Content Development and Marketing
Content Strategy for your Website
Content on your website has evolved a lot since the first days of your website. No longer can you stay competitive with a five page website. Competitors are moving fast and while speed is not my concern with content, substance is. It is exciting to hear about a new brand and delve into it. As a company you have customers that need to find you via surface information. As they become familiar, research shows the new economy is looking for an experience. A story is wanted of why they should choose you in the marketplace.
Users are getting use to share their products and services with peers and friends. The web has helped create this experience for customers and clients. Just looking back in the past five years you can see success from this trend. Fortunately for business’ it has also become quite easy to set up this ecosystem for your products and services.
Stats surrounding content marketing show how important this industry is for those seeking success. This form of marketing helps to increase visibility for companies, with businesses reporting that adding a blog increases site visitors by 55%. Companies that have blogs bring in 97% more inbound links than companies without blogs.
The creation of content that is relevant, compelling, entertaining and valuable. This is content that must be consistently provided to maintain or change the behavior of customers. Content marketing is an essential marketing activity that helps retain customers, acquire new ones and helps companies to build a strong brand.
It should encourage some kind of positive reaction from customers. If the content is not able to change or maintain customer behavior, it has no marketing value. Content marketing requires engaging content that in some way drives business.
This form of marketing doesn’t involve direct selling. Instead of focusing on a hard sell, it focuses on providing useful information to a target audience on a regular basis. The goal is to become established as an expert, drawing customers to buy from your company when they are ready to make a purchase.
A content marketing mistake to avoid is the creation of impersonal content. Content that is bland and impersonal will never provide the results you seek. Remember, when you create content, you’re creating content for people. Your goal is to create relationships with these individuals. Use creativity to develop content that reaches out to people, creating personal relationships instead of staying blandly impersonal. To get people to notice your content, you’ll have to engage them quickly. Focus on the subject of your content and try to be engaging with potential readers, ask questions, provide ways to interact with content and consider adding visual aspects to it as well.
4 Steps of Content Marketing
Researching and gathering information
Curating and Organizing
Writing
Recycle
From Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ
“Content marketing isn’t just about attracting customers. It’s about attracting and appealing to anyone who might influence a potential customers.
Don’t just create content for your current customers, or even just for your potential customers. Create content that appeals to these influencers and your content marketing efforts will be far more successful.”
We are done with brochure websites if you haven’t already you need to be focusing on your website as your place of business. The same way you would educate customers walking in your door. This should be the goal of your website to answer those questions to an even wider market of potential customers.
A Better Web,