Businesses spend a substantial amount of time and resources developing content for consumption by both existing and prospective clients. And unfortunately, sometimes the strategy used to promote it functions as a black hole that causes your content to vanish into digital space. In order to ensure that your hard work pays off, try some of these content marketing best practices and make the most of your content online.
Share it on social media
Social media is more than just an outlet for sharing photos of your cat wearing glasses and complaining about the person driving the car in front of you. Social media is an extremely effective online public relations and marketing tool that can help businesses maintain their brand and stay in the minds of their target audience. By sharing your content on social media, you are bringing attention to your content and educating your followers, which consequently draws positive attention to your business and positions your company as an expert in the field. An added perk: search engines see social-driven traffic as validation of your brand/site, so you might see a boost in your rankings.
Repurpose it for alternative initiatives
Producing meaningful content can be a time consuming task. For this reason alone, it’s both a shrewd and resourceful idea to find ways to re-use your content. For example, your company could re-package a blog post as a whitepaper and offer it on a landing page that visitors can download after providing their contact information. Not only will this extend your content, but it will provide your company with new contacts that can be nurtured for conversion.
Optimize it for search engines
93% of online experiences begin with a search engine¹. Optimizing your content for search engines will help ensure that individuals actively looking for your content can find it. This requires a comprehensive understanding of how search engine algorithms work and how to construct your content in a way that appeals to them. For starters, do your research and make sure the title, text and meta data are rich in keywords that have an opportunistic search volume and relatively low competition.
Send it to your mailing list
Email marketing is still alive and well. In fact, according to ExactTarget, 77% of consumers prefer to receive permission based marketing communications through email. Consider developing a monthly or bi-monthly email newsletter for your subscribers that promotes your recently-produced marketing content. This will draw additional attention to your content and potentially convince a current or prospective client that your expertise, products and services can solve their problems or help meet their business objectives.
Incorporate it into other content you produce
As a business, it’s likely that a good portion of the content you produce is similar, or at least relatable in theme. Such similarity often provides great opportunities to link specific terms or phrases within one piece of content to another that is specifically focused on that topic. As you produce content, try to identify key terms/ phrases that could be linked to another content item published in the past. It will extend the life of your content and potentially open up new doors for your business.
Syndicate it to relevant sites and blogs online
Simply setting up an RSS feed will enable you to easily syndicate select published content to strategic online resources, such as informative website or blogs that are specific to your industry. Not only does this type of dissemination significantly expand the reach of a particular piece of content, but over time works to increase brand awareness and credibility among your target audience.
Developing an effective content marketing strategy is much more involved than simply publishing content on your website. Start maximizing the effectiveness of your online content by following some of these basic content marketing best practices.
¹Search Engine Journal.