As Bill Gates put it in 1996, content is king. The genius behind the success of Microsoft had the foresight to know that content marketing will drive the future of the internet. Fast forward 25 years to 2021 and the tech tycoon’s prophecy has never been truer.
Today, the global digital population is over 4 billion and about 26% of adults in the US are online and connected to the internet. This is just the tip of the iceberg. 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers believe that content marketing is an essential component of their marketing strategy. Content is engaging and there’s an extremely large audience to consume it.
This is a reality that most businesses are aware of today. However, knowing how to get content marketing right is not common knowledge. This is why we’re here to tell you exactly how you can make your content marketing strategies more effective and reach more people.
Here are a few things you can incorporate into your content marketing strategy to ensure that you’re getting the best bang for your buck.
Getting Your Audience To Trust Your Brand
One of the tenets that content marketing is built on is trust. You need your audience to trust you and identify with what you say. The key to doing this is choosing the right tone and sticking to it. People should be able to identify your content just by its tone.
Your tone could be your brand identity and add nuance to your content to set it apart from the rest of the competition. Boring, drab content doesn’t usually get a lot of attention. This is exactly what the competition does wrong and you should make the most of it by doing it that much better.
To choose the right tone for your content strategy, ask yourself questions like what the vision of your brand is, what you’re doing to further your goals, and how you would like your target audience to perceive your brand.
Answering these questions and remaining consistent with these ideas with all your content across platforms will help you earn that trust from your readers. One thing to keep in mind is that trust is lost much easier than it is earned, so you need to consistently push out quality content.
Engagement Is Key
You measure the success of your content marketing strategy in terms of how much engagement it has achieved. You want people to engage with your content by liking, sharing, and commenting on it. This helps push your content to more people with a similar online profile.
It’s no secret that delivering quality content that’s interesting and valuable to readers is a tried and tested way to gain organic traffic and engagement. However, we couldn’t have overstated it because it’s just so fundamental to making a content strategy work.
The key is to identify what your target audience would find valuable and make that interesting while maintaining the right tone to communicate your ideas and goals as best as possible. Of course, there are a thousand other ways you can churn out content and push it to your target audience but that would be inorganic traffic that doesn’t sustain itself and will likely have very low conversion rates.
Drawing Attention To Your Brand
Building on the previous point about the distinction between organic and inorganic traffic, the difference is quite starkly different. Organic traffic is driven to your site because of genuine interest in the value that you offer, while inorganic traffic just happens to find its way onto your site. That’s not to say that inorganic traffic doesn’t work at all, it just doesn’t work quite as well as organic traffic does.
That said, to build an effective content marketing strategy, you’ll have to find the perfect balance between organic and inorganic traffic. The content your brand produces must always be focused on the value it offers to readers, but you can always use a blend of marketing techniques to push your content to more people, even if they’re not necessarily looking for content from your brand specifically. This will help you grow your base of readers who trust your content and want to consume more of it.
Making the most of tools like search engine optimization (SEO) and building a network of backlinks and internal links is your best bet to increase your viewership and consequently the engagement.
In Summary
Content marketing strategies are to be refined and tailored to suit the needs of your brand. What might work for one brand might not necessarily do wonders for another. But we’re sure you’ll find the perfect balance of these three key components of content marketing strategies - consistency, relevance, and growth, and refine it to perfection so your brand can stand out and outpace the competition.
We hope this post has been insightful and helpful in understanding how to make your content marketing strategy more effective.
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