Content marketing? One of the best approaches to building your brand!

Content marketing? One of the best approaches to building your brand!

Content Marketing is basically a marketing approach pivoted on delivering consistent and relevant content to drive profitable customer action. Am I going too far? Let me explain.

Content marketing is the simple way of driving traffic and sales for your brand. Most of your customers are not going to buy from you the first time they hear about your venture. There is a lot of processing that is happening in your consumer’s mind before committing to a purchase. When you involve content writing into your brand marketing, you publish well-researched, informative content that builds a sense of authority and trust around your business.

How do you go about it? Here’s a few things you need to keep in mind before starting on with it. Let’s dive.

Make a note of the basics of content writing:

·     Keep the end in mind before you begin- You don’t want to stare into the screen blankly with no idea in mind. Draft a skeleton of the content you’re writing and see how it helps you! When you begin on an article, you aren’t left hanging because you already know what to write about next. As a writer, as and when I developed the habit of executing my content blueprint, it has helped me a lot and saved so much of my time!

·     Do a keyword research come what may- Your content is educational and entertaining! But it receives no value if the audience doesn’t even find it first. Understand your fundamentals, help yourself rank higher on the pages of Google and set yourself apart from others.

·     Possess an on-page SEO blueprint- Every piece that you will produce has to be clearer than your skin. Messy content is not something everyone’s fond of because it’s irritating. That’s squarely why you might want to create a SEO blueprint to apply to every blog post that you write.

·     Stay conversational and avoid jargon- The voice and tone that you use in your content makes all the difference. Staying conversational in your content might seem to break the grammatical rules because your focus shifts to the targeted audience and addressing them as such. Don’t expect every customer hopeful to know what you’re talking about. Adding a bunch of jargon in your content has never really helped anyone. Keep it simple.

·     Spice up the content with relatable photos and videos- Articles aren’t newspapers. Walls of text only sum up to readers potentially skipping it. So how do you get rid of them? Visuals! Visuals make your content fun, entertaining, sum up your ideas and also potentiate the points you make.

·     Editing process is the cherry to the top- Its time for the edit! This is when you clean your mistakes, add more pointers and probably reorder your content. The primary aim of editing is to make the content easier to swallow and make it as useful as possible to your readers.  

·     Draw a content calendar for each month- It is, as you can guess, a calendar including all of your company’s content plan for a month. They have the same benefits of designing an outline for your blog- saves more time and energy. (Make sure you have a consistent content calendar)

Developing a structure for your content is extremely important to ensure you have covered your points at the appropriate junctions of your writing. Also, a well-built text allows the readers to follow through your squabble and navigate through the text. A rational flow is of the essence to a cohesive text.

The structure of your content should include and exclude some things like this:

ü Stay clear and concise- Content that delivers the point quickly and effectively is preferred over a boring random content.

ü A thorough research- Performing a thorough research offers you a wider perspective and hence delivers a flawless, organic looking content.

ü Professionalism- On the verge of creating your online presence, make sure you don’t wrong by getting too casual. Stick to where you come from.

ü Proofread- Don’t let silly issues like spelling mistake, incorrect sentences and wrong deliveries spoil your content. It is frustrating. Read, and fix your errors.

â Don’t include any of this

û Offensive content- A content must never be obscene. Writing or creating an offensive article could portray you to be insensitive and land you in trouble.

û Complication- While pursuing creativity, unnatural content with complex sentences and concerns sets off unnecessary.

û Keeping it dry- I am contradicting my own words, I know, don’t attack me. But while you try making your content simple make sure it doesn’t get dull. It must be easy to understand yet enjoyable.

û Plagiarism- This is a big negative! Research and provide authentic content to your readers. Use a plagiarism checker instead and fix your errors.

 This brings me to my next point.

How to choose the right topic for your post?

8 out of 10 readers don’t read through your content after your headlines so that makes it only 2 out of 10 readers that actually click through your article. So how do you produce an article that produces more clicks?

1.  Your content must be blog worthy- With the encroaching, growing competition around you, its necessary for your blog topics to be blog worthy. If you want your blog post to rank well, you will have to combine the right keywords with user intent to ensure your article is displayed correctly.

For example, when you look up in Google for “Laptop bags”. It shows you a variety of Laptop bags that you might find amusing to buy for your laptop. It doesn’t display an article or blog on your result page. That’s precisely why you need to know your right keywords to rank higher in Google for people to click through.

2.  Choose high volume keywords- The best articles are built along specific high volume and low competition keywords that fuel organic search. This combination of keywords gives you a better chance at ranking for those keywords and hence push through traffic to your blog posts.

