Marketing 101

Custom and targeted content is the future of marketing. Decision makers and marketing managers believe that they are a far cry from truly leveraging targeted content. In today’s digital age, customers are more knowledgeable and aware of their needs and options, on the other hand there is no shortage of content on the internet. More than 2 million articles are published every day. If you are a blogger or content publisher, all that content poses a challenge but luckily for you, the content marketing strategies are also evolving and the solution lies in adoptability.

we will show you how you can simplify your content marketing strategy and boost its effectiveness with cautious tweaking.

Capture the imagination of your audience

The golden rule of content marketing is to create engaging content. If you know what your audience wants, it will become easier for you to engage them with content which is customer centric. One example of this is personalized content. According to Forrester Consulting’s 2014 Thought Leadership paper, most of the respondents (around 98%) agreed that personalizing content is important for a brand’s long-term and short-term objectives. You don’t have to be an extraordinary writer to do that, but you need to get inside the head of your audience. Capture your potential costumer’s thoughts and imagination so you can stand out of the crowd.

Expand your reach by adding visuals to your content

A human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than textual info. People tend to attract more towards visual content like images, videos, gifs etc. You can make your blog posts more engaging by placing related images between text. One rule is to add an image after every 350 words of content. The header image of a blog post is the most important one as it is visible while social media sharing, and can attract a large number of viewers. Infographics are also a good way to maximize viewer engagement. A Buzzsumo study found that infographics still get more shares than any other content type.

Help people stay one step ahead

In this digital age, information travels on a much faster pace and keeping up with the trends is getting harder. People want to be ahead of the curve and the anticipation of the unknown is what grabs the viewer. Help them stay one step ahead by calculated guesses and logical predictions in your field of expertise. This is the reason rumor website are so many and so successful, but you have to be careful as too many wrong predictions can cause damage to your website reputation.

Podcasts are the next big thing

Podcasts are being termed as the next big revolution in content marketing with New York Magazine declaring a “Great Podcast Renaissance”. There have been 1.1 billion UK downloads of BBC’s podcasts since 2004. Podcasts are becoming famous with US drivers. According to some corporate estimates, by the end of this year nearly half of the new cars sold will have internet connectivity and by 2025, it will be all of them. With this kind of potential, it is the perfect time to start your own podcast for content marketing because they need less resources and are easy to produce.

Enhance your content effectiveness by publishing as social-first

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term “social-first”, a social-first strategy revolves around social media and building social audience as a primary goal. Many of the corporate brands like Ford and Nescafe are redefining their marketing around social-first strategy to directly interact with end users of their product. Keep in mind that social-first strategy is not same as using these platforms to drive traffic. According to Jeff Moriarty of Johnston Press, “It’s no longer enough to simply think of these platforms as places from which we can entice audiences to our own properties. For many, once they’re on Facebook, they’re staying on Facebook, so we need to put our content where the audiences are”.

Structure your website and content for maximum user interaction

After landing on some blog post, an average reader decides in the first 10 seconds, whether he will stay on that particular post or not. In case like this it is very important to have a professional website template and proper page structure plus the blog posts should be written in engaging style. Every article should be divided into proper headings and sub-headings. Paragraphs should be short enough to be readable, but long enough to develop an idea. There should be clearly visible social media sharing options at the end of every blog post.

Include photos and bio of your staff

People bond best with other people, not with faceless organizations. Try making your marketing more human and connect with your audience on a more personal level. Best way to do that is to add a photo of the writer next to his/her biography. Your “About page” should be unique and personal so the viewers can relate to your story and inspiration.

Using these tools and methods will enable you to generate effective content and span it to a larger audience but keep in mind that the fundamentals are still the same. Great creative ideas and great content. Finding interesting topics and telling them well are still the most important things.

Tell us your favorite way to amplify the value of your content?

Moving forward, which strategies and platforms do you plan to focus on?

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