Author: Katia Martin | Kanguru Digital Agency Montreal
The average online user is bombarded by approximately 5,000 -10,000 ads per day. You’d expect this to be a monthly metric, but unfortunately, it’s a daily one. If you are feeling shocked, it’s probably that you, like many others, have adapted to this evolving “adscape” by becoming much better at ignoring the ad noise. Pushy marketing tactics don’t seem to work anymore and marketers are left to their survival by coming up with better ways to get users to listen. You might have heard about content marketing but what is this ominous marketing tactic and why does it seem to be trending? Let’s take a look at it together.
What is Content Marketing?
Firstly, content marketing uses a more organic approach through a marketing technique called “pull marketing”. This means that instead of aggressively “pushing” a message to an audience, your audience reaches out to you. This seems like an ideal position to be in but how do you get users to search for you if they don’t know who you are? There are multiple ways of doing this. If you think of your audience as waves of traffic searching for various topics or following certain trending topics out of their own interest, it makes this concept a lot easier to grasp. Let me explain.
Is Content Marketing Effective?
According to Forbes Magazine, content marketing can lead to 74% increase in lead generation. Obviously, results will vary based on industry, and overall search volumes for that particular topic. For our client Scrappy.ca, we were able to increase their online visibility by 70% and are now using their SEO strategy as their main source of new leads.
So clearly there are some major benefits but obviously strategizing it correctly becomes a crucial part in how well it performs. First and foremost, you need to decide which type of content works best for your audience and how to best reach your goals. Here are some considerations when strategizing the type of content marketing that should work best.
So which type of content marketing should I use?
Ideally, it should be on a variety of platforms and each one has their own advantages and disadvantages. But there are many other types of content marketing that can apply for different purposes. Many marketers have become excellent surfers by riding these topic and trend waves and therefore reaching their audiences organically. Here are a few examples of how this can be applied:
Trend Surfers: Social Content Creation
Social media, in general, can add an authentic charisma to a brand, making it more relatable. However, unless you already have a following, social media posts alone won’t mean you’ll get any traction. Riding social trend waves means you’ll be piggybacking on already trending topics in order to get some traction. Social media users often follow these trend waves because they are either participating in it themselves, are passionate about the trend or are simply entertained by it. This can be done in many ways. For example, through social justice trends, challenge trends (i.e., the mannequin challenge), user-generated content, piggybacking on trending posts, etc.
When it comes to Social Media Content, keep it real.
There are a lot of advantages to making your brand relatable, just keep one thing in mind while creating your social content, keep it authentic. Ever see someone who was just trying too hard to be the “cool kid”? It can be a little off-putting and even look a little needy for your attention. It can have somewhat of the same effect with organizations that are trying too hard to be trendy. Use your own internal company culture to organically set the tone for what level you can use in your social platforms so that it appears authentic and natural. Find what makes your organizational culture unique and emulate that on an online platform.
Topic Surfers: Information Content Creation
People are constantly looking for information on various topics. If you want to surf this wave, then you’ll be creating content giving your audience valuable information that they are looking for. This can take the form of blog posts, informational videos, infographics, podcasts, emails, and webinars. Essentially any kind of source of information that can be found in search results. At Kanguru Digital Agency, we specialize in surfing that topic wave by building SEO strategies through the use of blog posts. Here are some tactics that we regularly use to help build our strategies.
Top 10 tips building your information content strategy.
1. Get an audit done for your website.
At Kanguru Digital Agency, we start every blog project with a free SEO audit. This ensures that you have a structurally sound foundation to get traction on your blog as quickly as possible. If you have some structural problems within your website, it could cause all your hard work to go unnoticed by search engines.
2. Do your keywords research before selecting a topic.
You might think that you know exactly the topics that your audience is looking for, and you might also be right. However, quite often there are variances in lingo, competition, volume, etc that can affect your results. In order to ride the content marketing waves, make sure that you are actually riding an existing wave by selecting the right keywords. These alone can affect the results of your blog post. There are a variety of keyword tools available online that are there to help you make a more informed selection of keywords. The ideal keywords have a good balance between keyword difficulty and volume. Pick a sweet spot that you think can work for your business and use that as your topic selection.
