Content Marketing
Facilitated by Susan McLain
Basics
- Online content marketing can include magazine articles, email/text, infographics, blog posts, social media, press releases, apps, ads, white papers, case studies.
- Consider how you do your tagging, select keywords, create headings, and link to other posts.
- Tagging and cross-linking give content exposure to a variety of audiences.
- Consider carefully how you want to present yourself—even if you delete something later, it will always be around.
- Google frequently changes the first page of results to give more sites an opportunity to appear (i.e., if you search for the same term multiple times, you’ll probably see different results each time).
Content
- The most important thing is to provide valuable content to your audience.
- To identify what content will be valuable to your audience, research your audience. What are they reading? Where do they read it? What formats do they prefer?
- It’s essential that the content is written well, with good grammar and spelling, no typos.
- Analyze traffic to see what’s bringing your audience to your page.
- Compete against yourself and your stats (number of viewers, clicks, etc.). Set goals to improve performance of content marketing.
- Presenting case studies/success stories can help drive interest, but stories that are really relevant to your audience’s businesses are more effective.
- Break information into digestible bits.
Videos and Images
- Videos are very big now.
- Deliver the message quickly—60–90 seconds.
- Whiteboard videos (basically a cartoon) are effective.
- An interactive approach is good if the video needs to be longer than 90 seconds.
- Infographics and other images are also still good choices.
- It’s important to give images, videos, infographics, and so forth, descriptive and memorable names. Also tag them.
Website
- Think about the look and feel of your website.
- Make sure your website is optimized for content exposure and SEO. You can use WordPress plugins to help.
- Include a good photograph that presents yourself professionally. Select an image that mainly shows your face.
- The best thing for a website is to have a blog—dynamic content.
- If you write a blog post related to another post you already wrote, be sure to link to it. That will drive traffic to both blog posts.
- Come up with a content schedule so you have a plan and a consistent message
- Once your content is out there, you might continue getting traffic on older content over time.
Facebook and Other Platforms
- Try linking and hashtagging to other Facebook pages to reach your audience and other pages’ audiences.
- Use Facebook boosting and promotion as an inexpensive tool.
- If you boost or promote a Facebook page, make sure it has key information you want people to know about you/your content/your business.
- Storify is a great online tool—it jump starts your audience’s exposure to your content.
- Aggregator sites—some are reputable and some aren’t.
- Cross-link with fellow promoters. (Author 1 reviews for Author 2; authors share each other’s content.)
- Volunteer to be on panels, give presentations, and so forth to get exposure.
- If you’re a writer, find other avenues to publish your writing to get your name out there.