SEO implies search engine optimization and it is everything to do with optimizing websites, online content, and social media content and enhance the visibility of businesses, boost website rankings in various search engine results pages. SEO is important when it comes to branding and reputation management.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is different from SEO. Content marketing is defined as marketing with the help of content. It is all about developing content in the form of blog posts, photos, videos, slideshows, info-graphics, webinars as well as other media pieces that capture’s the attention of the audience and helps to build a positive association with the client’s brand.
However, both SEO and content marketing are required for the sake of businesses. In some cases, SEO and content marketing may overlap. Some aspects of SEO are common in content marketing.
Therefore, to strengthen a content marketing campaign it is important to strengthen SEO first. SEO mentions the requirements and content writing fulfills the requirements. For the optimization process content is necessary and content marketing campaign provides the much-needed content for SEO process.
If you are new to content marketing and SEO then this blog can be useful as it highlights the various steps to develop a content marketing strategy for business to grow it. This blog acts as an ultimate guide to strengthen your content marketing campaigns.
Following are some of the important steps that help the content marketer to strengthen his or her content marketing campaign:-
Setting a Mission with Objectives
If you are into content marketing business then you need to set a mission, you should have goals and objectives. To keep your content marketing mission right on track you need to have the following:-
- A target audience
- The content to reach the target audience
- The benefits that the target audience can get from the contents
The content marketers provide businesses, target audience so that the businesses can achieve their business objectives. Following are some of the important business objectives that give rise to a strong content marketing campaign:-
- Improving Revenue: – Businesses want more revenue from their enterprises. The right content marketing strategy helps a business to fulfill their objectives of improving revenues.
- Make More Sales:-Businesses are focused on getting more sales in the form of high-quality leads. Lead generation helps a business in meeting revenue objectives.
- Getting More Business Traffic:-If a business maintains a website then the business objective is always to get quality business traffic online. Enhanced traffic implies greater possibilities for meeting business objectives.
- SEO Success:-If the search engine optimization process is successful then it leads to traffic generation.
- Reduction in Marketing Costs:-If the content becomes effective then it contributes to a reduction in marketing costs.
- Engagement with Social Media:-If businesses can use the various social media websites to full potential, then that process not just boost business traffic but also helps the business owners in gaining authority over their enterprises.
Establish Your KPIs
If you are a business and want to achieve your goals then you require making your goals specific and measurable. A good content marketing strategy has some key performance indicators or KPIs. The KPIs help a business to understand when it has achieved the business goals and objectives. The KPIs help a business to achieve sales, revenue, business traffic, SEO and other aspects of digital marketing.
Following are examples of KPIs:-
- Hitting a certain revenue-target in a month or three months or 6 months.
- Getting more sign-ups for your business website and that indicates that you are getting high-quality leads.
- Getting a certain number of email subscribers.
- Seeing an enhancement of website traffic.
- Improving the website ranking in various search engine results pages.
Knowing the Audience
In content marketing always remember that the audience plays a crucial role. A successful content marketing strategy creates the right content for the audience. It helps to attract the audience, generate business leads and convert leads to sales. In a content marketing strategy, one needs to do the following to make it effective:-
- Collect demographics on visitors, social media followers, email subscribers.
- Focus on web analytics and email subscriber analysis, social media analytics to fetch data of the audience. Such data can be related to gender, age, education as well as income of the audience.
To know the target audience getting customer feedback is important. Collection of feedback from the customers helps a business to understand the following:-
- How the customers feel about the content the business is producing as part of the content marketing strategy.
- The urgent requirements of the audience.
- How the business can address customer issues with the right content marketing strategy.
Getting customer feedback can help a business in the following ways:-
- Customer feedback helps a business to understand the priorities of readers and subscribers.
- It helps to decide on the best places to reach customers.
- Create profiles of the buyers.
If proper buyer profiles are created then it helps a business to understand the following points:-
- Appropriate buyer profiles help a business to understand the type of contents that the audience is interested in.
- Buyer profiles help a business to develop a content marketing strategy to understand how to attract the audience.
Access the Current Position of the Business
Many businesses already have content posted online on various websites, social media websites. A business needs to understand whether the content that is available online is helpful to the business, is it helping the business to meet its objectives.
For accessing the current position of a business as part of the content marketing strategy it is important to conduct a content audit. Content auditing involves the following:-
- Logging into the contents like blog posts, social media posts.
- Assessing the success or usefulness of the contents.
- Identify the gaps in content.
Logging in to all the contents of business requires SEO tools like “crawler”. A “URL crawler” does the following:-
- It lists the URLs.
