Content Marketing Made Simple
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on developing and delivering valuable relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined customer base- and, eventually, to drive profitable consumer action.
Content is marketed in various forms, like:
- Written Word: Blogging, E-books
- Audio: Podcasts
- Images: Infographics, posts, and stories on social media platforms
- Video: Social Media posts, documentaries of seminars and events and more.
The key objective is to provide relevant information in a format to drive a business goal.
Check out Quaff Media if you’re seeking content marketing and SEO services. We specialize in delivering high-quality organic traffic to developing digital enterprises. Our content marketing services could be ideal for your company.
Why invest in content marketing?
Digital distribution of content and e-commerce has made traditional media like newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV somewhat irrelevant when it comes to marketing.
“Content is king.”-Bill Gates . Today content marketing has become an essential tool of marketers because the consumer wants to be a part of an experience.
Examples of successful content marketing
The rise of content marketing has transformed many traditional businesses into media publishing brands:
- Red Bull: They host experiences and events around extreme sports like skydiving, motocross, etc. Red Bull makes full feature films covering formula 1 racing and a host of other content that elevate the brand image of its high-energy beverage.
Nike: They maintain their brand image through the athletes they sponsor.
Nike doesn’t sell shoes, it sells dreams and aspirations.
Importance of investing in content marketing
When executed properly, content builds brand equity, which means that your brand gets more valuable over time as you continue to develop excellent material. And the more you aid your audience, the more your brand will be known as a thought leader in your industry.
Some of the benefits of Content Marketing:
- Your customers will stick around for a longer time.
- Build better brand awareness and significantly increase your traffic on your website to drive up sales.
- Good for organic search and visibility
- Better customer experience for converting leads.
- Cultivate a loyal customer base
The traffic that content marketing generates is crucial and different from the traffic we get from traditional marketing. The people who consume your content consciously or subconsciously learn about your brand and you are not interfering by spam-like ads. This is critical for online sales and growing your brand image.
Creating a Content Strategy
Now that you’ve concluded that content marketing is a good idea, you must come up with a strategy. “Market like the year you are in.”- Gary Vaynerchuk.
In other words, you’re establishing relationships and resolving issues. Your content will succeed if you add value and provide your readers with the information they need to solve the difficulty they are facing. If you don’t, all your fancy writing, headlines, and techniques will be useless.
It’s even better, if you can be the one to both inform your audience that they have an issue they didn’t realize they had and supply them with a flawless solution, you’ll generate customers for life.
Even if there are other, better answers available, they won’t care – you’ll always be the experts in their minds because you were the first to help them. You can publish content in many different mediums to tap into growing audiences. Posting various sorts of content allows you to be on all the platforms your audience spends time online.
But, before you begin churning out content like a machine, we need to keep some things in mind:
- Setting goals: A successful content marketing plan must be supported by market research for your brand to implement a strategy that distinguishes it from competitors. This data also enables you to precisely identify critical content performance indicators and optimize your content strategy to support your overall marketing objectives.
- Determine your ideal buyer persona: Your target market is not a faceless individual in a crowd. Every marketing effort should, at the very least, aim to engage your target buyer. As a result, you should create a persona for this potential buyer. Put yourself in their shoes and create content that provides the appropriate amount and type of information about your product or service at each stage of the process.
“Great marketers have immense empathy for their audience. They can put themselves in their shoes, live their lives, feel what they feel, go where they go, and respond how they’d respond. That empathy comes out in content that resonates with your audience.” – Rand Fishkin
- Evaluate your existing content: Examining your content in terms of design, layout, format, nature of the material, authors, and content target. Analyze your existing content using data such as page views and shares. Based on these findings, you may make sound recommendations and make the appropriate changes moving forward.
- Measure, adjust strategy and repeat: You can set your frequency for performance reports, whether weekly or monthly, based on the targets you set early on.
Over time, you’ll fine-tune your messaging and achieve success with content marketing. Subscribe to Quaff Media today for the most up-to-date information on practical, modern content marketing – every week.
Building an audience
There can be audiences like
- Own Audience– Like people subscribed to your E-Mail
- Shared Audience– Like followers of your Twitter or Instagram Page.
- Other People’s Audience– Like a complementary brand that shares your post on their Instagram. Or a Journalist writes about your brand on his Twitter account.
“The only way to win at content marketing is for the reader to say, ‘This was written specifically for me.” – Jamie Turner
The secret to building a loyal audience is to provide them with useful relevant content about your niche. Companies should view content marketing as a relationship-building tool. Content marketing executed properly portrays your company as an influencer which drives awareness by good storytelling.
