The Content Marketing made simple
SOMMAIRE
What is Content Marketing ?
What will you learn in this article about content marketing:
We will see how to use the content published on our website to have more traffic, more conversions and especially more sales, I recommend this marketing strategy, because once set up, you will immediately notice the difference and see your online business start to bear fruit and reap profits, and especially this strategy of achieving your online business goals, if you are going to stick, will last in time and few factors could put it at a head in the future.
Why Do Content Marketing?
You wouldn’t want to rely on chance for the success of your online business! , you’ll probably need a good marketing strategy, and without it you didn’t even realize if your content strategy works or not, or if your content makes you money or you still have to work it !!! So only
a good strategy, well in place based on content could let you know the well-being and good health of your online business. We
‘ll see then, how are you going to do, to create a good content marketing strategy, in a practical way to make the latter the spearhead of your online business.
Different types of Content Marketing:
1-Doing Content marketing through a blog:
- Thanks to the blog, you will be able to pass thousands of readers to your website (business) and sell your products behind
- Thanks to the blog, you will be able to improve the referencing of your website and bring back more customers directly from search engines including Google
- Thanks to the blog, you will be able to retain your customers and bring them back to your site or online shop, because they will find in the latter a kind of service after sale and advice and accompaniment that they will not find with other competitors if you apply yourself to it
2- Email Marketing:
3-Make Content Marketing Through Videos and Podcasts
Steps to create a content marketing strategy that works:
You absolutely have to learn to proceed in stages when you create a sales strategy, that’s why I had to prepare 11 for you, follow them one by one and in the end, you’re going to have clear ideas about your online business, either it’s about from a blog, website, E Commerce shop or any business that needs content, and you’ll really visualize how your content really makes you money, let’s go without too much wait at the first step:
1-Define your goals when you get into content marketing
You’ll never know where to go if you don’t even know where you’re
going !!! Sit down, take a few minutes and ask yourself t
his question: I really want what, when I get behind my keyboard and access my site !!! many of you will answer, but we want Fric!! Yes I know!! everyone wants Fric!! but believe me, few of us really want it, because when we really want our online business to make us money, we really put our butts down and work !!! So, if you’re j
ust pretending to be working! , or you do things that half, believe me you are wasting your time, because next to it there are people who really work, look at your competitors or those you take as an example !!! Oh yes they work and they especially have something that you thought not interesting you: these are Goals
While I’m not long on it for nothing !!! Take a pen and put your marketing goals in writing, yes write your goals and paste me this paper in front of you in your office, to have it
all the time in front! So for a good content marketing plan, first define your missions and then make sure when creating your content really take i
t into account and make sure: What you focus on is what’s really essential to be part of your content and what’s not, to rule out disruptive keywords that mislead Google when categorizing your content
Define your target audience precisely and think about the content you could really put online to reach them.
Ask yourself clearly is what your audience really needs what you offer them as content, from a qualitative point of view of course and added value, do you offer content that will only find on your site, at least in part!
Then move on to the objectives you want to achieve and why not, must achieve, in such or such period, they may well be :
Improve your incomes, and what your company earns or simply start to earn money with your website and this through your content marketing strategy, especially define a figure to be achieved within a specific time.
Bring more readers to your website, thanks to your content marketing strategy.
Achieve more conversions and thus more sales which will help you improve your income and guarantee you a monthly salary!!!
Make your content an ambassador for your brand, and thus direct your content marketing effort to what it will impose you as an authority in your field and then allow you to achieve your other goals.
Make good content marketing in order to reduce the bill you pay in advertising for your online business…etc.
Once you’ve mapped out your mission to your audience and the clear goals you want to achieve, we can then move on to the second step of creating a solid content marketing strategy:
2- Make your goals traceable and measurable:
Tracking content marketing objectives on google analytics
Make sure you regularly monitor the progress of your work, and the impact of your efforts in your content marketing strategy.
Then define your own KPIs for your content strategy. To be clearer, you need to know where you are at all times and be aware when one of your objectives is reached, in order to increase the requirement.
You could easily install trackers with google analytics, and define your objectives, this tool is very sufficient to concretize your content marketing strategy, analytics insights will inform you continuously on for example your numbers of visitors, your conversion rates and a lot of other data that you will have previously requested on google analytics.
Here are some performance indicators that you could integrate into the monitoring of your content marketing strategy
Get a number of visits on your site well defined, and this during such or such period for example (to reach thanks to your strategy of contents, 1000 visits per day, in 6 months).
Get a certain number of comments on your articles, the same for the sharing and the ratings you are given, to finally achieve your goal of becoming an authority in your field or niche and then be solicited by your competitors for partnerships to achieve your other goals more quickly.
