CONTENT MARKETING

Content Marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing and distributing content for a target audience online.  It is a good idea to create a content marketing strategy before starting to create our content as it will give you a framework.  This strategy will help with the preparation and creation steps.

This presentation will discuss Content Marketing for Small Business. Our agenda for the presentation is the first talk about what is content marketing, then discuss the different formats of content, look at strategy for content marketing, talk about copywriting. And then finally look at some examples.

What is content marketing?

So what is content marketing? Content marketing is a marketing strategy where you actually create content targeted at specific audiences. This is the content that they may be searching for. So, this does relate a little bit to search engine optimization, but the content doesn’t necessarily have to only be rated to find people finding you through search engines. It could be through other marketing methods like social media, and videos and things like that. The ultimate goal of content marketing is to show that you’re in authority of a specific subject matter.

Additionally, if you provide a content marketing strategy, this also shows you have credibility in the subject matter. A lot of traffic can be generated through search engine optimization, because a lot of content is text based. But again, content doesn’t have to just be text. It can be text, audio, video, and images. The other thing about targeting your audiences, you can actually look at a content marketing strategy that actually targets intended customers at different points in their buying process.

Formats

So let’s look at some different formats that are part of content marketing. The first is actually text which again is written words. But we need to think of this as in many aspects of being just part of one thing but because of search engine optimization, which uses the text content A website. This is usually it’s thought of during content marketing. But images are also part of content marketing, and a different type of format. These could be photographs or illustrations. Usually text and images go hand in hand, especially on websites.

Another format that could be part of a content marketing effort is audio, which is again, the spoken word. Again, words are still listed here. But people have ways to consume this through different methods. So unlike a website, audio that could be part of a podcast for example, many people like the concept of video so this is should be part of your content marketing. This could be in the form of recorded videos or animations.

Strategy

Let’s talk about strategy related to content marketing. For some important part is to actually set a goal because again, content marketing is not necessarily a straightforward effort, it really is important to start first with goals. These could be what you’re aiming for why developing this content and the goal of how this relates back to other business initiatives. Because content strategy should be focused on different target audiences, it’s very important to think about those target audiences. Who are they What are they struggling with? Why or where do they go and look for solutions, and how you can actually solve their problems.

Because a number of method formats do have text, the concept of keywords comes into play. And so it’s very important to think about how keywords you may be targeting your content strategy. And then how those different content methods may be affected. So out of the four formats, again, text images, audio and video, figuring out where you would distribute this content also has a point of the different content methods you’re producing. One final thing on keyword research is to think about grouping these keywords together into different groups. Because again, you may be targeting people at different parts of the buying cycle. And so grouping them in is a very important part.

Another aspect of content strategy that’s important is to look at what’s called longtail keyword research. This is basically using keywords or phrases that have high search volume but low competition and what I mean by that is, let’s say you’re looking for a content strategy related to shoes. Shoes is a very broad term which will be find much a content but it may be that you can have content related to a specific type of shoe or specific color shoe and things like that, that may still help to get more people to find that information. Next part of the strategy you need to look at is to think about your content ideas. These are again, identifying the concepts you’re trying to relate in your content marketing strategy, developing topical clusters, this goes back to a little bit of a keyword grouping. And so here we’re talking about and then actually identifying a length. This could be in the form of text, how much text you want to write video, how long the video should be, and audio, again, length.

Next on your strategy, you want to identify how you’re going to actually create this content. It if it is text, again, grammar is an important thing to look at. It should match your brand style of what you’re trying to accomplish. And again, a lot of people in the case of text like to skim it so we need to think about that. And finally at the end, you want to make sure that as part of your strategy Have measure your measuring and analyzing this. And this kind of relates back to the beginning which was setting the goal. In this case, a SMART goal might be actually good because it allows you to identify a time component and other aspects of your strategy.

Copywriting

Right to take a little bit of time and discuss copywriting. copywriting is the concept by which you actually write your content, in this case text with a very specific structure and things like that. It’s not just writing for the sake of writing. Obviously, you need to do things like proofreading, but part of it could be the structure of the text, how the paragraphs are formed. Do you happen to use bullet points and numbers to communicate your different ideas? Could charts and data comparisons be included? Making sure that as your co produce this written text here is keyword focused on And this concept of crafting a hook so that this writing has a purpose and a structure to it. Because of all these factors and it’s not just like normal writing, you might do in an email or a letter to a friend. This may be something you want to look to outsource to experts, because the copywriting is part of your content and does need to be in a specific structure.

Examples

Those are some examples. One of the primary places you’ll execute your content marketing strategies, actually the information on your website using content marketing, the website is a perfect place to present all this information. Again, it suits all the formats whether it be text or images or audio or video. one specific example which traditionally is on a website is blogging but in the case of a content marketing strategy. Blogging actually takes on a different thing than just the simple explaining what’s going on today or something like that. It actually is a mechanism by which you can publish content on a regular basis in chronological fashion, but targeted to different things. This could be based on specific keyword groupings and topical clusters you’re looking at, or other factors to go through. Another example of a written form of content marketing is press releases, press releases, still have a place to share information about your businesses with multiple media outlets with the idea that those may be picked up. But the press release itself is a form of content.

In addition to your website, another communication network that’s very important our social media, your posts that you can put on different social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter could be part of your content strategy. They do have a different platform. In the case, say of Twitter, it’s much shorter. In the case of Facebook, maybe better with images with a little bit of text backing it up. But again, thinking about this specific posts on those social media platforms, video is becoming something people like to consume more and more, just look at YouTube and the amount of traffic that site has on a daily basis. But you don’t have to just be on that one platform. You can host your video there. But embedded within your website, you can take your videos and actually place them on your social media platforms. There are a lot of options where video can be shown to different people. One of the easiest and most direct ways to share audio content is podcasts. They are a newer phenomenon, but they do allow for subscriptions. And so if people may find a topic they’re interested in and subscribe to your podcast and then because they’re subscribed, they’ll actually receive your new episodes automatically. So it’s a great way to share audio.

Conclusions on Content Marketing

So let’s wrap up this presentation with some conclusions about content marketing. There are a number of benefits of content marketing. One is that you can actually use it as a structure to help you create content to target your potential and current customers to provide them information to help with bringing up your authority and credibility as a expert within that subject area. Because it does have a lot of texts, which is predominantly put on websites that can help with running website traffic. And so your content marketing can be a strategy by which you have people come to your website. And then you can share with them other information which may help to generate leads for your product or services or potentially even sales. And content marketing can have many different focuses so you can actually target people at different parts in the buying process. Maybe they’re an informational stage where there’s trying to learn more when they’re investigating stage or They’re trying to understand more, or they’re ready to buy and you can actually target that through different formats again, text, audio, images and video, and you can put your content on multiple platforms.