Good storytelling can be difficult to master, especially if you are a marketer or business owner with a sales background. Rather than marketing your services right away, concentrate on increasing brand awareness.
After building an audience, you can guide potential buyers through the conversion funnel. Then sales will be a natural process that doesn’t feel forced.
Rather than relying on a marketing team to create content, Qualcomm hires journalists, business executives, and tech bloggers. To the greatest extent feasible, the brand attempts to remove itself from the picture. They don’t discuss themselves. Instead, they tackle things that are important to their readers.
This brings me to an important point about your material. You must earn an audience rather than build one. Your content must be good enough to warrant someone’s time and attention. If you publish mediocre content, your readers will see it from a mile away and immediately lose interest. You may have heard that people nowadays have shorter attention spans than the average.
Our audiences no longer have time for substandard or even mediocre content. So, the first step is to develop attention-grabbing content of excellent quality. However, simply making and posting it is insufficient.
You need to drive traffic, and in today’s content marketing world, you don’t have time to wait for it. You must promote your material. Look at where your target audience spends their time online and begin putting your content there. (Remember all your research on your ideal customer)
Paid advertising is another possibility. The advantage here is that you may directly place your material in front of a highly focused audience. The final method for increasing traffic is to borrow someone else’s audience, which means asking people who already have an audience to share your content with them. Perhaps you publish a guest blog piece on their site, or they tweet something about your writing on social media. In any case, using your network is an amazing (and typically free) approach to get your information widely distributed. It may be all that some people require.
Let’s go over the different types of content marketing now that we’ve discussed the benefits of content marketing, how to design a strategy, and how to build an audience.
Written Word
The written word is the most widely used form of content marketing. The amount of written content in the world is essentially infinite, but that doesn’t imply you should disregard it in favor of other, more current, sophisticated types of content. Writing is more important than ever before, therefore let’s look at how it works as content marketing.
Blogging
“These days, people want to learn before they buy, be educated instead of pitched.” – Brian Clark
Blogging is a tried-and-true method of leveraging writing as a content marketing platform. In a word, blogging is when you, as a thought leader or subject matter expert, regularly write about relevant topics to your audience. Blogs can take many different shapes and forms, and no two are alike.
When most people hear the word “blogging,” they imagine a misunderstood hipster sharing their ideas and feelings with the world from their bedroom. These do exist, but they aren’t the focus of this article. We’re interested in using a blog to gain an audience, establish relationships, market, and grow your content.
A blog should be hosted on your website, either as a subdomain or as a separate section. A blog is relatively simple to set up from a technological sense. Most website platforms include a blog option that you can easily enable. You have total ownership of the creative process involved in a blog. You are independent of third-party platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
Write blog posts about how to utilize your products and display them in context to provide prospects and customers with the product knowledge they require. Then, to boost the sales process, including links to your unique product pages.
Incorporate your entire brand into each blog post and piece of content. Make it simple for readers to read your information that captivates them. Divide your content into bite-sized information bits, use a strong font to guide skimming readers to rapidly get the message, and utilize photos to draw attention.
You’ll need both human and financial resources to make your blog the center of your content marketing strategy. Quality content that attracts and converts buyers does not happen by chance. These resources could be either internal or external.
You should think about several resources. You should consider resources for content creation to develop the information; creative, such as design, photography, and formatting; editorial to ensure that the content conveys the appropriate ideas, as well as editing to ensure the grammar is correct; marketing to get your content distributed; and technology to facilitate uploading and other technical issues.
Furthermore, organizations that blog receive 97 percent more inbound links. More inbound links imply higher online visibility, which means that all your subsequent content will have a better chance of ranking in search results.
Blogging demonstrates your WHY.
Every company has a “why” for being in business. Why do you provide the product or service you do? What do you hope to introduce to the market? What is the point of caring? These ideals should be part of your brand and incorporated into your website, but your blog allows you to take it a step further. Blogging might help you demonstrate your enthusiasm for the problem you are attempting to tackle.
This is best accomplished with:
- Customer or employee thought leadership
- Interviews with customers or spotlights
- Thought leadership by the CEO
- Manifestos or postings with a more revolutionary/call-to-arms tone
Your blog can function similarly to a content hub. You can use it to share various forms of material you’re producing, such as a podcast.
SEO
I’m not referring to manipulate the system here. That used to work, but as search engines have evolved, those kinds of “black hat” approaches have all but vanished. Working with the search engine now works much better, but to do so, you must first understand how search engines work and what their motivations are.
