More businesses are using content marketing to gain higher search rankings and increased brand awareness. SocialMediaExaminer notes that 91 percent of marketers regularly use content marketing as one of the tools to drive business, per a study by research firm eConsultancy along with digital marketing firm Outbrain. Plus, more than 90 percent of all marketing professionals indicated in the study that content marketing would continue to grow in usage in 2013.
Companies publish news, images, videos and content about their operations, industry events, company happenings and employee successes. This steady flow of Web information is seen via blogs, social networks and videos. When a company is doing content marketing right, it helps to elevate their site rankings, generates more leads and improves overall brand awareness.
Let’s take a look at how to kick-start your company’s content marketing efforts.
Create Content
Content creation is both an art and a science. Your content team may start out being a reactive content group, writing about business developments or industry news as they occur. But, in fact, it’s best to steer the team to become more proactive.
One of the ways to do that is to take your existing company materials and make new SEO-centric content around them. You’re already creating great newsletter content, now it’s time to tweak these marketing and informational documents for the Web, pinning images on Pinterest, writing blog posts via your WordPress site or uploading company videos to YouTube. Create a content calendar for developing content for the next six months across your range of Web properties.
Become an Expert
The more content you build for your company, the greater that expertise is viewed, by both readers and search engines.
For instance, if your company makes underwater video cameras, create content that talks about underwater cameras. In your content, share videos and stories about the camera’s uses. You might want to even offer prizes to readers for the most adventurous use of your company’s cameras. Think creatively.
Similarly, say you run a digital marketing firm. You’ll likely aim to develop content on SEO tactics, content marketing statistics and other Web-related topics to drive new business leads. A good example is the iAcquire.com content marketing news from the fast-growing NY-Phoenix digital marketing agency. Its team uses infographics, videos, and presentations to share news and analysis on topics like inbound marketing, search analytics and content marketing. In doing so, the agency is building its expert profile on the web.
Produce Sharable Content
Great quality will float to the top of keyword searches. That’s why so many companies take the time to write blogs, embed images, shoot videos for upload and create every type of content for the Web. It works, but only if it’s quality material. Remember that as you create great quality content.
Use searchable keywords, with good headlines and solid body copy in blog posts. Good quality content will positively impact your rankings. Make sure to avoid articles that have 10 or more linked keywords — this is considered a poor form in content marketing and can negatively impact your company’s rankings.
Share Your Content
Share all your company content! Put images on photo-sharing social networks like Pinterest and others. Place your videos on Youtube and embed them into your blog posts. Create slideshows and place them on your Facebook page. Tell the world about all of these on Twitter.
The Web is a big place and the more you add your content to social media sites and reach out to well-known bloggers, the better chance your content will spread successfully around the Internet.
