* Versión en Español “Pasos para definir una estrategia de Content Marketing”
Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases (Wikipedia). Appropriate content marketing strategy is essential to your marketing attempts for many reasons. You must be able to create the content that grabs the attention and generates leads, further converting them into customers. When you are defining a content marketing strategy, you are basically designing a strategy to create quality content that achieves these goals.
First Step: Know your audience
The first thing you must remember is that no matter what strategies, techniques, tools, or resources you use, there is one focus throughout the process: your audience. No matter what you do, it should be aimed at getting to your audience. You should be visible to your audience through search engines and you should have content that grabs their attention. Without rich content, your marketing really has nothing. It is like leaving something void of personality and it will never help you sell. It will hinder your progress and you will be left with an empty marketing strategy. Rich content contains the elements that capture your visibility and audience and helps you to convert leads into customers that will provide you with business long term. Creating rich content involves realizing who is your audience, as well; understands what is appealing to them and what they are able to view comprehensively.
Second Step: Keyword Research
Creating rich content contains the keywords you began to implement at the beginning of your site creation and SEO implementation. We recommend you to read “SEO Best Practices for Small Businesses”, in case you haven’t done it. These keywords should be relevant to the site as it wouldn’t make much sense to keyword stuff your pages only to have an ignored site and a site that is hard to understand. You must also ensure that you contain information that is useful to your readers. If they are looking for information, they likely have a concern or issue and are seeking a solution, so provide it. They aren’t likely to follow you if you are giving them useless information.
Third Step: Help your audience – Don’t try to sell to them!
If you use blogs (We invite you to read “Blog Marketing”) or forums to market your business, it is a good idea to leave brief and succinct information that solves an issue in your niche. This may be an answer to common problems or just helpful information for using products you may sell. When your readers realize that you are trying to help them more than sell to them, they will likely trust any suggestions you may have that you believe would benefit them well. If you are using articles to market your business, you want to contain educational and informational information that is best going to suit your readers’ needs in finding the information. Your key objective is to create content that is going to market your business and not deter readers from using your services.
Your information should contain quality for your readers and should be what they need to make the best decisions. You don’t want content that search engines aren’t indexing and you don’t want content that isn’t agreeable with your audience. If you aren’t providing valuable information within all your content, your audience will likely find another site to follow, providing another business with the leads you are striving for.