A search engine’s purpose is to give you the most relevant information to whatever sentence, question, or query you enter. The more successful they are at this, the more likely you are to utilize their platform, which means they will be able to display you more advertising. That is how they earn a profit.
SEO is the technical process of boosting the quality of traffic to your website and getting as many users as possible. Material marketing, on the other hand, focuses on employing useful and relevant content to promote profitable consumer or client activity.
Because every website requires words, articles, substance, keywords, and so on, SEO is centered on content marketing. Both must work in tandem to be successful. A search engine robot will “crawl” your website regularly, going over every page, image, word, and link to determine where you belong in the online world. Search engines categorize you and save your information by analyzing the material on your website.
That is why, when you search on Google, you frequently see millions of results. They are displaying every webpage that mentions the thing you entered in. No one goes through them all. Most people do not even get past the first page, which raises the question, “How do you get on the first page?
By ensuring that Google understands exactly what your blog is about. Finally, your goal is to be as valuable and relevant to one specific topic as possible. As people find and interact with your content, you’ll build a reputation with search engines for being relevant, and you’ll be rewarded with a higher ranking, which leads to more traffic, which leads to a better reputation, which leads to a higher ranking, and so on.
SEO is more than simply blogs, articles, keywords, and link backs; it is also about optimizing robots.txt, improving metadata, and applying tags correctly.
Technical optimization makes a website appealing to search engines and guarantees that there are no broken links or error codes on the site (like 404s). Otherwise, the search engine will give the source a low ranking. Optimizing URLs and making the slug (everything after the.com) as short as possible helps the search engine identify relevant subpages and categorize the various elements of your site.
This is critical for any SEO campaign’s success. The technical SEO aspects boost the user experience. A solid sitemap guarantees that visitors can easily access content, and an optimized robots.txt scans the site so that viewers can access the content. The appropriate tag delivers exceptional and superior indexing as well as genuine search results.
Tags such as header tags and title tags serve the user by structuring the content in a way that is valuable to readers while also being simple for search engines to interpret. A decent title tag ensures a positive user experience because the visitor can recognize the material on the page before clicking on it. Header tags (H1-H6) are very important for differentiating headers and subheadings within the content and keeping it ordered.
It creates a flywheel effect that can bring hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site and essentially expand your business on its own.
Let us now discuss the skill of engaging your readers through the written word. I’m referring to copywriting.
Copywriting
Have you ever read one of those lengthy Facebook ads from start to finish? Or seen a funny commercial, such as one for the Squatty Potty or Dollar Shave Club?
In both cases, the advertising used copywriting to attract and maintain your attention for the duration of the ad.
The skill of using the written word to engage, convince, and persuade is known as copywriting. You are engaging in copywriting whenever you come across the written word in any type of advertising. But how does this relate to you and your content marketing?
After all, you’re just a blogger. You don’t need to be an expert in copywriting, do you?
Wrong.
One of the quickest and most efficient strategies to increase the outcomes of your content marketing is to become a great copywriter. It is the difference between a reader being bored with your content and eagerly sharing it with everyone they know.
This blog post will not be able to cover everything you need to know about copywriting. It’s simply too vast and profound a subject. However, I can reveal some of the key characteristics of strong copy that you can utilize right away to improve your content.
Become obsessed with your headlines
It is the single most important factor in determining whether your material is read. It doesn’t matter if you have the best content in the world if your title is dull or weak. An excellent headline is concise, detailed, and compelling. It should both tell the reader what to expect and tease them with what’s on the inside.
Your headline should also qualify your reader, which means it should appeal to your intended audience. If it is overly ambiguous, a reader will begin reading, believing that the article is relevant to them, only to learn that it is not. They’ll believe they’ve been duped.
This is quite important. You’re not just trying to get people to click on your article and read it. That loses all meaning. You want the right individual to read your content, someone who will benefit from it. So, take the extra minutes, hours, or even days to get your headline just right.
Write to a specific person.
You must be able to enter their minds and join the dialogue. One method is to write to a specific individual. This could be a persona you’ve made of your ideal consumer, or it could be a genuine person who fits the bill for your target demographic.
In any case, imagine this individual as you write. What are they having trouble with? What kind of experiences have you had? How would you approach them if you were sitting on the couch in a coffee shop with them?
Once you’ve determined that, write to them. Ignore all your grammar and professionalism rules. Simply write as if you’re in the coffee shop with them, or as if you’re sending an email to them.
Without a doubt, your work will become more personal, and you will develop better bonds with your readers. They will believe you are speaking directly to them because, to some extent, you are. That is the type of work that your target audience will read, share, and purchase.