3.  Writing for an enduring audience- Not stating that non-evergreen content is off limits. That type of content has its place but its benefits are usually short lived. Whereas, an evergreen content remains relevant over time. It drives visitors to your blogs for weeks, months and even years while still turning in the same value and information.

4.  Let your topic must make sense to Google- Have you experienced this time when Google gets back at you with search results that have very little or nothing to do with your original topic? That is because Google is struggling to make sense out of your headline. If you want the best chance at ranking well, get clear on how you want Google to translate your idea.

5.  The longer, the nicer- I know it seems obvious but there are many definitions to a long-form content. As I have understood and as per a HubSpot data, for SEO, the length of an ideal blog post must vary from 2,100 up-to 2,400 words. You might receive a lot of search traffic, but not a lot of return traffic and engagement metrics with normal length content. Switch your tactic. Incorporate long form content in your content strategy and see how it impacts positively on your ranks in the SERPs.

Well, we have landed on my favourite part to do while writing content. Images and Videos. I know I said this, but it was only a brief up there. But what I’m about to tell you is the importance of visuals. It really and clearly makes a difference.

Our lives are all about attraction. It spurts out its own magic.

Us humans are visual beings and all of us are attracted to beauty in our everyday life.

When you exploit the existence of images and videos and incorporate it in your content, it adds more value to your message. Visuals like this, are eye-catching, that captivate your readers minds which herein helps them to focus to get a better idea of the message that you are trying to convey. They lean towards getting a better understanding behind these images.

Most of all, lean on science; Reading just walls of texts is deficient for humans. Content that involves visuals are easier to remember and are remembered more often.

Make sure you add on eye-catching, relevant and relatable images and probably even gifs to make your content a little more-lively.

You are probably thinking if you’ve created the impact now.

How to make sure you have?

When it boils down to passing on information in any given form, your main criteria should be to make sure your content has established a connection with its readers. It can be scenario of your content having touched them at some point of your article.

For your readers to cook out a better understanding out of your content, check if you:

·     have empathized with them while writing your content

·     stayed conversational throughout. For example, the usage of “you and I” is better preferred over the usage of “you and we” as it adds to an emotional value.

·     know your readers and what you’re offering them

·     have used real-world examples for a better understanding

Here, you can count on some of these tools to get the best out of your content:

1.   HubSpot's blog topic generator

HubSpot’s topic generator is a free tool that overturns topics and titles after simply spilling out keyword/keywords that you are trying to focus on.

2.   Canva

Canva is such a magnificent imagine creation tool that cannot be praised enough. It helps you choose you image/video type from many different options and even choose a custom size.

3.   Grammarly

Grammarly is easily one of my most favourite tools to use. It is a type of processor which when entered with a text or file, fixes instantly over about 200 types of errors. It also helps optimize texts to make them more readable

4.   Evernote

This is an ideal tool that allows you writers to gather and sort information as quickly as possible. It also has this amazing feature that manages your deadlines for you, and allow users to the share any information with clients.

5.   Copyscape

Copyscape is an online anti-plagiarism tool that is aimed at finding out whether unauthorized copies of your content have popped up elsewhere on the internet. Plagiarism is not a very good sign after-all.

6.   Google Ads keyword planner

This has to be pretty much the official keyword research tool because its Google’s own. It fully fulfils the keyword research needs whether it is designing a content or writing copies for a social media campaign. This tool could be your first pick to choose the perfect keywords for your writing.

Coming down to the main memorandum:

What is the significance of Content Marketing?

Content Marketing solely involves the creation and sharing of videos, blogs and various other online materials, which intends to stimulate interest in its products or services but does not explicitly promote a brand.

It not only works its charm for building trust, spawning leads and encouraging customer loyalty but also has become the new normal from the other (consumer) end. It, in itself, helps to evolve what customers expect out of the brands they are interacting with. It has become so important to all of us because it mainly answers the audiences’ questions. Apart from the goodness that it normally provides, for your business, it also-

·     revamps brand authority

·     polishes SEO efforts

·     enables your brand to show off your subject expertise

·     sets yourself apart from other competitors

But hey, why am I badgering you to employ the right form of content writing into your brand marketing?

You have already guessed the answer. It helps you stay answerable to your audience. High-quality consistent and engaging content knocks the audience more than any other technique. Content writing provides your brand with the solace to create cohesive pieces of insightful information. It is, you can say, one of the significant factors to determine the growth and success of your brand. Stay consistent though, consistency is the key to success.