What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing method of telling your brand’s story or values through educational, entertaining or valuable online and offline assets. Content marketing examples can be any of the following: social media posts, videos, blog posts and whitepapers for example. The aim of content marketing is to reach a clearly defined audience and turn this into profitable customer action.
The different types of content marketing
The list of the types of content marketing is extremely long and in some cases marketers might even have a difference in opinion as to what actually classes as content marketing. To us, content marketing is any valuable digital and non-digital asset that helps to tell the story and goals of your brand, whilst entertaining and educating your audience. We’ve mentioned above a few examples of content marketing but below we’ve put together a whole list to get you creative content juices flowing!
-Blogs
-Website copy
-Social media posts
-Brand Videos
-Whitepapers
-Infographics
-Podcasts
-Webinars
-Presentations
-Books
-Ebooks
-Email marketing
-Case studies
-User generated content
How online content marketing helps your SEO rankings
Not only does producing content marketing help with your brands trustworthiness and build relationships with your customers but it also helps with your Google rankings. As Forbes said ‘SEO without content marketing is like a body without a soul’ and really we can’t think of a better way to put it. Content marketing is the essence of your SEO. Valuable, unique, digital content gets indexed fast by Google, meaning your site is more likely to get pushed up in the rankings as Google views this as content audiences want to see. It all makes perfect sense too when you think about Google’s aim – to provide meaningful, informative content that their audience is looking for.
The more content you produce for your business the more opportunity you have to use your business’s keywords. It isn’t ideal and is actually frowned upon by Google to cram all your business’s keywords into a small space on your website. So, creating blogs on your website with topics that revolve around your business’s keywords can help you rank for these terms whilst you’re following best practices. For example, if you’re a florist in Leeds, you will want to rank for flower bouquet-related terms. So, you could write a blog with the title ‘bouquets perfect for summer birthdays.’ This gives you the opportunity to not only educate and entertain your audience, building a relationship with them but also to get more of your keywords on your site with the aim of Google seeing this as valuable content. The amount of topics you could write about is endless too, so just think about all those opportunities you have to include more of your keywords on your website with blogging. The same goes for other online content you produce – you’ll want to make sure your keywords are used throughout, so Google knows exactly what your content is about and it appears when your potential customers are searching for content just like yours.
Want more information on SEO and content marketing for your business? Give us a call for a friendly, no-obligation chat! Or talk to us through live chat on our website.
Tools to help you generate content marketing ideas
We know how it is – sometimes the inspiration for topics for your content can dry up. Especially if you’re producing content as well as working within your business, it can get pretty tiring, not to mention time-consuming. However, there is light at the end of the long content tunnel as there are a huge number of content marketing tools available on the internet that can help you generate ideas and get those juices of inspiration flowing again and tools that allow you to see what your audiences are searching for. Check out our upcoming blog about tools to help you generate content marketing ideas in more depth.
Tools to help you create your content marketing
Once you’ve got the ideas for the topics you want to create content around if you’re not a design wizard and you’re producing content yourself for your business you may be on the look out for online tools that can help you create it. You’ll want to create it easily and efficiently allowing you to concentrate on your business. You’ll be happy to know that there are a lot of tools out there to help and we’ll be talking about them in more detail in our upcoming blog.
We hope with our easy-to-follow guidance you’ll be a content marketing expert in no time!
If you’re looking for a buddy to help take the load of content marketing off your mind completely, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We not only create a content marketing strategy for your business from scratch but also produce the content and take care of the publishing of the content too!
How to measure the success of your content marketing and the effect it’s having on your SEO.
There are numerous ways to analyse the results of your content marketing efforts and the effect it’s having on your business’s SEO.
From exploring Google Analytics to monitor your web traffic, to using MOZ to check your domain authority score, and getting your head around social media reporting tools. Ultimately you want your website and brand as a whole deemed useful by search engines, and the only way to make sure you’re on the right track is to dive into some numerical analysis. It doesn’t have to be laborious though! Check out our upcoming blog, which will dive into more detail about how to report on your findings. The great thing about reporting is that you’ll find yourself learning new things about your audience, and in turn giving you more ideas for fresh content. It’s one big, happy content marketing cycle!