Maintain Simplicity
One of the cardinal sins of copywriting is overcomplicating your message, which leads to confusion. Good writing is all about breaking things down so that your reader can understand what you’re saying quickly and effortlessly. This includes avoiding the use of sophisticated terminology, insider jargon, technical jargon, and extended flawlessly formed phrases.
That’s essentially a death warrant for your copy. Instead, divide your sentences into paragraphs. Simply state your point. Find the simplest approach to express what you’re trying to communicate. Otherwise, your reader will have to sift through your text and become confused. As a result, they do nothing, they don’t buy into it.
Although email may appear to be outdated, it is still one of the most effective and powerful marketing tools available. It’s a direct line of communication with your target audience. When people offer you their contact information, they are demonstrating a level of trust that cannot be overstated. For the past ten years, email marketing has provided the highest ROI of any marketing channel.
This is because email has a better per-session conversion rate than both search and social combined. Let’s look at some of the most effective ways to incorporate email into your content marketing plan.
List building
If you aren’t reaching your target audience – or enough of them to move your content marketing plan – your email content won’t help your business. Building your list should be the foundation of your entire content marketing campaign. Period. That may appear to be a bold claim (and it is), but it is also true.
When someone finds your material, they will visit your website to read it, perhaps browse around a little, and then depart. They might even buy from you on the first visit, in rare situations. The issue is that you have no way of getting in touch with them.
You’re relying on them to remember your content and return regularly so you can advertise your product or have them share it with their friends. However, if you have their email address, you can contact them. You are free to send them new information or promote your items at any moment (within reason). Your audience takes on a life of its own, becoming someone you can see and talk to directly.
The truth is, it doesn’t matter how many people read and share your material if your bottom line doesn’t improve. Your goal with your content should be to generate real business results, not just many readers and followers. That isn’t enough to pay the bills.
So, before they go, you need to figure out a means to get their email address. It’s your top priority. You may do this in several ways, but the most effective is to give them something valuable in exchange for their email address.
Consider your topic. What are they dealing with if they read your article or blog? What issue are they having that you might be able to assist them with? Make a piece of content out of it that you can give away for free.
Here are a few ideas:
- Email series
- Free downloads
- Update lists, like new releases and product updates
- Free e-book
The list goes on and on. It’s just a matter of using your imagination. The trick is to make sure it’s relevant and appealing to your target audience, and the only way to achieve so is to test a variety of options over time and determine what works best.
“What happens when they opt-in?” you might think. To do so, we must discuss automation.
Automation
You want to stay in touch with your customers as a marketer or business owner. Email automation is a powerful marketing automation tool that allows you to send the correct message to the right people at the right time using automated processes.
It’s ideal for lead nurturing and, ultimately, driving sales from both new and existing customers. Email automation is a method of delivering automatic emails to the right individuals with the correct message at the right time, without having to do the work each time, using a marketing automation platform.
You may target customers based on their activity, preferences, and previous sales when you combine your website analytics with your email marketing software. Then you can customize each customer’s experience and make your automated campaigns more relevant.
It’s like having an endless number of salespeople hustling to sell your goods 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or a virtual version of yourself welcoming every customer who goes into your store.
A nurturing sequence is a popular technique to employ automation in your organization. When someone joins your email list via a free opt-in or even a “join newsletter” button (which we don’t advocate), they probably have little knowledge of you. They’re unfamiliar with you and your surroundings.
This is your chance to tell your narrative in the nurturing sequence. To establish a relationship with them and inform them of your mission (and how you can help them). You’re catching up with them.
This single email sequence has the potential to completely revolutionize your brand.
Instead of having a lot of people on your list who are all at varying levels of understanding about you and your business, they all get the same introduction and foundation right away. Everyone is on an equal footing.
This increases their engagement with your brand, increases their likelihood of opening your emails in the future, and increases their likelihood of becoming loyal customers.
Isn’t it fantastic?
The only issue is that you’ll require email software to do so. Most of the options are either overly complicated to use, or they are overly simplistic and limit what you may accomplish.
We use and suggest ConvertKit at Quaff. It’s highly powerful while yet being simple to use, and it won’t break the bank. After you’ve set up your automation, consider how you’d like to communicate with your subscribers regularly.
Newsletter
Newspapers and journal publishing have a lot in common with email newsletters. You send your readers an email regularly, usually once a week or once a month, with updates, news, fresh content, or fascinating information you want to share with them.
With your newsletter, you can very much do whatever you want. If you publish a new blog post every week, your newsletter may merely serve as a means of informing your subscribers about the new content.
