Content marketing paves a lot of chances for the marketers to create, distribute and share content. Effective content marketing strategy helps the businesses to prepare & plan for stimulating and also cost-effective sources of the site’s traffic and new leads. Through content marketing, you not only gain website traffic but educate your target customers and you can generate awareness for your service or brand. Content marketing is an effective strategy you can use to tell about your brand in an engaging & compelling way.

According to the survey of content marketing institute, nearly 70% of B2B marketers and a range of 86% of B2C marketers surveyed using content marketing in some or other form. Doing a content marketing strategy in an efficient way can develop brand awareness, improve brand loyalty, drive more revenue and conversions.

For all the advances that have become place over the years, one thing is evident: Content marketing is here to stay. In fact, this time last year, it was determined that the content marketing industry would be deserving of more than $400 billion by 2021.

And as content marketing extends to grow and our strategies to it become more mature, these trends will shape the way organizations create and employ content in 2019.

Why Content Marketing?

We have looked at top 3 fame companies namely Glossier, Harry’s and Away who had built trustworthy communities and nurtured explosive growth through its creative and engaging content tacts. Am sure, you will be envious once you know the result of content marketing efforts. Are you worried, as you are new to content marketing efforts? That’s not a big deal since a small step towards the strategy is fine.

According to research gathered by Coschedule:

Content marketing provides 3X more leads per dollar spent.
Companies get 3.5x much traffic than other companies if they publish 16 plus blog posts per months.
Content marketing runs 62% less than conventional marketing.
An average of 61% of US online customers uses to make the purchase after reading testimonials or recommendations from a blog.
You can gain 6x more traffic through content marketing than other marketing methods.
Quality content deliverable should revolve around the mind of the marketers since the updated algorithms cause ranking fluctuations. It sounds good to listen, but the actual practice finds as a big deal. Many SEO’s are believing that they are already on the path of content strategy, but they are not since their focus is only on keyword research.

Keyword research may also tempt you to develop content that your brand never focuses on. I am sure, you can end up with increasing traffic, but definitely, it wouldn’t convince and convert the customers. Focusing away from a keyword driven content strategy and working on audience-centric one will put your effort in better place results in SEO content that converts.

Keyword research also possesses an important place but in the later stage while you are diving into your audience and on your brand expertise.

Audience-focused content strategy differs from the keyword-focused content strategy:

A content marketing strategy usually starts with the target audience and then gradually dives into the understanding of your brand’s expertise & unique value proposition. Assume one of your prospective customer’s journey toward conversion. Is search the only source your audience use to get information? So, why should your audience opinion be defined as keyword research?

A content strategy is a plan that throws questions like:

Who is your audience?
What are their needs?
What sorts of content do these people want to use?
How can you match your expertise to your audience’s needs?
What unique expertise does your brand offer?
Get Started with these content marketing strategies:

Set your content marketing goals:

Before stepping into content creation, you need to know why you are creating it. Understanding what your goal is about will guide you and your team as well, in the further refining process of content marketing strategy. For example, your goal may be improving the number of visitors to your website or blog. You can work even more to turn them into subscribers, and you can build strong relationships with the help of the email you acquire if your content is good and interesting.

To bring more traffic to your site, your content needs promotions. You want to get listed the blog in various publications and also get mention it in industry blogs as well. It’s not an accurate definition, but the more you perform. Build strong content and promote it, the more you gain from content marketing, the more you make experiments forward.

Research your audience & approach them in a way they understand:

You have to keep two things in mind for a successful content marketing strategy. One is your brand voice, and the other is the audience. If you are trying to reach younger generations, then you want to reach them through social media channels in an attractive language. If so you are targeting the old shoppers then your content has to rely on building authority.

Tools like Google Analytics can support you to judge which content is most familiar among your prospects and figure out who is reading what, where, & when. Recognizing who your content requires to targets can encourage you to figure out what topics and forms your content should feature.

Update Your Current Content:

If you are already writing or publishing content in other types of style then its time to implement the recent content marketing strategies in your style of writing. To perform this, you need to know what sort of content you are going to produce. The types of content I had highlighted before is not the format such as blog posts, videos, or podcasts, but the topic you chose to produce on a regular basis. The topic you chose for your blog will be a foundation and can be also called “Content Pillars”.

You should concentrate on 3c’s which is engagement, evergreen, and events. Engagement implies writing a content that initiates a conversation and allowing people to like your opinion on a particular niche. Evergreen relates to the content, allowing inclusion of key terms for your business. Content writing around a particular or popular event like news or industry event is referred to events.