Reaching a certain income towards the end of the month, quarter or year (500 euros the first month and 6000 euros the first semester and why not 24000 euros the first year)
Reach a very precise number of subscribers to your email lists for an eventual email marketing to finally achieve the president’s goal which is to generate a monthly income !
You’re probably starting to preview how mapping out your goals and proceeding in steps can really help you succeed with your content marketing strategy and grow and develop your online business.
You can of course at this stage you can help a little, by launching an advertising campaign to make discover your content to other readers and make them come back to your site for free later because you will have already prepared a valuable content, on which they will not hesitate to come back to better benefit from it, but pay attention to your expenses and integrate them in your calculations and take them into consideration when you analyze the results of your performance indicators, we talk here about return on investment !!!
But for this second step to succeed, and that your indicators will all be green when you look at your results, you must take into account the third step which is none other than:
3-The good knowledge of your readers and your audience:
Never just feel like you know your audience and your readers and just say, I think it’s these users who are going to come to my site and love my content. NO !!!
You must absolutely do a great work of reflection and analysis, in order to know exactly what kind of reader, is going to address your content, to create it for them.
Improve the quality of your articles
To know your audience, you should not just predict !!! it’s those who are not going to achieve their goals that do that !!! but you, my dear reader, you want to succeed,,, don’t you !!! you remember !!! you really want money !!! so don’t just predict, meet your readers and find out what they expect from you to give your marketing strategy a great chance to succeed.
What could be better than collecting data to better understand what kind of content your audience really needs?!!
A-Collect data about your readers :
It’s not a spy game but you’re going to do this for the good of your readers !!!
Moreover Google Analytics is ideal for this job, so you need to know everything about the users who come to your site, your Facebook group, your followers on Twitter and your followers on LinkedIn.
- Gender
- Level of education
- Age
- Income
- Readers via mobile or desktop PCs
- The bounce rate and how long they stay on the site
- Do they stay longer where you put videos or not.
- Do they follow your internal links
- Did they comment? Tweet? Give a note.
- Did they register through any source
- What they downloaded!!!!
- They come back in how many days on your site
- Their main focus on your site and which pages interest them the most?
Do the same with Facebook insights and Twitter data, do not hesitate to launch surveys on Tweeter and facebook to collect as much data on your readers and followers, ask them directly what you could create as content so that it is really useful to them, then make sure to meet their needs starting with those of the majority, and especially, provide them with content, complete, useful and that will satisfy the majority of their requests, while reserving a few to offer them a supplement, which they will access only after registration or payment! !! but don’t do that all the time !!
B-Collect and analyze the reactions of your readers and followers
It is absolutely necessary to push your readers and followers on social networks to react to your articles, sincerely, I’m not there yet, as you may have already noticed, so I would not be pretentious, I just want to share with you what I have learned and understood on the subject, and what I will surely apply on my own sites when I will start and implement my strategy.
- So, you absolutely must, you must push your readers to express themselves:
- Their impressions of the content you offer them
- What they really need urgently and you haven’t put them online yet…
- How you can really help them and guide them step by step to solve their problems and overcome their most pressing difficulties.
Above all, this strategy will allow you to know the urgent needs of your readers and what is a priority for them, so that you can take care of them with good, complete and satisfactory content.
C-Create a Customer Avatars :
You will then by analyzing the data and habits collected on your readers and prospects, create a certain customer file that is none other than the personality of your subscribers and readers and the factors that can influence them and encourage them to respond positively to your calls to action and offers of products or services.
You can then partition your lists of subscribers according to these customer avatars in order to better target them with much needed content and offers that will be created for them, which will ensure the success of your content marketing strategy.
4- Analyze your positions in relation to your competitors and evaluate your content and make it competitive :
- Never put your head in the sand when it comes to self-criticism, sift through your content, visit your competitors’ sites, the best ranked of course and those who do content marketing, evaluate your content in relation to what they put online !
- Make an audit of your content, its quality, its optimization, is what it is commented and shared, is what your content is really useful !
- Identify all your weaknesses concerning the creation of good content, make sure to fill them and do not hesitate to delegate the work that you do not yet master to a specialist, while moderating your expenses and trying to improve yourself.
This method is really effective to succeed in creating a good content marketing method that will really work and generate profit for you.
How to do an audit of your content:
Any good content marketing strategy has to be strictly and regularly monitored, so your content has to be put to the test, every time you see a drop in traffic, conversions, sales, registrations, feedback I mean sharing and comments, …etc.
When you start in content marketing, you won’t need a marketing agency to do your audit, you can easily do it yourself, there is software and even in Freemium mode, which will allow you to analyze your site and your content, you will only have to analyze the data about your site that will be provided to you.
