Content marketing must be an essential aspect of any business’s marketing efforts. This is especially true as traditional marketing becomes less and less effective. To make sure your content marketing efforts aren’t wasted, learn how to make your content stand out. Here’s everything you need to know about content marketing.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a form of strategic marketing that uses valuable content to inform, educate and inspire your audience.

It is distinct from similar forms of marketing like native advertising, branded content and product marketing. Content marketing is useful and informative for your audience rather than merely content that’s sponsored or disguised as a news story.

How Does Content Marketing Help?

At its core, content marketing is designed to help with three major aspects of your business.

1. First, it should ultimately lead to increased sales.
2. Second, it should offer overall cost savings.
3. Finally, it should help attract better customers with more loyalty to your brand.

Think of content marketing as a one-size-fits-all solution for every customer in your target audience regardless of where they are in the sales funnel. The information that content marketing offers should always be useful, valuable and build trust with your audience.

Content marketing serves as an excellent companion to your search engine optimization efforts. Good content adds the value that search engines are looking for. Even with Ads sponsored search results, the top of the search engine results pages will always be the most trusted source. Most people are savvy enough these days to recognize the difference between organic results and an ad.

The Importance of Evergreen Content

When you think of evergreen content, you may conjure up images of a holiday tree or any other kind of pine or fir that retains its vibrant green coloring all year long. Evergreen content functions much the same, as it’s meant to have perpetual life rather than shedding its relevance over time. Put simply, evergreen content on your site is content that is sustainable and lasting to the point where it will always be useful.

Content that merely exists forever doesn’t qualify as evergreen. Usefulness and value are the most important factors to keep in mind when crafting evergreen content. This kind of content should continuously draw traffic to your site for the foreseeable future, so it’s not content about news items, statistics or current trends. Instead, evergreen content includes articles like how-to tutorials, product reviews, lists and top tips. Keep in mind, however, that evergreen content shouldn’t be the only kind of content you develop.

Types of Content Marketing

When developing content for your marketing efforts, there are quite a few different types you can explore. Make sure you don’t go all-in on one type of content marketing.

Blogs: The most common type of content marketing is blog posting. If your brand doesn’t have a blog, you’ll want to develop one right away. Blogs can contain a wide variety of content on their own, with plenty of ways to draw more traffic to your site. A blog is where most of your evergreen content will be. You just need to make sure your blog is consistent in terms of an upload schedule and quality of content.
Video: Video is one of the best content marketing tactics to reach and engage consumers. According to 85 percent of U.S. internet users watched online video content. This makes video a powerful tool in your content marketing arsenal.
Infographics: Consider infographics. Content marketing is ultimately meant to convey useful information to your audience to help build trust with your brand. A 1,000-word blog post can do that just fine, but an infographic can make dense information easier to absorb.
An e-Book: Publishing an e-book can take information to the next level by combining the value of blog posts and infographics. Depending on your cost/value assessment, you can even offer the e-book for free.

Developing Engaging Content

There are several strategies available when it comes to developing engaging content. You’ll likely have to implement quite a few if you want to create successful content that will drive traffic, increase sales and build brand awareness.

Before you start writing, determine your topic. The literal title of your blog or any other kind of content can have a massive impact on its effectiveness. For example, if the title of your blog is a question, it will likely get more clicks. Roughly 8% of people use search engines for questions.

Knowing how to make the ultimate title won’t mean much if you can’t come up with a topic in the first place. While there are plenty of topics that your audience will be interested in, it’s not uncommon for brands to simply run out of ideas at times. Fortunately, you’re not on your own during the struggle. You can consult other members of your company for answers. Your support team will know what customers struggle with the most. Your sales team will know what people want to know most about your brand before becoming a customer.

In addition to turning to your own company for ideas, you can also turn to your audience at large. While directly asking for blog topic suggestions doesn’t really go over well, you can be a bit sneaky about it. Ask members of your audience what they need help with via social media, email lists or blog comments, among others. Sometimes you may get irrelevant and nonsense answers, but other times you’ll get answers that translate well into blog topics.

Getting the Most Out of Your Content

Once your content is written and published, you then have to market it. In fact, about 80% of your time with any given piece of content marketing should be spent promoting it, while 20% of the time is spent creating it. There are quite a few ways you can quickly promote your content.

Send your content to your email list.
Post about it on social media in a scheduled post.
Email anyone you directly mentioned in the article.
Syndicating content with entities like Medium and LinkedIn.
Create some graphics that are easy to share on social media that represent your content’s value.

After the initial promotion, don’t let your content fade into obscurity. For example, imagine you run a shrink wrapping business, and you wrote several blogs years ago about industrial shrink wrapping machines. You can take the information from those old blogs and use it to create a new blog that covers everything a customer may need to know about automatic shrink wrap machines.

You can repurpose more than just blog posts. If you have an extensive image gallery, you may want to repurpose information into an infographic. Additionally, you can turn any previously hosted webinar into a video. You can also use old blog posts to create an e-book, which is a format that a lot of people prefer over blogs.

The podcast world is growing increasingly popular as well, so you may want to turn some of your old blog posts into podcast episodes. Just remember to edit the wording a bit to make it sound more conversational.

Enhance Your Content Marketing With M16 Marketing®

If you’re looking to take your content marketing to the next level, these tips are only the beginning. Get help from the digital marketing experts at M16 Marketing®.