Brainstorm the content ideas & research keywords to present what your audience is looking for:

It’s time to brainstorm about the content you are going to create and how it works with your content marketing strategy. You may have lots of ideas to update but for successful content, you need to be on the track of strategies and should avoid the trap of simply reacting. To have a clear idea, prepare a content marketing calendar that avoids repeatable content and will help to achieve your business goals. Choosing the specific topics and keywords your audience searching for will be the foundation of your content marketing tactics.

The first thing to brainstorm is topics and the terms. You can write down many ideas your audience might be interested in. You can even involve people who use to work directly with the users particularly a sales representative or customer service. You can gather the results using tools like Google’s keyword planner, Serpstat, Espionage, Moz or keywordtool.io etc. Refining the group of your list to find who makes sense to your business goals is also taken into account. Build and organize a spreadsheet with the data you had collected using the keyword tool and prioritize each one according to your business. Target your top terms to write the content and this will be SEO friendly content.

Plan Which Content Marketing strategies you are going to test with:

With high competition in content and social media ranges, it’s significant to find your opportunities to excel well in the existing markets and to do the best of your work. What makes your content stand out from the competition and how actually it influences your audience is important. These content marketing tactics focus on using their core competencies, but here’s how you can obtain those same kinds of possibilities within your own business:

Keep an eye on your competitors:
What are they doing, Where they are excelling well, where they are publishing & how they are using the opportunities.

Search related topics on Google:
Look at the top 10 search results and observe what’s there. Observe how long is the content, and what makes it stand out from others.

Question yourself where you & your team really good at?
What are the models that your competition are coming into that you can disrupt? Are there peoples present in your audience whom you are not serving? What have you produced that you are the proudest of?

Another important strategy is to prioritize the content that has a high impact. You should concentrate more on the growth of your audience size, traffic, and subscribers. You can do these by dumping all your ideas onto a board, by identifying all possible opportunities and put them together in one column, and by ranking the opportunities. You can straight away jump on the high scale value for a successful content marketing strategy.

At this point, you understand what you should be concentrating the most on. But remember, your other ideas are not bad so don’t throw them out. Those ideas may give higher return activity in the future.

Promote your content!
It’s more important to implement your content marketing strategy along with your social media strategy. One of the best ways to promote your content is the email newsletter. It’s important for the marketers who are in urge of promotion to build an email list. You people can use some email service provider like Milkshake, Lemlist, Mailchimp, or ConvertKit that enables you to build and maintain subscribers. You can also see analytics to measure how your campaigns work.

Once you are ready with your email list, you can promote your content on social media and email newsletter as well. Promoting in such a way help you stand directly in front of your corresponding prospects. As mentioned earlier doing keyword research for your content is another important strategy you can implement to make sure your content is found by people through organic search. The quality of the content in your blog represents your brand. Set up a social media calendar to produce interesting posts your audience like. Make sure you handle and keep up the posts updated in the scheduled time. Consistency, along with the quality and refreshed content, can reflect extremely on your brand.

Final Thoughts:

By now, you might be aware of what should be implemented to execute a compelling content marketing strategy in 2019. Creating compelling, engaging & rewarding content is not an easy deal, but if done well by keeping the short-time & long-time goals in mind, it’s worth of. You are a teller, so sharing your brand’s story that deserves to be heard is important. The tips we had mentioned are just the tip of a comprehensive digital marketing iceberg. With every passing day, it’s becoming harder & harder to pull the clients and getting engaged for your clients. In fact, to move forward brands need to be more transparent. Size of the market is increasing day by day, and so your brand has to excel well in front of your audience. You can execute the same via these compelling content marketing strategies.

The best way to start off in 2019 is to get back to your content marketing strategies. Analyze your past campaigns with your team and determine whether you had met your objective and what you can change in 2019. As mentioned earlier, find outstanding channels and curve your strategy towards using more time on them. Don’t quit listening to your audience and always be adaptable enough to approach any changing habits.

The key areas to think about your upcoming plans in content marketing have to do with

Your present strategy
Your capability to new upgrading technologies
Your budget
Your company’s strength to measure ROI
Your involvement to build a thriving content marketing strategy
A strong and successful content marketing strategy takes time, but this is the correct time to think ahead and to implement the same.

Author's Bio: 

Fazeela is a Digital Marketing Executive at Bright Bridge Infotech, a law firm marketing company and she enjoys learning about the Digital Marketing field. She specializes in guest blogging, blog publishing, and social media. She is an avid reader and loves writing impeccable contents pertaining to digital marketing. She holds a bachelor degree in Engineering.