Gone are the days when businesses followed the traditional marketing model and invested in campaigns and advertisements on TV and newspapers. Back then, companies with bigger budgets generally had leverage. However, the digital age has levelled the playing field for smaller businesses.
All businesses invest in content marketing to keep themselves afloat. If you are new to content and you are a budding brand looking to establish an online presence, this article is for you.
Content marketing allows you to create content, publish it, distribute it, and analyze it to build your brand awareness in the best possible way.
Why is Content Marketing Important?
Here are specific reasons why content marketing is for you:
Content Creates Value
The only real way to stand out from your competition is to create value. Your audience has to benefit from your content to visit your site and buy your products. Content marketing allows you to create content to suit the needs of each individual, as opposed to running a traditional marketing campaign or ad that benefits no one. Content marketing involves creating content for your target audience. Building an email list helps you do this. There are a plethora of ways to build an email list. Consider looking up ‘how to use a drawing to build an email list at festivals‘.
Drive Traffic Using Content
Given how all business is online, you need to drive traffic to your website to get customers. They need to find you. Content marketing facilitates this. You can do this through email marketing, Social media marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and much more. Given the popularity of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, you can expect to find your target audience.
Use Content To Educate Your Audience
As mentioned, you need to create value. The best way to do that is to educate your audience and simplify concepts and ideas that they want to understand. Once you pick a niche and become a credible source of information for your target audience, you can expect to receive droves of traffic. The more valuable, credible, and consistent your content is, the more you will stand out, and higher the chances of generating leads and converting them into returning customers.
Also Read: 4 Killer Social Media Marketing Tips For Beginners
What kind Of Content Should You Create?
You can experiment with all kinds of content that are likely to benefit your target audience. Consider working on blog posts. You can experiment with long and short posts, depending on the topics you are tackling. Blog posts are great to explain broad concepts and ideas, feature products, and talk about brand updates and news.
Video content works well for tutorials, product reviews, Q&A sessions, unboxing, behind-the-scenes or bonus footage, vlogs, brand updates, and so much more. Video content is easily the most engaging form of content, which is why you should focus on creating videos for YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
How To Go About YouTube marketing?
Creating videos for YouTube and marketing them correctly can fetch you a ton of mileage. YouTube marketing involves creating videos that people will want to watch and optimizing your channel.
- To create videos that people want to watch, identify your niche, and create videos that your target audience will want to watch. If you are unsure, look at their competitors and check what kind of content your target audience is responding to. All of this is a part of researching and planning your content. You can experiment with short videos, long videos, short films, documentaries, music videos, animated videos, etc.
- Once you have an idea, come up with a script and a storyboard. Getting cast members on board and make sure everyone involved in the project knows their roles. Set a schedule to shoot and make sure you follow it to avoid wasting time and money.
- Use excellent equipment to shoot your video. Shoot your videos in natural lighting with an excellent camera or a phone that has a high-quality camera. Use a tripod to make sure your footage is not shaky. Also, get yourself an external audio recorder to get the best audio quality possible. Once you finish shooting, synchronize the audio and video using a video editor.
- Set up your YouTube channel with a catchy channel name, a high-quality profile picture, and a bio that explains what your brand is about. Be sure to include your contact information links to your website and social media handles.
- Use keyword research to look for keywords relevant to your field or niche that are being searched and include them in your video titles and descriptions to rank high on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Optimizing your content for the search engine is vital
- Be sure to use the most important part of the video in the beginning as a teaser to encourage people to watch it till the end.
- Another thing you should do is issue a Call-to-Action (CTA), compelling your audience to subscribe, comment, like, share, or visit your website. You can use YouTube cards, typically at the end of the video to do this. However, if you do not want to use YouTube cards, you can look up eliminating YouTube cards.
- Learn how to track your posts and gauge your videos’ performance using YouTube analytics. You can tweak your marketing strategy based on how your current content is doing. You have to measure the performance based on metrics like traffic, watch time, and so forth. Facebook and Instagram also allow you to track your posts and their performance through Facebook analytics and Instagram Insights, respectively.
- Lastly, make sure you cross-promote your content. Merely focusing on YouTube is not enough. Get your followers on other platforms to check out your YouTube videos. Share the links to your videos on Facebook and Instagram once they are up.
Use these tips to kickstart your content marketing campaign on the platforms mentioned above and drive heaps of traffic to your site.