You build confidence in your brand by continuously sending important, relevant content to your subscribers’ inboxes. Customers will trust and rely on your organization as a source of knowledge, products, and services if your newsletters are well-written and helpful.
Rather than being a replacement for other forms of marketing, a newsletter complements and expands on the content you already have. Customers are more likely to engage with your core offerings if you send them a newsletter with exclusive, relevant information and links back to content on your site. Customers will often send your newsletters, allowing you to expand your audience even further.
Your subscribers aren’t only looking for entertainment. That could have a role, but in general, they’re paying attention to you because you provide them with some form of benefit or value.
If you don’t constantly give them what they want, whether it’s advice, recommendations, frequent material, or just chuckles, they’ll get bored and go. Wasting their time is the very worst thing you can do, so don’t go halfway. Make an extra effort to make your newsletter outstanding.
Recap
Don’t underestimate the importance of email in maintaining and strengthening your brand’s relationship with customers and prospects. Email may no longer be a hot new method in content marketing, but with the appropriate plan and a little maintenance, it can still be very effective.
Your content marketing results will improve significantly if you grow your list, set up automation to nurture your subscribers 24/7, and create trust with frequent newsletters. You’ll be able to connect your content marketing efforts to actual business results.
Subscribe to Quaff Media today to have the most up-to-date information on practical, modern content marketing delivered to your inbox every week.
Podcasting
The tone and expression of the human voice may express far more meaning than the printed word ever can. It’s why, during the Golden Age of Radio, millions of Americans sat glued to their radios, listening to everything from adventure, comedy, and drama to classical music performances, news, and farm reports.
As broadcast radio gave way to television, television to cable, and cable to the internet of everything, it should come as no surprise to content marketers that broadcast radio has come full circle with podcasting and represents a new platform for storytelling, fueled by technological improvements.
Podcasting allows marketers and companies to communicate their value proposition to a captive audience clearly and succinctly. For our on-the-go society, podcasting’s on-demand functionality allows businesses and brands to communicate their stories anywhere, at any time, establishing authority in their sector and cultivating brand fans along the way.
The main difference is that a podcast can be consumed while doing almost anything, whereas video or written content requires the viewer to look at it. A podcast can be listened to everywhere that music can be played.
While many podcasts are just amusing, most listeners are drawn to them because they may learn and improve themselves while commuting or doing yard work.
A good podcast necessitates consideration, work, and consistency. A well-produced podcast may be your top business asset. It’s not easy (nor is most content marketing), but it’s worth the effort.
It’s also one of the most effective strategies to build a good relationship with the customers. If you think about it, they’re just listening to your conversations and hearing your voice for hours on end.
So, if you want to create deep ties and even intimacy with your audience, podcasting is something you should seriously consider. Let’s look at the most important aspects of establishing a podcast.
Choosing the premise of your show
The concept of a podcast influences whether it will succeed or fail, and by the premise, I mean the topic. The bait. The big theme that your show revolves around. This is critical. You want your listeners to come back week after week, which means you need to sell them on the whole show, not just a few episodes.
Consider a television show. They don’t want you to watch just one episode; they want you to watch the whole season. You keep watching a show once you’ve been hooked on it. You don’t care what happens in the next episode because you’re engrossed in the show. It’s effective, which is why an increasing number of firms are launching podcasts.
So, what is a strong premise? There are two essential components:
- Identify the niche you want to talk about
- Making the content unique
Consider a television show like MythBusters which combines science and Hollywood special effects to determine whether urban myths are possible or absurd. The theme is science in this case. They demonstrate and educate the scientific method. The unusual twist is that they are doing so using special effects and urban legends. It’s a crazy, hilarious, and utterly unique way to teach science and physics ideas.
By doing so, they developed a premise so compelling that their fan base didn’t care what the following episode would be about. It was part of the enjoyment of not knowing. What ridiculous thing will they do next?
That is what you aim to accomplish with your podcast. You’ve probably already thought of a theme for your podcast, so write it down and then spend some time considering your distinctive approach.
What is your distinct point of view? What distinguishes your viewpoint from others? What will you bring to the table that the market does not have?
The first step to creating a great podcast is to nail your idea. By hooking listeners, you not only establish an engaged and dedicated audience, but you also make it easy for them to spread the word about your program to their friends and networks.
Your podcast will start spreading on its own. It all comes down to how you decide what to talk about on your podcast.