3. Build your SEO strategy
Once you have done your research on the trending keywords and topics, you’ll need to build a calendar. Make sure you have a good variety of interesting topics that you’ll be able to write lots about. Be realistic with your calendar. If you are overly ambitious with your writing, you can easily jump ship after month 1. Remember, consistency is key to getting results. If you are new to building content and developing an SEO strategy, it might be a bit of a process before getting results.
4. Building Authority on a Topic
If you want people to listen to you, you’ll need to build some credible authority within your topic of choice. This ensures that readers are motivated to follow your advice. Credentials, certifications, awards, are all great ways to build that authority. Having a bio on the author at the end of the page is a great place to insert any pertinent credentials.
5. Writing Relatable Informational Content
Authority alone is not usually enough to get people to listen. Making your content interesting and easy to read is equally important.There is nothing worse than dry informational content. Think about it, who wants to listen to an expert going through his dry, technical jargon. Reading about it is no different. Remember your audience is not an expert and most of them have low attention spans. They are coming to you so that they can better understand the topic and losing them within the first few sentences is a great way to get them to bounce and find their information elsewhere. Make your content relatable and fun to read and steer away from technical jargon, whenever possible.
6. So how do you make your content tone work for you?
Having worked with many brands, I find that quite often the default setting usually tends to be the “professional” tone. In all fairness, there is a time and a place for a brand to sound professional, but there is also an opportunity to engage with your audience a lot more through a more familiar tone. Unfortunately, the professional, authoritative tone is somewhat of a “safe zone” and sadly, using a more engaging tone isn’t utilized nearly enough throughout their marketing channels. For example, blogs and social media platforms are ideal channels for that conversational and more familiar tone.
7. Make sure your content is highly related to your product.
Google’s systems are not isolated and when you are writing blog content that it could perceive as not being highly relevant to the content of your entire site, it can affect your overall ranking negatively. So just make sure when creating your content that you are also including keywords related to your product.
8. The importance of the balance between writing content for your audience and writing your content to be SEO optimized.
When starting to write blog content, it is tempting to engage in keyword stuffing or alternatively to simply write to make sure that your content is interesting to read but to minimally ensure that your content is SEO optimized. But the best content is a balance between the two. When writing for SEO, it’s easy to lose sight of your brand persona and engaging tone which can make your blog grammatically correct yet incredibly dull to read. Make sure that you equally prioritize your user experience, readability and keyword insertion by starting with the tone that you would like your blog to have and that is often not always the same tone as the overall website.
9. Don’t sleep on user experience or your users will sleep on your blog content.
Users have an average attention span of approximately 5 seconds before they move out of your site and on to other content if they don’t immediately find what they are looking for. Making your content easy to skim through is an excellent way to get users what they want to see.For example, having short and sweet paragraphs with descriptive headlines and an anchored table of contents makes for a much better user experience.
10. You’ve done all of this… now what?
Business owners and marketers can often get frustrated with creating content expecting audiences to engage with their blog right away and to appear in search engines. This is often a process of figuring out what works and what doesn’t and even if you know what you are doing and are doing everything correctly you will most likely only start reaping the rewards months into your blogging SEO journey. For this reason, many marketers and business owners often abandon too quickly before getting any results. Here are the best tips to ensure success in creating engaging blog content for your audience. For some, it can take 3 months, for others it can take over a year of consistent content creation. Track your progress through the Google search console and just hang tight till you get some movement cause consistency is so important in building that traction.
In conclusion, riding the content marketing wave requires a strategic, patient approach. With users bombarded by thousands of ads daily, content marketing offers a way to cut through the noise by delivering valuable, engaging content that draws the audience in naturally. By leveraging trends, building authority, and maintaining a balance between SEO optimization and user-friendly content, brands can create meaningful connections with their audience. Success in content marketing takes time and consistency, but with the right strategy and persistence, it can yield substantial results in terms of visibility and lead generation. Stay the course, track your progress, and continue refining your content to meet the evolving needs of your audience.
