What Is Content Marketing & 10 Tips You Can Improve Your Content

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing can be defined as a marketing strategy that involves consistent creation and distribution of relevant and valuable to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. Created content (including blogs, videos, and social media posts) are shared on online platforms  like a website, social media platforms, Facebook, YouTube etc.

Content marketing is all about creating content in order to attract and engage with visitors and eventually turn them into customers.

Content marketing is one of the best ways to attract attention and new business leads. It’s time-consuming and takes a lot of effort, but it pays off dividends.

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) says that content marketing generates three times the number of leads traditional marketing does, and it costs 62 percent less. 

It is a great way to go about business development, and you want to invest some time into creativity into how you are producing your content

 If you’re not producing it yourself, you want to make sure that you’re hiring a pro to get better traction and have more people reading it, and you can start reaping the benefits of what content marketing can do for you

10 Content Marketing Tips

#1. Better Headlines in Subject Lines

This is the one place where you want to pump it up a little bit, you don’t want to be clickbait, but you also don’t want to be boring. You need to put some energy and take some time to think about what is a title that’s going to make people want to read what you’ve written

#2.  Scannable.

People are time-starved, and they don’t read anymore. You want to make sure that you don’t have huge areas of dense copy because people get high fatigue. They’re looking at screens all day long, and they don’t want to read huge sections of copy.

One of the things you might notice on medium when you look at is a lot of writers who have a whole lot of followers; they’re usually like one or two-sentence paragraphs. There’s a lot of white space in their text because that’s very easy on the eye, and it’s effortless to scan and read.

Make sure that when you’re writing your blog post, you make and scannable.

#3. Don’t Forget the Visuals

You want to make sure that you inject photography or graphics or charts into the blog content of the written content that you’re producing

Use stock photography; you can use canva to add text to graphics or photographs just up the interest level of what it’s like to scan through and read your blog you want to make it visually attractive to people

#4. Educate Don’t Sell

No content marketing is marketing.  It’s inbound marketing, but you don’t want to come across as sales and marketing

You want to make sure that you’re providing valuable, actionable content to your readers. That’s the point of content marketing is based on attraction, not promotion

By adding value in giving them things that they can use to help them in their business, you are creating credibility in yourself and your staff, showing yourself as an expert in what you write about so

#5. It is Not About You

 that’s very closely linked to number 4 about education don’t sell, it’s not about you. One of the things most blog posts and websites are constantly writing about themselves, about their own offerings. You want to make blog posts and writing articles about them about your readers’ problems and offer solutions to them.

This will show that there’s a benefit in doing business with you and that’s what’s going to establish that level of attraction. Make sure that when you’re writing, it’s not about you; it’s about them.

#6 Leveraging Links

You want to make sure that you’re injecting links in your blog posts in your articles.  You can link back to other blog posts and articles on your website, or you can also link to curated content on other people’s sites

This will increase the level of perceived value in your what you’re writing for your readers because you’re serving up additional valuable content to them through these links

Google will also elevate you in search because you have a longer-form article and more links in it, so that’s another added benefit

#7.  Make Your Content Work Harder for You

The biggest mistake is to make all the effort to produce a piece of content and then posting it and only 1 place. Make sure that you’re repurposing your content and getting the most bang for the for your money, that the effort that you put into making it

If you do a blog post or article, you want to make sure that you post on your website, but you can also post on a link then you can also post on medium.com

You can pull quotes from it and put them on Instagram or pull quotes from Spark to make a cool quote graphic and posted on twitter. You want to make sure that you’re repurposing your content

You can also transcribe podcaster transcribe videos that you do and turn those into an article, so there are all sorts of ways to repurpose content

#8.  Boost SEO

Make sure you do a little research and keywords and leveraging keywords in the content that you’re writing in your blogs in. Your articles will be index in google based on the keywords you use in your content, so do some research.

You can also get some SEO bombed by how you title your images and also what is called Alt Text.  For example, you have an image that has a file name of it, “stock image 978321.jpeg.” That’s not going to help you, but if you name that image’s best design of all time by jack jones. Jpeg “. That is going to be indexed by Google, and that is also going to improve your SEO for that article (best design of all time) It should relate to your content because that’s going to elevate you in search, so think about SEO

#9. Do Your Research

You need to use quantifiable proof points in the copy of what you’re writing in your content.

By using a third party, research is going to add a level of weight and credibility to your article. For example, if you used a quote in one of your blog posts that said the Mackenzie Research Institute has said that “65 percent of all buying decisions are made by millennials,”. A quote like that is going to add a level of credibility because it’s from this institute to your article, so you want to make sure that you’re leveraging the power of other entities and other third parties in your content.

#10.  Used Power Partners

Using other experts to boost your credibility. This could be experts that are well-known names in your industry, or it could even network partners of your own who are in your industry but will offer up quotes to include in your content. It implies a level of credibility through the endorsement of other partners.

You can ask your connections for input your content, or you can offer up your input, your own quotes to their content; it can be a mutually beneficial relationship and can amplify the level of credibility of your content.