- It analyzes page titles as well as page descriptions.
- It helps to find duplicate pages.
- It helps in creating sitemaps.
A content audit helps the web marketer or the content marketer to get the following:-
- It helps to get content descriptions and content titles.
- It helps to get the content length.
- It helps to get social shares.
- It helps to get backlinks.
Figuring out the Best Content-Channels
There are available several channels from where the audience can get content online. The social media channels like Facebook, Twitter provides the content marketer with the network to reach the target audience. For the content marketer, it is important to use the various social media channels to post content and reach the audience online.
Deciding on the Types of Contents
There are available different types of content that can be used in content marketing campaigns. Popular content types include blogs, articles, press releases, photos, videos, eBooks, webinars, worksheets, checklists.
Identification and Allocation of Resources
If you are aware of the type of content that you need to create then you can focus on the requirements so that you can create the content as part of the content marketing strategy. Common resources that are indispensable for the right content marketing strategy are as follows:-
- It is important to identify who is in charge of maintaining or producing the content.
- The CEO of a business or the chief marketing officer of the enterprise has the final say over the type of content that can be used as part of the content marketing strategy.
- It is also important to comprehend the various physical, human, or digital resources and tools that are required to create the content.
The content marketing manager of a business is solely responsible for delivering the content. Individuals create content based on their respective expertise. Among the tools and resources that are important in a content marketing campaign are the following:-
- Content creators recruited for in-house content creation.
- Video creators, graphic design experts
- Freelancers
- The appearance of the publishing workflow, appearance of the content schedule.
The content production process involves the following:
- Creating the outline for content, approving it online.
- Writing post.
- Creating the images for the content.
- Sending the posts to the editor.
- Making changes in the content as per requirement.
- Uploading the content like blogs, articles, PRs in relevant websites.
- Publish the uploaded contents.
Creating a Content Calendar
If your content marketing strategy is good then you need to know when to publish content on various platforms including social media platforms. Many content marketers use the content calendar to schedule content postings. Google calendar can be used as an effective tool for content scheduling. Before updating the content calendar, it is important to do research and search for topics that can be useful in enhancing the web traffic for the business.
Creating Content
Yet another step in making the content marketing campaign effective is to create good content. As a content marketer, you need to research, strategize before creating content. The content created should be such that it can attract the audience. As search engine optimization is an important process in a content marketing campaign therefore business needs to create content according to SEO guidelines.
The content creator needs to search for keywords associated with a particular topic. The content has to be written based on these keywords. While creating the content, the content writer has to be professional, the content should be free from plagiarism, it must be grammatically correct. While writing engaging content for the audience the keywords should be properly distributed in the entire content. The created content should be such that it can be optimized well so that you can increase its visibility in various search engine results pages.
Distributing and marketing
The next important part of a content marketing campaign is distributing as well as marketing the content. The content marketer cannot expect results unless this step is carefully handled and that is why this step is so very important for a content marketer.
You can distribute and market the content using the following channels:-
- Various social media websites
- Various websites
- Use emails for distributing as well as marketing contents, online.
The content marketers can use popular online tools to market and distribute the content. It is advised to the content marketers to research well, identify the various tools for content marketing and distribution, use then to market and distribute contents online.
Measuring Results
After the above-mentioned steps are carefully executed, the content marketer needs to measure the results and assess the success of the content marketing strategy. The content marketer has to use the KPIs to measure results, check whether you are hitting the targets.
Tools that are useful in tracking the success of a content marketing campaign are as follows:-
- Google Analytics
- It allows the content marketer to check whether the content is performing well or not.
- Tools like Buzzsumo allow the content marketer to view the performance of contents on various social media websites.
- Conversion analytics of tools like Optinmonster helps content marketers to assess the success of various content marketing campaigns.
Other tools for tracking, assessing and evaluating content success include Google Alerts, Mention. These tools allow content marketers to understand whether the content is being shared or mentioned. Tools like SEMRush help the content marketers to assess KPIs for the search rank of contents. There are available several digital marketing hacks and SEO tips that content marketers use to make a content marketing campaign successful.
This blog highlights the different steps that you can take to make a content marketing campaign successful. Therefore, the next time you are thinking of market your content online then you need to go through this blog as it gives you useful insights about the things that you need to do to enhance website traffic, generate leads, convert leads to sales. In this context, it is important to say that if the web marketer is skilled, if the person is experienced in his or her field then it pays off as far as running a successful content marketing campaign is concerned. If you like this blog then publish it in suitable websites, online.
About the Author
Kaylee Brown, Currently; she is associated with Greatassignmenthelp to provide online assignment help to all needy students.
