Content marketing shares useful and informative information that is relevant, engaging and useful to your audience.
There are four types of content:
- Audio
- Video
- Written
- Images
At contentwriterireland we usually focus on creating written content for blogs, audio, and for videos so in this blog we will focus on these three types of content.
The most important area to consider when creating content is that whatever content you create it must have some sort of value and usefulness. Believe me, there is absolutely no point in you creating content if your audience is not getting some sort of use out of it, because if they arent getting some use out of it these people will abandon you like some turd they have flushed down the toilet bowl!
As a content marketer in Ireland you will have to ask yourself the question, “Do I want to be the turd flushed down the toilet or do I want to the flower in vase that everyone admires and adores?”
I cannot reiterate this point enough: Your goal as a content marketer is to make life easier for your audience, establish yourself as someone who they can trust and who can help guide them through the often tricky world of digital marketing.
So why invest in content marketing?
One of the reasons why content marketing is vital is because content creates brand equity which means over time that if you continually create content that your brand will become more and more valuable. The more you help your audience the more the value of your brand will continue to increase. If the content that you create becomes a necessity for your audience then conversely the value of your brand will continue to increase.
What begins to happen when your content is engaged with is that this creates a flywheel type effect until suddenly you find yourself dominating your field.
The principal way content creation creates value for your business is via organic traffic. Organic traffic is the goldmine of the internet. Why? Because if you have traffic growing organically you will suddenly find your business popping up all over the place. The goal of growing organic traffic is that your website and brand will start growing like a mini Forrest with trees, plant, shrubs, and flowers popping up all over the place. Believe me, when you do content marketing correctly you could well find your brand turning into the f#cking Amazon rain forest!
When your brand does start growing at such a rate you will suddenly find yourself being forced to hire other content marketers and digital marketing experts to help cultivate, trim, and take care of your forest. This is the beauty of tapping into the oil well of organic traffic your website and brand has the potential to grow big.
Obviously, the main platforms in which you want to secure organic traffic will be platforms like Google, Youtube, or some podcast. The reason why organic traffic is fundamentally different from say outbound marketing is that with organic traffic these people are actually looking for you. These people are actively searching for information about your business and this is why this type of traffic will lead to far more conversions than with outbound traffic.
For example, say you are advertising on Facebook you are interrupting other people. You are attempting to boot in the door when it comes to their day. This type of outbound marketing is much harder because its a hard sell were you are attempting to impose yourself on other people. Another example of this is, when you are on some website and next thing some random popup comes out of nowhere and takes over your entire screen, will you want to engage? Hello no! You’ll be thinking get this junk off my screen now. I didn’t ask for this crap. Goodbye!
The fact is, this type of outbound marketing is irritating and annoys people. This is why outbound marketing should only be used to augment inbound marketing. It doesn’t covert as much as inbound marketing and it also is very expensive and sometimes even a total waste of money.
In a nutshell here is the difference:
Outbound marketing you have to go to the audience. But with organic traffic the audience comes to you.
The reason why this is so powerful is for a number of reasons
- These people have a problem
- They know they have a problem
- They are coming to you for a solution to that problem.
All three of these ingredients are absolutely vital for online sales and this is why content marketing is uniquely place to grow your business.
Create a content marketing strategy
Once you have decided that content marketing is the way you want to promote your business, you need to create a strategy.
One of the first aims of any content marketing strategy is to build a relationship with other people. How do you build this relationship? You provide the solution to their problem. If you create value and problem your readers with value information which solves there problems, your content will succeed. Before you start pumping out content like some content marketing Goliath there are a number of things that you should try and accomplish fist.
Know who your customer is
The core of any marketing plan is knowing who your customer is going to be. The questions that you should be able to answer are: 1. What do prospective customers want? 2. What are they struggling to accomplish? 3. What is there pain point?
Basically what I’m saying is that you need to step inside the mind of your customer and understand what his problem is and how you can solve his problem. You will need to speak the language of your customer. One of the things you can do here is create a persona of your buyers and this persona should represent the customers who are trying to reach your content. Based upon this content you should start making decisions on how your content can get new customers into your net.
Figure out what they actually want
You should be able to step into the shoes of your customers and figure out what it is that they actually want. For example, you should know what steps your customers need to take before they start buying from you. What will you need to have in place before you have your customers reeled in and jumping around like some fat juicy Salmon on the bank of a river? What I am referring to here is a content roadmap. You should create content that addresses each stage of your customers journey.
What content marketing strategy will you use?
You will need to communicate with your potential clients in a certain type of voice. What I’m saying is that you will need to determine what style you are going to communicate with your clients. At this stage of the game you can get a little artistic and will have room for experiment.
Another thing you’ll need to consider is what format you are going to use? Will it be via a video or via the written word? What kind of stories do you intend telling and in what kind of voice?
The more information you have about your audience, the easier it will be for you to decide what will be the appropriate manner of voice and style. From my experience, the best strategy at this stage will be trail and error. You will need to experiment and discover the perfect tone of voice for you and your brand.
Content marketing audience building
In order to build up an audience you will need to earn it. Believe me, with a vast amount of information out there you are going to have to come out with your A game if you’re going to acquire that much coveted audience. There are many many people fighting over the pieces of the pie and if you want to get your hands on a slice of the pie you’ll have to earn it!!
If you put out average content then your readers will smell that the content is average and they will abandon you in their droves. There is a cliche going around at the minute that peoples times spans are decreasing but there is another side to this argument and it is that people times spans aren’t decreasing but that their tolerance for junk bulls#it content is decreasing. The modern audience no longer has time for some half arsed article or video that tells them absolutely nothing.
So what I’m trying to get across to you here is that your first step is to produce great content. But simply creating content is not going to be enough. You cant just create a video or a blog and then suddenly expect traffic to come in like a tsunami. You will need to push and push your content at every opportunity you have. One option you can use to promote your content is to run paid advertising. This method can be expensive but it also can be a great way to increase traffic to your website. If you are going down this route make sure to use the information that you have gathered about your customers persona. This information will be in invaluable when targeting customers.
Overall, content marketing is a super way to grow your business and if you come up with your A game you might just manage to get your hands on a nice juicy piece of the pie.