Launching your podcast
Now that you’ve determined your premise, it’s time to launch your podcast. But first, you need to take care of few things:
- Proper audio equipment
- Software for recording
- Hosting software for podcasts
You don’t have to go bankrupt to afford professional, studio-quality audio equipment. We live in an era where you may appear quite professional without spending a lot of money.
First, you will require a microphone. There are two kinds of them: USB and XLR connectors. A USB microphone connects directly to your computer and requires no additional hardware. It’s the quickest and least expensive option to get high-quality audio for your podcast.
To connect an XLR microphone to a computer, an interface is required. These microphones are usually a little more expensive, but the audio quality is far superior. Prices can range from $30 to thousands of dollars, depending on how far you want to go. However, one of the most popular broadcast mics, the Shure SM7B, costs $400.
For a few hundred dollars, you can have the same audio quality as the pros who have hundreds of episodes and millions of downloads. After you’ve sorted everything out, make a content schedule. Decide:
- When to record your podcasts
- Who you wish to interview (Unless you don’t plan on interviewing anyone? That is OK as well.)
- How frequently do you want to release episodes?
This is by far the most important thing you can do to help your podcast grow. The key difference between successful podcasts and those that no longer exist is consistency. Above all, consistency will determine the success or failure of your podcast.
Don’t rely solely on inspiration. Make a strategy and stick to it, no matter how you feel or what difficulties arise. You will be significantly ahead of 90% of other podcasters if you do this.
Converting your audience into viable leads
As I previously stated, the purpose of your content marketing is not to increase the number of visitors, likes, shares, downloads, or impressions. Those are ego-driven metrics. They have no genuine meaning.
Your material, like your podcast, must be directly related to a business outcome. Don’t get me wrong: developing a following of dedicated listeners who enjoy your content is a difficult task that should be rewarded.
However, this will not be enough to move the needle in your business. You must convert them into subscribers or buyers. And the simplest method to accomplish this is to simply ask them. Many podcasters do not promote their products or services. They don’t have a clear call to action for their audience. That is a huge mistake.
Not only should your premise be closely related to your primary products or services, but you should also discuss them in every episode you post. The podcast Building a StoryBrand is an excellent illustration of this. They have no sponsors or advertisements in their podcasts. Instead, they connect each episode to their product. Every episode serves as ongoing marketing for their products.
If that feels too forceful, consider advertising a free resource instead. You may start converting your listeners into subscribers by developing a landing page with a sign-up form.
Recap
To make a successful podcast as a content marketing platform, follow these steps:
- Determine the premise of your show.
- Purchase a microphone and hosting software.
- Make and follow a content schedule.
- Convert your listeners into subscribers or customers.
Podcasting is one of the most effective ways to acquire new customers, grow an audience, and build a relationship with your audience.
Video Marketing
Video marketing has existed since the invention of television. A video is worth thousands of photographs if a picture is worth a thousand words.
Video, more than any other media, allows you to communicate a narrative within a shorter time frame. With the appropriate characters, scene, and mood, you can make someone feel just what you want them to feel in an instant.
It’s why the film industry is worth more than $100 billion in the United States alone. It’s also the closest you’ll go to making direct contact with someone. Although podcasting is an excellent method to connect with your audience, nothing beats video.
Every day, people watch more than a billion hours of videos on YouTube alone. The platform’s sheer size and power are obvious. So, how can you effectively market your brand with the video?
Vlogging
Vlogging is one of the most effective approaches. If you couldn’t tell, vlogging is derived directly from the word “blogging.” It’s the same concept, but instead of words, you use video.
Vloggers often point the camera at themselves, either on their computer, on a tripod, or simply by holding it selfie-style and discuss numerous things relevant to their industry.
This is an excellent technique for personal brands to create relationships with their target audiences over the internet. Your viewers gain from viewing you, listening to you, hearing the expressions in your speech, and getting a feel of your personality.
People want to do business with companies they know, like, and trust. They want to feel that bond with you. They are looking for an interpersonal experience. That is achievable on a massive scale with video. The same blogging ideas that I discussed apply when you vlog.
Choose a topic to discuss — it should be something you know a lot about and should be directly related to the primary product or service you offer. Then, finally, create content.
Some people are natural content creators. Ideas and themes that they might discuss for days simply flow out of them. Others must think more thoroughly and conduct more research to come up with content ideas.
Whatever you are, keep two things in mind: You are here to serve your audience. If you’re at a loss for what to say, simply ask your audience.
That is the little secret of content marketing. Ask your audience what they want, and then provide it. This feedback could be from comments on your videos, newsletter responses, or simply interactions with your clients or current consumers. Whatever they say to you, it’s a gold mine of content ideas and subjects to discuss.