Semruch , Alyse , Seolyser , Majestic , Ubersuggest will be more than enough for you to make a preliminary audit of your site and content, you will only have to submit your url to one of these analysis tools, and you will have a preliminary report and sometimes quite detailed on the state of your content and even the improvements to be made to make it more efficient and competitive.
In principle, here is what you will seek to analyze and monitor during a website audit:
- The formatting of your content , tags<title> , and meta description
Internal and external links, as well as your semantic cocoon if you have implemented one. - Linkage and Backlinks and the authority of the sites where your backlinks and anchors come from and the lexical fields that surround them.
- The length of your article and your content, you will also have to analyze the highest ranked content on this point to know where you stand.
- The responsiveness and interaction of your audience to your content, the number of comments, shares and ratings given to it.
- The keywords and phrases for which your content appears in google results (very important)
You will have other data such as broken links, reload speed, alt description and size of images, size of your HTML, … etc. and you should take into account all this information in order to finally rectify the situation and put your content back on the race for the first place on the SERPs and hope to implement an effective content marketing strategy that will generate a lot of sales and profits.
You will also and especially know what are the elements of your content, which pull it down and divert it from your theme and marketing strategy, and remove it to solve the problem, it often happens that we go out for keywords that we have not paid attention to and this is a great risk for your business because the readers who will visit your site based on these keywords will really harm your online business.
By using Ahrefs to detect gaps in your content, you will for example detect
Target keywords and expressions related and common to your theme (niche) that you should have included but omitted.
Issues and needs of your audience that you have not yet addressed in your content
The content that only needs a small improvement to be well classified on google, that you must improve in order to make them the gateway to your site and thus, they will be the ones that will attract visitors to your sales pages and all the other content that is not yet missing and make your audience discover them via internal links well designed and eye-catching to increase efficiency, to finally achieve the objectives of your content marketing strategy.
5-Determine where your readers are
For your content marketing efforts to be rewarded, you absolutely must get what you publish to your readers, and what better way to do that than to find them and know where they are hiding.
Each type of audience has its own preferences when surfing the net, and if for example your theme is DIY, better focus your efforts on promoting and finding traffic on youtube, and create extra content and video tutorials and post them on this network to attract the maximum number of visitors to your content.
You can also use Google analytics and Buzzsumo to analyze your content, and the interactivity of the social networks with it, depending on for example, the entry pages to your site and from which social networks, what topic interests readers coming from each of the social media and what length of content suits them best, …etc.
All this data will allow you to better direct your content marketing strategy and to prospect for customers where they are really located, while proposing and ensuring what they are looking for of course.
You will also ensure more feedback and engagement from your readers, because they will be really interested in what you publish as content and not just what you offer them for free.
6-Discover the kind of content your readers expect from you:
An excellent content marketing strategy is often based on a very specific type of content for each type of reader and target audience.
For example, when you do DIY, your website or online store will need a blog for example, to provide a very special type of content that should be for example articles formatted according to steps, to explain to your readers how to do this or that DIY yourself.
Your readers will also probably like it when you explain how to do it in a video.
So for a successful marketing strategy, there’s nothing better than satisfying your readers with the type of content they really want from you.
I also recommend Video Marketing, it works great, look at the benefits that youtubeurs generate, think as I said, about creating videos and include them in your content marketing strategy.
Same for graphics and illustrations of all kinds, this type of visual and even audio content (podcasts) enhance well the engagement of your readers and is a great source of sharing and lead generation and conversions, and that says it all about a lot of sales and effective content marketing.
7-Do you have the necessary planning and resources
- Anarchy and business never mix, you really need to get your house in order to avoid ruining your marketing strategy.
- That’s why when you decide to rely on your content to sell and make money, you’ll have to get organized and above all you’ll have to equip yourself with the necessary resources (human and logistical) to carry out your content marketing strategy successfully.
- You are going to analyze what your competitors do best and that ensures them a good success, you may adapt it to your style and market and especially detect your weak points and try to fill them.
- You will have to organize yourself for this, delegate the parts or types of content that you could not do yourself in a professional way to specialists, and why not recruit them in the long term or make them partners.
- You will need for example a good creator of videos, computer graphics or podcasts, you will find many professionals on Fiverr, at really competitive prices.
- Also equip yourself with the necessary hardware and software to carry out your content creation if you are going to do this yourself, because the impression your readers and followers will have of you and your work is very important and it’s usually what will make them decide to take action or not when it comes to your sales offers for example.
- Be also punctual and transmit a certain regularity in the publication and a homogeneity in the offers and services, this could well be similar to the creation of your own brand.
- Your content and offers, your products and your prices should not be found anywhere else similar, be unique, create rarity, novelty and make your readers and prospects accustomed to exceptional content and offers each time you will solicit them.
