What is content marketing? There is a plethora of ways that you can describe the content marketing definition. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute actually lists six possible definitions for this marketing term.
The official, hand-selected definition is: “Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
If you want to really make your content stick online, put some of these time-tested methods that take advantage of the most effective content marketing trends into action. Read on to learn more.
Getting Started
Content marketing is a goal-orientated method that requires several directives.
- Quality content is the first step.
- Delivering something of value to the reader is incremental.
- Knowing how to reach and engage the user comes next.
- Driving consumer action via the content is the ultimate goal.
In order to make the most out of your content marketing methods, you’ll want to have a strong game plan in place from day one. A few considerations should be made while creating the content marketing strategy for your online store.
- For starters, if you are not an adept writer, you’ll need to acquire such talent.
- Secondarily, if you do not know how to target your content, you’ll also want some help.
- Thirdly, knowing how to place your content, when and where – e.g. syndication of it – is incremental in you seeing the return on investment for your time, money and efforts.
We’ll help you get there with this informative guide on a winning content marketing strategy that will help you not only reach your direct audience, but that will also help you engage your readers and even attract new readers that may not come from your organic demographic.
There are a lot of cogs in this wheel. However, if you take the time to properly apply these methods, you’ll be able to drive more traffic to your online store than ever before. And as we all very well know, traffic to your website equals conversions and a growing, loyal customer base.
Create a Content Marketing Strategy
You first step is to create a content marketing plan. It’s no easy feat; but it’s not impossible, either. To do so, you will want to make sure you have several things in place beforehand. We’ll drum down this list to help you expedite your efforts.
Start with your strategy first. We’ve included a helpful infographic (below) to give you head start on this. The five basic principles of a solid e-commerce content marketing strategy include: Awareness of need; consideration and research; analysis and comparison; encouraging the customer purchase (call-to-action); improving customer loyalty.
Creating Great Content
If you happen to be a capable writer with marketing experience, kudos. This will save you some money, but it will come at the sacrifice of your own time along the way. Generally speaking, it’s wise to focus your efforts on running your online store and to consider hiring either in-house or outsourced talent. You’re going to require a steady stream of content to effectively market your online store, so look for long term talent that you can rely on.
A number of outsourcing services are available. A few that top the list that you can run a Google search to find include: Scripted, iWriter, Text Broker and Content Mart. All of these services have impressive backgrounds and portfolios and offer competitive packages for their services. You can expect to pay anywhere from $20 to $35 per 400 words of content. Each service also offers up-sells and add-ons like social media management, blog management, syndication and more.
The SEO Factor
Today’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) requires critical thinking. As an online retailer, you may not have any expertise or experience in this arena. In this particular instance, it’s smart to go with a service provider that does, or to consider hiring in-house talent. While there are many aspects to getting pages to rank, the most important aspects are your page scores (loading time, content quality, links), and how it reads (grammar, style, prose, keywords, etc.).
Once you have identified the first step for content marketing strategy (awareness of need), you’ll need to conduct the next step: Research and analysis.
Ask yourself these questions along the way:
- What search terms are customers using to find your online store?
- What keywords can you include in new content that can help attract more visitors?
- What are your competitors doing that is helping them to rank higher for pages and search terms than you are?
Using programs like Moz, SEM Rush and Hit Tail, you can conduct keyword research to find the best terms for the content that you’d like to push out. These terms are called “keywords.” They are the general terms that a prospective customer would type in/info/hittail.comto a search engine to find your store (if and when it’s ranking for those results). If you can find search terms that are not as competitive as others, you can simply create quality content – following the content marketing strategy infographic we’ve provided above – and start ranking your products and services effectively.
Keyword research and content creation combine to create one of the most effective content marketing methods that you can consider during the present day. As the chart below reflects, those two initiatives can easily create a winning game plan that’s taken a step further when you apply the next methods we’ll deliver in this guide.
Using Long Tail Keywords
In order to be successful with your content outreach efforts, you have to assure that you are planning for the modern world of SEO. Trying to target short tail keywords (keywords that consist of two or fewer words) will usually not generate the results that you desire. That’s because the competition is too fierce and there are too many results. But there is a way that you can do this.
Long tail keywords (keywords that are three or more words) are highly effective. A lot of people actually search using three or more keywords when trying to find things these days; namely because they also realize that they have to tailor their results to find the most relevant content.
Here’s a good example of how long tail keywords can be more beneficial in your ranking strategy and why they are an incremental facet of modern day SEO, and content outreach and marketing efforts. The keyword shown in the screenshot below, “beg bug remedies,” has over 2 million results. Even though it’s three words, it would be difficult to get a page ranked due to the competitive nature of the search term. In addition, it would also make content outreach more difficult, too.