You’ll attract people who share your beliefs and value the same things you do. That is far more valuable than ten times the number of people who are just somewhat interested.
You attract others who believe what you believe by sharing your ideas, opinions, and thoughts related to your brand niche. They will become your most loyal consumers and most vocal supporters.
Whiteboard Videos
Whiteboard videos are also a popular video genre. Whiteboard videos can still cover a wide range of topics, but they are animated or sketched. It’s like regular videos, except for the scenery and people. Whiteboard videos are highly useful for a variety of reasons:
- You do not need to be good on camera
- You don’t require expensive video equipment
- If you want, you can outsource the entire thing
It’s an easy way to get started making video content right away, even if you’re on a tight budget. The overhead required is minimal, which should be music to the ears of any hard-working small business owner.
Whiteboard video resources:
- How to Create a Whiteboard Video
- How to Create a Whiteboard Animation on a Budget
- The Best Websites to Make Your Whiteboard Videos
Your obvious first step should be to write a script for the video. If you record it yourself, you can improvise, which is something that many people do. However, if you’re sending it to a voiceover artist to record, you’ll need to offer them a script as well as specific directions on how you want them to sound.
These artists often charge by the number of words in the video, thus the shorter the video, the less it will cost you. That being said, outstanding voiceover artists with competitive rates can be found on platforms like Upwork or Freelancer, so don’t be scared to shoot a longer video.
The same is true for video animation and editing. If you can’t handle it yourself, you can easily hire a freelancer on the same sites to assist you. Whiteboard videos are an excellent way to get started with video marketing.
Product Reviews
Product reviews are one of the most prevalent genres of video content. People want to see reviews of software, electronics, cosmetics, etc. Because they want to be sure that they made the right decision.
You’re just tapping into a market with a lot of traffic. There’s no need to start from scratch. Find a product relating to your industry, write a fantastic review for it, then upload it to YouTube, and you’ll almost certainly start receiving traffic.
However, there are a few things to keep in mind if you want to get the most out of product reviews.
1. Choosing relevant products to your brand niche
You want to provide value to your target audience that is interested in your brand niche. If you offer lawn care services and publish a video review of a good toilet plunger, you’ll almost certainly attract many viewers who do not need your services.
This is again another case of vanity metrics (views, subscribers, etc.) vs. true business outcomes. It’s not simply about gaining attention. The goal is to get the right people to see the appropriate video.
2. Create a great video
Investing a few more hours in nailing the beginning or rewriting the script to make it better and clearer might mean the difference between someone being engaged and gaining value, and someone being bored and leaving right away.
Keep in mind that you must win their attention. Average isn’t good enough. That does not imply that each film must be professionally produced for $10,000. Not in the least. However, the content must be excellent. The recommendations you give and the information you share must be well-thought-out and relevant.
3. Have a good call to action
You don’t want someone to view your content, be blown away, and then leave because you didn’t provide them with a CTA. Instead, give a free download or use your video to promote your goods. Allow them to take the next step in their relationship with you.
I suggest providing a free download for video content. Going straight for the sale at this point is usually too aggressive. They have no idea who you are. They’ve just met you! You can collect their email address and continue to create a relationship by offering them your free content.
Recap
Don’t be afraid to try video marketing. It’s not difficult at all. It’s also a fantastic approach to increase the “know, like, and trust” element, which makes consumers feel more at ease doing business with you.
You can stick to video basics like vlogging, whiteboard videos, or product reviews, but there are plenty of ways to get creative and create compelling content that draws and keeps your target audience’s attention. Make sure to direct them to your other content, particularly your website, where they may join your email list to receive more relevant information.
Content marketing on social media
There are three things to keep in mind to use social media effectively:
- Shareability
- Consistency
- Engagement
Shareability
You want to make your material shareable when you’re generating it for social media. What makes content shareable?
You’ll need a fantastic headline. This should be obvious. You’ll also require clear, user-friendly graphics. That means no cluttering visuals that make it difficult to see what’s happening or read the text. Make your content stand out by making it huge, bright, and bold.
Finally, it must be intriguing. When it comes to social media, you must evoke emotion; else, your content will not be shared. Joy, passion, wonder, and comedy. If your material evokes one of these powerful emotions, people are compelled to share it. Take advantage of this.
Consistency
If you haven’t already realized, consistency is crucial regardless of the content marketing platform you use. It’s simply a part of the job. Social media is no exception.
You should prepare your audience for what they can expect from you. That means posting at regular intervals with content that has a consistent and distinct style to it, so they can spot it in their feed right away. This will help you develop a brand and community, which will increase your engagement.
