Building a website is really just the starting point in a digital marketing strategy, your next steps is to find the best marketing channels to help direct potential customers to your site. There are a number of options available to you, such as social media, paid ads or content marketing and SEO.

Content marketing is a really popular method as it gives you an opportunity to provide value to your customers, and at the same time demonstrate your expertise. If you write high quality content that is optimised for search engines this will also be an excellent source of traffic for your site.

Kick start your content marketing strategy

Content marketing is a more involved that simply writing regular blog posts. To have any real success you should keep in mind the following:

  • Understand your audience – The key starting point with your content marketing strategy is to look at it thought the eyes of your ideal customer. What type of content or information could you provide that would be genuinely interesting or useful to them?
  • Keyword research – It is not enough to simply write great content, you also need to consider how much competition there will be to rank in the search engines for your desired keywords. Doing sufficient keyword research will help you to find terms with high search volume, but that have less competition for attention.
  • Content calendar – Content marketing can take a little while before you start to see results, but it is vital that you stick to a regular consistent schedule. Writing a content calendar in advance will give you a clear picture of which topics you need to post and when you want to have them written by.
  • Analytics – Data is a key part of digital marketing. Getting properly set up with tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console will help you to understand how customers are interacting with your content and how it is performing in the search engines. For instance, which of your posts do customers spend longest reading and which posts get the most hits? This information will help you improve your content in the future.

Setting content marketing up for success

Many business owners have heard of the benefits that content marketing can bring, but are unable to put in the consistent effort required to see any significant results. There is often a perception that content marketing is about writing a short blog post once in a while, with little consideration given to the factors outlined above.

A successful content marketing strategy requires patience and persistence, and a half-hearted attempt at this can actually be worse than no attempt at all. Landing on a site where the last post was added six months or a year ago won’t fill your customers with the impression that your business is up to date and embracing fresh ideas.

It is for this reason that many companies are turning to managed services to run their content marketing, outsourcing content production and publication to experts who can give it the attention it deserves.

If you’d like more information on how to get started with content marketing for your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch.