with your approach. Your content should be targeting at creating value for your stakeholders and should be useful and relevant for them. Use Analytics to get insights into what content works and what doesn’t. You may as well look at Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner to inform your choices of topics for your content. Then, curate your content to suit different platforms.
Define your audience
Your audience should be the key driver defining your choices for content topics.
For whom is your content meant for? Who are the stakeholders for your business/nonprofit organisation and what platforms are they on? From establishing your business to content marketing, defining your audience should be the first and foremost driver to inform your choices. Then, curate your content to suit their needs and expectations. You may as well fragment your audience into groups (based on demographic details such as sex, city, etc.) if you have a large audience to cater to.
Your content should include a call to action
Don’t mistake your call to action for a sales pitch.
Your call to action might include a call to make a purchase or a donation but it must not sound like a sales pitch. But how do ensure that perfect balance? It’s a long road and you do that by creating value for your stakeholders first.
What else?
Use your content space to share your stories.
If you’re to outsource this crucial task to some agency, do so wisely.
- Outsourcing doesn’t mean you don’t take a part in this at all. You should keep following to your agency for updates and insights and brainstorm with them for creative ways to engage your audience.
- Do not outsource to the same agency you have outsourced the task for digital marketing and/or website development. It’s a niche and takes much more than only putting in keywords here and there.
- Instead, hire a writer who may have a background in literature or journalism and has a niche for storytelling. Also, engage with your writer regularly (say, once in a week) to develop and plan stories for the time until next meeting.
We would love to hear from you and help you out with developing a calendar plan for your content marketing.