If you’re creating content for your brand, you need to be marketing it – properly. It’s crucial to leverage your content in multiple ways and across various platforms. This strategy is called content marketing; it is an essential marketing strategy, especially for blogs and online-only businesses.
According to HubSpot, the leading marketing automation platform adopted by agencies, “the purpose of content marketing is to create and share relevant written, downloadable, and visual media so your target audience can learn about your brand, expertise, and products or services.”
Simply put, any content marketing agency you hire should be doing the following things to further your business in the long run. Since these three strategies are so important, we implore you to reach out to your agency and ask them how they are handling these aspects of your business!
Develop a Content Program
Many companies drop content on their website and leave it there. While this seems like a good idea from a search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint, there are many more ways that you could be using this content in addition to it having its own page on your website.
Webinars
Let’s say, for example, that your blog writer comes up with a fantastic idea for a blog series. This content is developed and oriented for a text-based platform – and that’s fine. What your marketing specialists should see in this content is an opportunity. With a little bit of effort, restructuring, and a great narrator, this blog series could become a fantastic webinar. You can either monetize content like this or use it to draw in more subscribers and followers!
Case Studies
Another missed opportunity is often your personal experience; case studies are instrumental in sparking conversions. Real-life applications for your products or services will always be in demand. It’s simple: real people want to see actual results before they commit to anything.
Long-Form Content
One more content strategy you may wish to employ is that of long-form content. These are long articles – usually 700-1,800 words a piece – that dig deep into a topic or event. Any long-form content on your website should be relevant to your brand; these pieces generally carry more weight for SEO purposes. Long-form content can come in a few different forms, like ebooks, cornerstone blog content, guides, and reports.
If you have an idea for this type of content for your website, reach out to your marketing team; any good content marketing specialist should be able to help you get from idea to reality.
Ongoing SEO Management
Once you start down the content marketing path, SEO becomes a significant factor in whether your business sees conversions. Seasoned professionals in the content marketing field know how to use keywords efficiently, headings properly, and source code to their advantage. From image “alt attributes” to metadata, your content marketing agency should be on top of it all.
Proper Social Media Management
While paying for advertisements on search engines and local radio can be effective, many business owners don’t realize how much free marketing they’re missing out on when they forgo social media. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone in the USA without at least one social media profile, so it stands to reason that your business should be on every platform, too.
To get the most bang for your buck (and time) on social media, you’ll need to develop catchy taglines and popping graphics. The best social media marketing giants post a lot of content continuously. Your content marketing agency should be posting regularly for you and using relevant, popular hashtags to help your business get more traction.
If you’re looking at all of this thinking that these steps would be time-consuming, you’re absolutely right. As a business owner, you’re already short on time; there’s a good reason marketing agencies have been growing in size and number. If you haven’t seen this level of support from your content marketing agency, it’s time to switch ships; we’re happy to help your business finally leverage its content effectively.
This post is courtesy of MMC Content Manager Charlene Briganty