- Create for you a working calendar that will correspond to the habits of your readers, they must know when you publish, what type of content and what kind of offers they will find from you and above all a support service and quick answers to their requests and demands, comments, messages and complaints.
- Make also an analysis on the best time to publish content or launch an offer, keep up to date with your readers’ habits, their connection times and peak hours on your site.
8-Stay up to date and competitive :
Your readers and prospects are not necessarily your friends, they always reserve the right to go elsewhere, especially if they are used to finding better content, better answers to their questions, better prices or fresh offers and new products and services.
Don’t be left behind when your content marketing strategy is underway, go back to answer the public often to find out about new requests from your audience, they might not be included in the comments you get.
Be also present on social networks, to be aware of the news that are circulating and that make the ,Buzz on social networks, you may be able to catch up if you have failed to provide content that your competitors have and that your audience still expects from you
Always bring back the newest methods to your readers, refresh your articles, offers, coupons and bargains that you may find for your customers.
Thus, you will ensure an up-to-date content and competitive offers that will make you a specialist in your niche and your business, the one where you will often find good advice and novelties with the best prices on the market.
9 Aim for excellence when creating content :
Now that you’ve gathered all the data you’ll need, developed a publishing strategy and schedule, studied your audience, the needs of your readers and their habits and the type of content that will best convey your help and offers to them, it’s time to move on to creating your content or enhancing it and upgrading it if you already have one ready.
If you want to learn or refresh your memory concerning the creation of good content to support your content marketing strategy, you will find everything you need in an article I put online especially for that, but for the needs of this article I will rather talk about the psychology to adopt when you want to create valuable content that will not be a waste of time.
Yes, I’m telling you this because if your content isn’t up to scratch, you’re really wasting your time.
You can’t count on content that is 70% good? why am I telling you this? because in web marketing we have a saying:
When you want to hide a dead body, bury it on the second page of Google!!!
You see !!! so if at least one or two articles or pages of your website don’t appear in the first page of Google results for at least one average keyword in your theme; you are working for nothing !!!
The problem is that, in general, you only need to make a little more effort to make this happen !!!
That’s why I ask you to really take your time when you create content, publish only one article each month, but put online an article that you will be proud of !!!
Your content must be complete, a terminus content, so when we read you, we would not need to look elsewhere.
Raise your level, be demanding of yourself and believe me, your readers will realize it and will reward your efforts to help them by answering your calls to action.
So never forget, a good content marketing strategist, puts the quality of its content above all, be patient, an online business is not created in one day !
10- Promote your content:
Don’t wait until Google discovers your content and finally puts it on its first page !!
That’s not how it works, you have to spend more time promoting and distributing your content than it takes to create it.
Excellent content without promotion will never serve your business objectives and will not play its role in your marketing strategy, so you must at all costs, inform your readers that you have just created excellent content that will surely help them and that will bring them a plus and why not change their lives.
To do this, social networks are a good solution to get your sales machine and content marketing up and running.
Publish a very attractive and promising summary of your freshly uploaded content; on Facebook, Linkedin, Tweet about it, create a promotional video and put it on your youtube channel, vimeo, make podcasts on the subject of your content and put it online,…etc.
You could also launch an email marketing campaign to inform your prospects of your new content, making sure to include your offers in it.
So you need to allow a lot of time for the promotion of your content in order to succeed in your content marketing strategy, this too will force google to put your content forward once your readers start talking about it, commenting on it and sharing it and once your content appears in the first page of google for a good keyword, your content marketing strategy will achieve all its goals and everything will be done automatically.
11- Evaluate your content marketing strategy:
If you remember well I talked to you above about the performance indicators and the objectives that you will have previously set to monitor and judge the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, the time has come to go for example on Google Analytics and monitor the evolution of your results over time and after each promotion campaign for example in order to judge which is the most effective.
Check your conversion rates and leads generated every day, analyze your data and detect weaknesses and possible gaps that may still exist in your content, remove or replace elements of content that you find to be causing you harm and add other elements as and when your readers ask for them or the subject of your content requires it.
Keep your content fresh and periodically relaunch new promotional campaigns to reach new readers, you could even program automatic tweets for example on Twitter to allow your readers to come back regularly to your content, maybe they will finally convert or make a purchase they couldn’t make before or discover a new offer you’ve just added.
Conclusion:
As you’ve probably just seen, a good content marketing strategy may take a lot of time and effort, but you can do as I did and proceed in stages:
Build your business , create your content, try to improve it over time and when you finally see that your efforts are starting to pay off, put it all together and put the pieces together to make your strategy clear and give it the final push so that it finally achieves all your goals and you finally start to make money behind it all !
Well I wouldn’t say no to a suggestion, I’m here to learn from you too, leave me a comment and I’d be very happy to follow up on it.
Samy
