Guidelines for Effective Content Marketing

Content marketing is becoming an increasingly popular marketing strategy for many businesses. More and more companies and individuals are using email newsletters, press releases and social media posts to promote their services and products. Here are some great tips which will help you carry out an effective content marketing campaign.

1. Establish your goals

Before creating any content, you should first establish your business or organizational goals. This way, you will be able to come up with a content marketing strategy which will help you accomplish these goals. Make sure all your goals are specific, measurable and have a deadline attached to them. For instance, you could aim at increasing your email subscribers by 20% by November 30^th, 2015.

2. Determine your target audience

Once you have established your goals, take time to identify the target audience. This will involve gathering as much data as possible about them. Find out their ages, gender, geographical location, education background and economic status. In addition, you need to understand what their interests are. What are they discussing on social media? What are they reading? What are they passionate about? Getting conversant with your target audience will enable you to adopt a more effective content marketing strategy.

3. Choose your strategies

When it comes to content marketing, you can choose between short and long form strategies. Short form strategies include Google+ and Facebook status updates as well as tweets. Long form includes longer copy such as press releases and blog posts. For effective content marketing, it would be advisable to use both kinds of strategies.  Whatever strategies you choose, it is very important to encourage sharing and conversation. Take time to reply to comments left by your audience. Encourage them to share any useful information and links with others within their networks.

4. Have an editorial schedule

Having an editorial plan is vital for the success of your content marketing strategy. Decide how many blog posts you will write and schedule dates for publishing. Figure out how many tweets or Facebook updates you want to post every week. Though setting up and sticking to a schedule can be very demanding, it pays off in the long run. To enhance your chances of success, you need to ensure that your content is very unique and helpful. Write great headlines which will draw people to read the rest of the content. However, avoid blatantly selling your product and instead focus on educating your audience. If the demand for content is overwhelming, it would be advisable to hire writers to help out. When it comes to email marketing, don’t forget to carry out A/B testing of your content before sending it out.

5. Be visible

One of the best ways of enhancing your visibility is by including popular keywords which are relevant to your product or industry within your content. You should also ensure that these keywords are added to your tags. Optimizing your posts will enhance your search engine rankings, thus making it easier for people to find you. In addition, you can create more visibility for your content using social media networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

6. Evaluate

Take time periodically to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. This can be done in different ways. For instance, you can check Google analytics for statistics such as bounce rates and page views. In addition, you could monitor the number of shares, +1s, likes or retweets on your posts. This information will show you whether your strategy is working or not. In case something is not working, figure out how it can be changed for better results.

Charles Mburugu is a webpreneur who writes for TechBlogKe. You can follow him on Twitter @techblogke