Content marketing for your business is equal parts traffic generation, SEO, and conversion rate optimization. At its heart, it’s about creating great content that
- keeps people coming back to your site,
- gets other sites to link to yours (bringing in more traffic from around the Web and from search engines), and
- makes your brand stand out in the minds of your visitors.
By publishing great content—week after week, for free—on your site, you’ll be attacking 3 of the most difficult areas of marketing at once.
As an SEO tool, content marketing is far and away the best thing available to your business. Other methods of link building give you short-term gains at best (and long-term losses at worst!).
Likewise, as a brand-building tool, it can’t be beat—Internet users have gotten savvy to all the traditional marketing channels (the many forms that ads can take), so those tools are losing more power each year. But, people do (and always will) still seek out great information. By providing that, you will draw people to you, essentially creating a media outlet owned entirely by you that readers want to return to.
Are you sold on content marketing yet? Great.
Formulating your content marketing strategy
The biggest mistake that companies make is to jump head-first into content marketing without having a strategy—they pump out blog posts, infographics, and videos at superhuman rates… for a month. And then they realize they’re out of ideas and tired of spending all this time without any visible results, so they stop.
That’s not an effective way to go about it!
Instead, you want to put in place a strategy for:
- The type of content you’ll produce (long blog posts, short instructional videos, webinars, podcasts, infographics, free-to-use image galleries, etc.)
- Your target readership (beginners in your field, your existing customers, people shopping around for services like yours, etc.)
- The subject matter of your content (and where ideas for new subjects will come from),
- Your content creation (who will write/draw/film it, and how often), and
- Your plan for promoting the content.
Choosing your content types
Blog posts (or “articles,” “white papers,” or whatever else you decide to call them) will probably be the mainstay of your content strategy. I suggest aiming for longer posts rather than shorter ones, both as a service to your readers (the more complete, the better!) and for SEO purposes—search engines prefer longer, in-depth posts to short, shallow ones, so if you want to rank highly for a keyword, a long post is the way to go.
By all means, choose multiple types of content. For instance, Moz has gotten a lot of value out of their Whiteboard Friday videos as a supplement to their traditional blog posts. Infographics, likewise, can be put to use by any industry.
Choosing your audience
When it comes to choosing a target readership, you know your market better than I do—maybe your company really sees the most value coming from your existing customers, so you choose to target them over new prospects (though that would be surprising!). However, I strongly suggest that you target beginners in your field.
For one, beginners make up the overwhelming majority of people interested in any particular field. They are the ones searching the most for content in your area, and they’re also the ones least likely to be tied to an existing product or service.
Choosing your subject matter
Figuring out what you’re going to write about is a blog post in itself (no, really—you should read that post, too!). But, let me add this:
Your goal is to choose subjects that will both resonate with your readers and provide SEO benefits. That’s why blog posts like “News about our latest update to Product X” should not be part of your content creation strategy—these posts may seem valuable to you, but your prospective customers couldn’t care less (and will certainly never be searching for that!).
This is why you almost always see content marketing mentioned in the same breath with long-tail SEO. The two go hand in hand, because if you can find a long-tail query to use as a subject, you can “corner the market” on that query and bring in visitors to whom you can provide value.
One final feature you should look for in the content you create is “evergreen” status—content that will be just as relevant five years from now as it is today. Thus, “Getting Started with WordPress” is great, but “Making the Most of the WordPress 3.4.1 Update” is not. Good evergreen content will continue to generate traffic (and links, and social shares, and…) year after year for your business.
Developing a plan for creation
To be successful, you want both a scalable and sustainable plan for creating content. This means your founder should not be trying to pump out 2 posts a week.
Ideally, you will have a handful of employees who are at the top of their game for whatever portion of the business they are in charge of. Get them on board with content marketing and ask for one post per month from each of them. This is a rate that’s sustainable in the long term, and it will work out to a post per week for your readership (or more as you get more employees involved)—that’s a great rate for a small business!
