What is Content Marketing?
When someone is doing a search on the internet, on Google for example, they type a specific search that is relevant to what they are looking for. The results are based on what the most relevant to you based on the keywords you typed. If your search engine optimization is done right, they should find you easily based on what your business is about. If your website is not optimized, their only chance to find you is to type the name of your company, which is pretty useless because if they already know about you, they are most likely already a customer or they already know about you. But what about everybody else? What if your business is relevant to that person who is doing a search but somewhow they can’t find you? That’s where you’ll have to build content that is specifically targeted to what your business is about so that your website appears in search results. That’s content marketing for you: creating and distributing relevant, targeted content that will help increase your visibility and ultimately drive customers.
Pros and cons
A good content strategy is time consuming and takes a long time to be effective. But the best part about it: it’s absolutely free! Obviously, you will need someone, if not you, that is capable of writing quality content and able to find enough subjects to write about on a regular basis.
The pros are quite obvious. It takes a little bit of time to be effective but once it starts to work, the effects are persistent and you could get traffic from that specific content for a very long time… unlike for example paid media, like Facebook ads or Google Adwords, which are definitely not free and once your stop a campaign, traffic stops.
The best thing about content marketing is not only that the traffic to your website will increase but so is your reputation. You can claim to be an expert, but what’s better than showing it by writing about it consistently.
What if you want to start but only have one subject to talk about? It’s always hard to start but the sooner you do the sooner you will see the effects. Besides, you can write content offline and once you have a few pieces of content put them all online at once. But really the only difficulty is not to start, it’s to stay consistent.
Content Marketing vs SEO
Based on all that, it seems like SEO and content marketing are exactly the same but in fact, not at all. As far as SEO (Search Engine optimization) is concerned, content marketing is only one component. SEO has a lot more layers including code, links, speed, etc. There’s a lot of technical aspect to SEO but you understand now that the visible part of the iceberg is content marketing and having good content marketing strategy is a key element to your SEO.
I have a small company, what should I do?
This is probably the question you’re asking yourself when it come to start writing. You just started your company, it’s just you, you have little to no time may be… So, what should you talk about? Your company? Your product? Your services? That’s probably not a good idea. You sure can talk about yourself, and may be that’s a specific strategy that makes sense to you and in that case I would talk about the process of your building your business. That can be an interesting subject, as long as you are totally transparent and document your journey in full transparency.
Other than that, your probably shouldn’t talk about yourself that much. First, you need to define your area of expertise. So obviously you need to not only be able to talk about a specific subject but master it.
Then, you will need to define who your audience is. You wouldn’t talk to a 18 years old like you would talk to a retired 65 years old for example. To define who your audience is, you need to know a few information: age, sex, location, interests, job, etc.
And finally, you need to find a list of subjects that you can write about that would be interesting for that specific audience.
Don’t forget to use all the channels you have available, whether it’s written content, or video content, audio content, or even images. Be careful though, find your strength. Not everybody is good at producing video content or audio content for example. If you don’t have that sweet radio voice or if you are not comfortable in front of a camera, stick to written content. Be realistic with your expectations and know yourself.
How often should you write
The key is quality AND consistency. Try to make a schedule for yourself. If you would like to create a piece of content at least once a week and you know that you might not have a lot of time to write, start writing multiple subjects to be a few weeks ahead, then start deploying your content while you keep writing to keep your weekly post. Don’t be too hard on yourself. It might seems easy to find one subject per week in the beginning but it means 52 posts per year! Can you keep talking about that subject and stay interesting and never repeat yourself? Pick your subject wisely and make sure you don’t have long periods of nothing. Good luck.
What’s next?
What to do with all that content once it’s written? Make sure you promote your content once it’s posted. That’s where your social media network will be helpful. You can share your content to your Facebook page, tweet about it, etc.
If you need help with your content marketing or if you have more questions about it, contact us.
