Information is still the most valuable commodity on the internet.
Let’s face it, the internet is saturated with advertisements and SEO spam with little actual value to the public. In a world where consumers are bombarded with low quality information, how can you capture attention and build lasting relationships?
Use your industry knowledge to attract customers.
Content Marketing In a Nutshell
Content Marketing is a strategy that involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content that your audience wants to consume. Imagine offering a series of articles that demystify the complexities of financial products and provide an insider’s perspective and recommendations.
Content marketing can include blog posts, infographics, diagrams, maps, videos, podcasts or any other medium that allows you to share genuine information with your audience.
Good content about relevant topics with proper search engine optimization and social media marketing will draw visitors to your site and once they are on your site you have a chance to convert them into customers.
How is Content Marketing different from Search Engine Optimization?
Traditional Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, often prioritizes ways of gaming the search engine algorithms to increase your ranking and will often completely overlook creating a great user experience or creating content that the user will want to look at. The unfortunate result of this is piles and piles of SEO spam cluttering search engines and actually making it harder for users to find REAL information.
… a well orchestrated Content Marketing campaign will include search engine optimization…
On the other hand, a great piece of content naturally contains many of the elements that are needed to boost your ranking in search engines and a well orchestrated Content Marketing campaign will include search engine optimization but it starts first and foremost with excellent content.
How is Content Marketing different from Social Media Marketing?
In many ways, Social Media Marketing and SEO were the precursors for Content Marketing. Social Media Marketers learned a long time ago that social media users will not engage with low quality posts. Your social media posts have to be interesting and generally have to be short and to the point which is the main difference between social media content and Content Marketing. Content Marketing strategies work best with longer form articles and they allow you to cover topics in greater detail.
Just like with SEO, Content Marketing naturally supports your social media campaigns because each piece of content can be sliced into smaller pieces and teased on social media helping add substance to your social media presence.
How Does Content Marketing Work?
Fortunately for us all, content marketing is fairly straightforward. You start by creating a piece of content that people want. Let’s say you are a community bank in rural Texas and you decide to write a blog article about personal finance. There are probably thousands of articles about personal finance on the internet but your article is coming from a trusted local source and can incorporate factors that affect the local community specifically.
The article should be well written and easy to read. It should include graphics, diagrams, bullet points and other elements to break up the text into digestible chunks.
Readers will skim over or bounce off of a wall of text.
Where possible, your article should include links to other pages on your website or other resources that are relevant to the topic. Be sure to include relevant keywords where they make sense to use without disrupting the flow of the article. The end of the article should include a “Call to Action” which invites the reader to contact you.
Once the article is finished, you can begin pulling out highlights including impactful sentences or interesting diagrams and use these to post about the article on your social media accounts with a link back to the article. These can be scheduled to go out at regular intervals.
Once you’re done, you can start all over again with a new blog article and begin building a library of articles on your site.
Tips & Tricks
- Choose topics that are both interesting to your audience but also related to a product or service you would specifically like to boost.
- Written articles are easier to produce but videos have higher engagement rates.
- Don’t be afraid to give away your insider secrets. People love to see behind the curtain and it demonstrates your expertise.
- Don’t be afraid to revisit older content, update it, and republish it with the same workflow of social media promotion.
- Look at your data to help guide your strategy. Identify the topics that are the most popular or have the highest conversion rates and lean into them by creating additional content related to them.