Alternatively, you might consider outsourcing the creation of your content. There are high-caliber, professional blog writers like Gregory Ciotti available for top dollar who can create great content for you. There are also cheaper subscription services like BlogMutt that are lower quality, but maybe acceptably so, depending on your requirements. BlogMutt acknowledges this in their FAQ:
Q: What’s the quality for $89? [Their monthly rate for 4 posts/month]
A: It’s good. It’s not great, like if you paid $400 a post, but it’s better than the junk from off-shore mills. It’s perfect for a business blog.
Planning your content promotion
If you’ve ever planted a tree, you’ve probably heard this one:
It’s better to put a $100 tree in a $200 hole than to put a $200 tree in a $100 hole.
For content marketers, the “soil” you want to pay attention to is your promotion strategy. If you have a $200 blog post, don’t spend $100 promoting it. (Obviously if you’re creating your content yourself, you can make the same analogy with your time.) Unless you already have a tremendous brand, drawing in tens of thousands of readers, your content isn’t going to promote itself.
For most of us, creating something great is half the battle (or less!).
So, how do you promote your content?
- Leverage your network. Most business owners have a lot more connections than they realize. Make a list of every company you have a professional relationship with, and send them all an email along these lines:
- Hi friend,
- I wanted to let you know about a new initiative my company is committing to. Basically, we’re trying to create a bunch of high-quality [blog posts/videos/white papers] each month about [your topics]. Here’s one example: [link to the best damn content you’ve ever created]
- If you think this might be of interest to your Web site’s visitors (or your Facebook followers), would you be interested in sharing it with them? I’d be happy to email you whenever we post something new.
- Remember—you’re providing value, for free, to these business owners and their customers. You aren’t asking for a handout—you’re offering something awesome to them! This works especially well if the person receiving the email has written previously about a similar topic—be sure to mention this in the email! For instance, “I’ve been following your blog, and I saw you recently posted about [some related topic]. I thought you might be interested in my post [Title of Awesome Post].”
- Want another way to get the attention of someone in your network? Highlight their work in a blog post. If they’ve done something awesome in an area your readers would be interested, create a post around that. Then, email the person and let them know about it—“I just wanted to let you know I wrote about your work on [some topic] in a recent blog post. You can find it here: [link to your post].”
- Another aspect of your network that you need to take advantage of is your email list. You should be sending an email to the world each time you create something new. As time goes on, you should also experiment with sending the whole post versus just a teaser—see which gets the most engagement, the most social shares, etc.
- (You are curating an email list of people who want general updates from you, right? You can use our free Hello Bar alternative—that little blue bar at the top of the page—to do this.)
- Let others do it for you. You can get a lot of free exposure by exchanging guest posts with other sites. You create some great content for another company to post (with your name attached to it, and a link to your site) and they will promote it for you—they’ll share it with their social media followers, send it to their email list, etc. Obviously this works in reverse as well—by allowing others to guest post on your own site, they’ll send their own followers to you. Find a few other businesses that are interested in this reciprocity and you’ll do wonders for your content’s visibility.Another aspect of letting others promote your content for you is to leverage social media. You should always have prominent social sharing buttons attached to your blog posts, and you might consider asking for a share directly. (The bottom of my posts always reads “If you found this post useful, please consider sharing it.”)
- Share it with news sites. News sites in your industry can be fickle. Getting featured there is mostly about persistence and connecting your content to the right editor. Try to find an editor who frequently covers stories in your industry, and email them no more than once every couple weeks with the most relevant content you have, along with a brief explanation of why you think their readers would appreciate this (e.g., it’s similar to some other story of theirs that got a lot of user interactions).
- Share it with your social media. You should post about your content both the day that you create it and a couple times in the following week (more for Twitter, since a relatively small fraction of your followers will see any given post). Don’t make this the same post each time—select an excerpt to highlight, share a reaction to the post, share your own thoughts, etc. You can use Hootsuite to schedule these posts well in advance.
Off you go!
At this point, you’re ready to formulate your own content strategy. Remember that the biggest challenge for any content marketing plan is achieving long-term consistency. Get a team on board (either within your organization or without) to ensure that no single person is bearing the weight of the work. Be sure, also, to give it time! If you’re pumping out great, consistent content, though, and you’re promoting it with as much effort as you put into creating it, you’ll be reaping the benefits within a couple months.