Whether you’ve just started out with content marketing or have been producing content online for some time, your strategy should be as economical and effective as possible. Your business needs to attract the attention of people searching online for products and services, and the stakes are high.
According to recent figures, more than 4 million blog posts are published daily, and online businesses alone are worth an estimated $2.84 trillion. It doesn’t matter if you’re an e-commerce business or a brick-and-mortar store; people still need to be able to find and learn about you as easily as possible.
Just having a website generally isn’t enough to bring in droves of new clients or keep the ones you have engaged. Your content strategy refers to any media that you own that promotes your business.
While you could post some content and just hope for the best, it makes sense to employ a few tried and true tactics that will boost your engagement. Here are several ways to successfully market your website’s content and improve your business results.
1. Create Amazing Content
Your first priority should be to create great content. The saying “Content is King” has been floating around for several years, and it still rings true. If people aren’t immediately pulled in and engaged by what you have to say, you’ll be fighting a losing battle.
It might be tempting to piggyback on trending news stories, but these can quickly fade. Consumers have also grown wise to clickbait headlines that don’t deliver what they promise. Instead, post evergreen stories that will remain relevant for longer periods and tell readers everything that your headline and summary guarantees.
Another way to deliver amazing content is to mix it up. No one likes to see a wall of words. Keep your paragraphs short, and include plenty of images. Also, post videos and invest some time in creating interesting and engaging infographics.
2. Focus on SEO
Even the best content needs a bit of help to get “found” by the search engines and then ultimately your target audience. Since there are roughly 74,000 Google searches per second, the potential is astounding.
Even if you’re not a website developer or SEO expert, you can boost the “findability” of your content with some specific tools. If you’re using WordPress, there are plugins such as Yoast SEO and All-in-one SEO that can help you with the optimization process.
However, you should make sure to get a reliable web hosting such as WebHostPro that will provide you with the fundamentals of a good SEO for your website – uptime, speed, and security.
3. Use Email Marketing
Since the competition is stiff for organic traffic, you can expand your efforts and reach more potential clients with an effective email marketing campaign. Email marketing is a method to not only convert the undecided, but to also bring back past customers for repeat business.
Provide website, social media, and even store visitors with an incentive to hand over their email addresses so that you can reach them later. There are plenty of email marketing tools available, such as Mail Chimp, but you’ll also want to set up an email hosting account.
Having a professional email address, such as joe@yoursite.com, looks much more professional than joe@hotmail.com. Setting this up is simpler than it sounds. You just buy your domain name, which you might already own, choose a hosting account, and then add the email addresses you want within the cPanel.
4. Leverage Social Media
Once you have some awesome content, you’ll want to promote it. One of your first stops should be social media. Which platforms you choose will depend on the demographics of your target audience.
For example, more B2B customers might be on LinkedIn or Twitter, while others you’ll want to target on Facebook, Instagram, and even Snapchat. When you post highly engaging content, others can “like” and even “share” it, which can broaden your reach.
Social media marketing involves much more than dropping links and disappearing. This is something you’ll want to learn how to do correctly to expand your brand’s awareness.
You can create quality social media posts that grab the user’s attention. This will encourage sharing and stand a chance to get the conversation started. You can make use of the ready-made templates when creating social media posts if you are not good at design.
5. Employ News Listing Sites
If your content is newsworthy, you may be able to get it listed on some new aggregating sites. This will get more eyes on your content and bring more visitors to your site.
The largest of these is Google News, and you’ll want to pay close attention to their terms of use. Depending on the topic category, some of these sites get a great deal of traffic each day.
6. Explore Advertising Options
Your last resort should be paid advertising, but this is still an option. If you want quick traffic, you’ll need to create a budget and watch your numbers closely. If you are willing to pay X amount for Y clicks to your website, make sure that these are converting to customers and that this strategy makes good business sense.
Google Ads and Facebook Ads are the 2 popular options for advertising. Do take note that you need different approaches to market your content on both platforms. Otherwise, you can also engage with influencers in a specific niche to market your content.
Conclusions
While this isn’t an exhaustive list of content marketing strategies, these are several tips that will help increase views among current and potential customers. As you develop and boost your brand recognition with these simple tactics, this will also improve your bottom-line results.