Brands that publish only promotional information are not trusted by consumers. The use of content marketing helps to win the trust of customers and attract new clients.
For competent realization of this direction of Internet marketing, which consists in spreading useful and interesting information for consumers, which promotes business and helps to bring new goods and services to the market, and also to create the company’s image or to support the status of an expert, it is necessary to follow a number of rules. We will talk about them in this material.
1. Create unique content
Copying and remaking content taken from competitors’ sites is fraught with getting your resource filtered by search engines and losing a significant portion of your audience.
If you create content on the same topic as your competitors, use a different format. For example, instead of just text, draw an infographic or record a video. Always try to provide information that is more useful and valuable to the consumer than other resources, and present it in an easy-to-understand way.
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2. Remember about the convenience of content
Users don’t read text that isn’t easy to read. Make the content aesthetically pleasing, attractive in terms of design. It’s best if all your publications are designed in the same style.
Do not go overboard with the decoration of the text, the text should be easy to read. To achieve this, you must:
- Break the text into paragraphs with a small number of sentences;
- Use subheadings, highlighting important passages and other formatting elements;
- Include illustrations and, if possible, media content.
Also, make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors.
3. Determine Your Target Audience
To understand what you should write about, you need to define your target audience (TA) – understand who you’re doing it for, who you’re going to interact with.
Make avatars for each type of major client. This will help determine the types of materials that will resonate with them. If you know your target audience, it will be much easier for you to come up with topics for your publications.
4. Take care of content relevance
Content should match the user’s request, give people what they expect to get. The information should help the visitor to solve their problems, be interesting to them.
Create publications that are relevant to the professional field and the topic of your site. And don’t forget to collect feedback from readers, it can be a great source of ideas for content.
5. Follow a content plan
Content marketing requires developing a preliminary content creation plan.
Even before you start, form a content plan with topics one to two months in advance. Decide on content formats, frequency of new content, and distribution channels.
6. Diversify your content formats
Content marketing is by no means limited to text alone. To reach as large a segment of the audience as possible and, therefore, sell more products and services, use different formats. It can be articles and posts, news, photos, infographics, presentations, eBooks, videos, mind-maps, checklists and more.
7. Keep track of statistics
Use analytics tools to constantly monitor your audience’s activity and engagement. This information will help you create an effective content plan. For example, if you’ve published a post that resonated with your audience, follow it up with a full article or video.
8. Give feedback
Responses to your publications can be either positive or negative. You need to respond in both cases.
Customers will be pleased if you thank those who left positive feedback. However, it is not advisable to delete negative feedback either. Handle the negative feedback, help the user to solve the problem he/she addressed you with. This way, you will attract more readers and potential customers.
Respond to customer questions by posting articles, videos, and other types of content on the topic.
9. Add keywords.
Before writing articles, shape their structure to understand what information to include in the text, conduct a keyword analysis.
Be sure to add search terms relevant to the topic of your article in the title, main text, and other elements of the web page. This will attract organic traffic from search engines.
However, do not abuse keywords, as the text oversaturated with keyword phrases becomes unreadable. The positions of such pages are lowered, and in the case of strong overspamming with keywords, the site may even fall under search engine filters.
10. Make a compelling headline
Many readers won’t even open an article that’s useful to them if it has a boring headline.
To make the headline catchy and eye-catching, use numbers in it. Not bad look in the headline question words: how, why, why, what, when, etc. It is good if the headline describes the action, creates intrigue.
It is important not to give false information in the title of the article. Such a reader will not forgive and immediately close the page, and a large number of bounces will inevitably lower its position in search results.
11. Use a call to action
Try to add to each article posted on your site, a call to further action, otherwise, the user will finish the text, close the tab and go further wander on the Internet.
If you want the visitor to be able to continue interacting with you, offer them to sign up for an email newsletter, go to the store, join a social media group, read other articles on the site related to this topic, etc.
Conclusion
By following the content marketing rules listed in this article, you will be able to create content that is useful to consumers, build your company’s credibility and increase your credibility, resulting in interested users becoming buyers of your products or services.