Engagement
It’s all about engagement on social media. On the other end of the line, actual people are looking at your stuff, loving it, commenting on it, and sharing it with their friends. It’s a very effective technique to interact with your audience and grow a community. A collection of people who have similar beliefs and get together for a common goal.
You can do so by using social media. However, it all begins with providing content that your target consumer wants to interact with and then reacting to every comment you receive. You’ll establish a tight-knit community that feels linked to you and your brand because of this.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
The practice of consistently improving a web page’s conversion rate is known as conversion rate optimization. One of the most important KPIs for an internet business is conversion rate. It’s the number of people who sign up or place an order divided by the total number of individuals that visited the page.
One of the most common pitfalls in online marketing is focusing too much on increasing traffic. It’s simple to believe that adding more traffic would fix your difficulties. It starts a wild scramble to attract more traffic at all costs, which can be costly and wastes more time and energy than it is worth.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to boost your traffic, but it shouldn’t be the only or even the most important goal you have. Consider the following scenario:
Let’s imagine you have 100,000 visitors to your page and a 1% conversion rate. That indicates 1,000 people have signed up or purchased something. Meanwhile, your friend’s page receives only 50,000 visitors, yet he converts at a rate of 3%.
This indicates that on this page, 1,500 individuals are converting. Which one would you prefer?
Your friend is getting more conversions with half the traffic because of a little higher conversion rate. So, before you go crazy trying to drive traffic to your page, enhance what you currently have so that your traffic efforts are significantly more successful.
Here are a few simple things to concentrate on to increase your conversion rate.
1. Add email signup forms
Adding an email signup form to your website, regardless of what content is on it, is one of the simplest ways to enhance its conversion rate.
If you’re writing a blog article, including a related guide or course as an email opt-in will not only boost your conversion rate but will also help your audience. You’re giving them the chance to acquire even more value from you and strengthen their bond with you.
Visitors to your product sales website aren’t always ready to make a purchase. It’s a major commitment, so they need to know, like, and trust you beforehand.
You’re giving them a lower-risk way to engage with you by giving them the chance to opt-in for something free. It’s still a commitment, but it’s a much smaller one that allows you to serve them and follow up on the transaction again.
Otherwise, they’ll leave and you won’t be able to re-engage them with your product (unless you retarget them with advertisements, which is considerably more expensive than email marketing).
2. Have a strong call to action
What you’re asking your visitor to do is called a call to action (CTA). Buy, register, download, and so on. Your nicely designed page will not function if your CTA is not clear, consistent, or explicit.
A direct action that your visitor can perform, such as “sign up,” “register now,” or “purchase now,” should be your CTA. Second, make your CTA stand out by repeating it throughout the page. You should put it in practically every portion of your page so that when someone decides to buy, the button is there in front of them.
Third, your CTA should be consistent in terms of text as well as color if you’re utilizing a button. This reinforces the action you want them to do. Your visitor will become confused and tune out if you start changing the color of the text of your CTA.
It may seem insignificant, but these minor things can make or break your sale.
3. Improve your page speed
Another factor that influences your conversion rate is the speed with which your page loads. According to studies, the longer it takes for a website to load, the more likely users are to leave.
They discovered that pages that loaded in:
- 2.4 seconds had a conversion rate of 1.9 percent.
- The conversion rate was 1.5 percent at 3.3 seconds.
- The conversion rate was less than 1% at 4.2 seconds.
- The conversion rate was 0.6 percent at 5.7+ seconds.
If your pages aren’t performing as well as you’d like, they may be just loading too slowly. It’s also not only your initial loading speed. If any of your page’s elements include animation or interaction, they must be snappy and responsive, or your conversion rate will decrease.
Recap
You can increase or even triple your conversion rate with just a few simple CRO modifications. Start with your most-visited sites and see if you can boost the conversion rate on each one using the ideas we offered.
Make sure to measure your current results and just make one modification at a time, like with any experiment. Allow the experiment to run and then double-check your results. You won’t know which one works if you make too many modifications at once.
Start building great relationships
As you can see, content marketing is a broad field with a wide range of applications. It’s easy to become overwhelmed, especially if you’re just starting.
Don’t try to accomplish everything at once. Choose one or two content platforms, to begin with. Test a few ideas to see which ones start to produce positive results, and then move from there.
If you’re still confused, consider your target audience. What are they doing with their time? What kind of content do they regularly consume?
When you combine it with your areas of passion or expertise, you’ll have a far better chance of succeeding. Finally, keep in mind that