Keyword Research Tips
Targeting keywords starts with proper research. Thankfully, there are some reliable services that you can consider using to achieve these goals.
A service called HitTail (mentioned above) will help you find the most relevant long tail keywords for your website and content outreach efforts. HitTail plugs into your website via a small snippet of code that you embed on the home page. It then communicates with your inbound analytics and uses a variety of algorithms to generate a list of the most effective long tail keywords that you can use.
The service will find out what keyword strings people are using to find your website. It will then derive the most beneficial keywords for your marketing plan. You will also receive weekly keyword suggestions with a to-do list. And you can even order articles that you simply post to your website later.
Creating Engaging Topics
Another area of content outreach that you will have to tackle is the topic of the content that you plan on using. Again, there are some helpful services that you can use to find good topics with relative ease. One of the most useful services is called BlogAbout, and it’s entirely free to use, too.
Take a long tail keyword that was provided to you by HitTail and plug it into BlogAbout. The topic generator will then go to work to dole out several topic ideas. You can use or modify these as you see fit to get ideas for titles, and to help in creating more engaging titles that will encourage users to read your content.
The Link Bait Strategy
One of the primary goals of content outreach and marketing is to attract visitors to your website. But you can only accomplish this goal if related websites and blogs are linking back to your posts, and if people are reading them and sharing them within their social circles.
Herein lies the most difficult task for you: Creating content that attracts users and provides a problem-solution format. This is the type of content that is the most useful and effective. That’s because readers want to find something that pertains to them and to their industry, and that helps them solve a pertinent issue or learn more.
A great example of effective content outreach can be seen in the screenshot provided below of a recent blog we created called: These 2018 Retargeting Statistics Prove it Works.
This specific content helps the reader become aware of how retargeting using services for native ads, like Ad Roll, can help them convert customers who have bounced from their store without making a purchase by remarketing to them after the fact and earning second-chance sales from cart abandoners. It concludes with a soft call-to-action of our e-commerce CRM solution, after providing the user with distinct value.
Along the way, through our research and development phase, we decided that we wanted to also rank for the search term “2018 retargeting statistics.” This made sense, given we’re an e-commerce service provider, and we deliver a new and trending solution for cross-channel CRM. As you can see from this screenshot provided below, we’re already ranking in the #1 position for this keyword, out of a total of 5 million-plus results. You can bet that this content marketing strategy helps us attract targeted, organic visitors that find value in the content, and that ultimately have a strong conversion potential to our software solution.
Attracting New Readers
Writing amazing content and sharing it on your social circles on just one of the steps. The next step that you will want to take is found with syndication and the integration of proven content outreach methods that help you attract new readers. You have plenty of options as far as service providers are concerned here. But one big name can also help you accomplish this goal: OutBrain.
OutBrain lets you syndicate content by simply adding the URLs to your dashboard. You set your per click budget and the service engages your content across broad and major online networks. These include household names like: ABC, MSN, Inc.com, Geek.com, PC World, and many more.
You are able to see analytics for each post and what they are costing you per week. This can enable you to make some key adjustments so that you can create more compelling content, based upon your A/B testing, that gains the most beneficial response.
Make sure you syndicate your posts using a tool like SproutSocial, which allows you to procure social syndication across a broad number of channels with one click. Of course, some initial tinkering will be necessary. You’ll have to set-up all of the social accounts inside of the software before you can start posting content.
SproutSocial lets you post to all your networks in just a few clicks. What’s more, it will scan your followers and the inner circles within your networks looking for related posts. You can then target specific users to engage with content, thus helping you reach even more prospective candidates.
The Retargeting Effect
As users to find your content and come to your website, many of them will bounce, or leave, the website. But you can still recapture these visitors by using a retargeting system to attract their interest again with a valued added proposition.
A great service for accomplishing this is called Ad Roll. It lets you use image ads that are targeted to bounced users as they visit other sites. Studies have shown that the conversion rates on retargeting are impressive. With Ad Roll, you set a PPC budget, link it to your website and let it run on auto-pilot so you can reengage users. It’s just one of 7 Reasons Why We Love Retargeting and You Should Too.
Need even more content marketing tips? Read our related guide: Here’s How Branded Content Helps You Stand Out.
In parting, we leave you with one last bit of illustrated advice, an infographic (which are wonderful content outreach tools, too, by the way) that entails all the steps that you need to take to design your own effective content marketing machine.
