To create an effective marketing strategy, you need to educate your audience about your solutions and make them feel confident about choosing you. Free content is one of the best ways to accomplish both of these goals at once.
What is Content Marketing
Content marketing generates leads and customers by consistently producing relevant information for your target audience. It is used to acquire new customers and increase engagement of existing ones through blogs, email newsletters, or e-books.
Here are five ways to use content creation in your marketing strategy.
Use Free Content To Attract Potential Customers
Strategy is everything if you want to establish your authority in any niche. People are turning to the internet to seek information and answers, and you want to be the one who offers that.
By using blog posts and high-quality content, you can establish your expertise at the first point of contact with your audience.
Everyone wants to buy from a brand that they can trust. Online businesses need to focus on making their content strong. Customers want businesses to be as transparent as possible, and content is the most effective way of doing this. It doesn’t matter if it’s about your product, customer reviews, or anything else — good content builds trust.
Connect with your target market by providing free information. You can offer eBooks or blog posts tutorials related to what you do. Put your name out there while your customers are getting informed about topics related to them.
Those who are satisfied with the content on your site are more likely to want to connect and learn more from you in other ways (like paying for a consultation). Free but valuable content will make establishing relationships with potential members easier.
Connect With Your Customers on Social Media
Your social media strategy is crucial to your success. Every business needs a platform to share its products, business news, and updates. Without robust digital marketing strategies, brands risk losing traffic and opportunities for engagement.
In business, it’s all about gaining people’s trust first, before trying to sell them something. But how do you gain their trust? You give them what they want! Offer free content to educate potential customers on how you can help solve their problems. Give before you get.
Be human, transparent, and authentic by providing value without expecting anything in return at first, making your customers far more likely to become paying customers down the road.
Use your social networking channels to share content from your website with your followers. This way, they will be updated with the resources available on your website.
Also, to generate more interest and engagement, you can like, share, and comment on other people’s posts on social networking sites. Try doing this on Facebook groups that are relevant to your audience.
Looking for a better way to connect with and engage your audience? Learn how to serve and connect with your audience by sharing your knowledge and earning from your passion. Check out our article on How to Start a Successful Membership Business.
Give Customers Access to Exclusive Promotions
Sometimes, it’s not enough to offer a free content sample of your product or service. You need incentives to encourage people to act and make a purchase from you.
If you have an email list or audience on the internet, try offering them exclusive coupons, promotions, and deals. Not only will that encourage immediate sales from your existing fan base, but it could also help attract new customers by way of word-of-mouth marketing. It’s similar to giving someone one bite of dessert before dinner.
It makes them hungry for more. But instead of food, give away valuable offers they can act on immediately. You might find they won’t say no when you eventually ask them to invest in your content via subscription fees or purchases.
The same goes for email signups. Send out occasional emails with exclusive offers such as discounts, special deals, and coupon codes.
Don’t be afraid to make these enticing offers, either. Send out short expiration dates that demand quick action and ensure that what you ask is worth their time. Remember: if they’re getting something worthwhile right now, then any effort on their part now (even signing up) will lead to a payoff later on.
Encourage Customers To Spread the Word About Your Services
Once you’ve created your free content, encourage viewers to share it via the internet platform. A good way of doing so is by adding a special offer in exchange for their sharing.
If they share your post on Twitter or Facebook, you can offer them a discount on your product or a coupon code. If they email 10 of their friends about it, you can give them exclusive insider information and so on.
This tactic will help you go viral with little effort—and, ultimately, get more people exposed to your brand. Remember: the more exposure you have as a brand, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative, will eventually lead to more people wanting to purchase.
Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or even free Google search to look for keywords relevant to your business and industry. You can use these terms as inspiration for possible topics of discussion.
Implement SEO Best Practices in Your Content
As you begin brainstorming ideas and researching trends, keep one eye on SEO best practices. SEO will help ensure that you rank well in search results and drive more traffic back to your site.
Search engines read web content differently than humans do. When a search engine reads your content, it looks for keywords and phrases it can understand. Here are more ways to make your content SEO friendly.
Use compelling titles and headings to give search engines a clearer picture of what your content is about—and they reward you with higher rankings.
Know your keywords
Before you write anything, know which keywords and phrases will be most valuable to your readers—and don’t waste space on unrelated ones. If you don’t know which words will attract readers, try keyword research or look at similar articles for inspiration.
You may find that writing content that appeals to your target audience can be tricky. When developing your content, it’s helpful to think about what topics are already being discussed in your industry and how you can give readers a different perspective on those topics.
Add keywords to your titles and headings
Make your titles and headings attractive for your readers while still telling search engines what they need to know by adding keywords.
Make It Informative. You want people who aren’t familiar with your topic area to click through and learn more; when they see your title or heading, they should know what information you’re providing.
Add a benefit to your titles so readers know why they should care. Readers come across tons of content every day. Why should they spend time on yours? Use a benefit-driven title and answer that question. For example, How to Write Product Descriptions That Generate Leads instead of just writing How to Write Product Descriptions.
Highlight crucial terms in boldface text so that even non-readers can skim through and get enough information to decide whether that page is worth clicking through.
Keep title length consistent
Since Google uses length as one factor in determining how important a piece of content is, keep consistent lengths among all titles and any subheadings on your site.
Google doesn’t specify a recommended title tag length, but most desktop and mobile browsers can display your title tag’s first 50–60 characters. Therefore, SEO experts recommend including 50 or 70 characters since this is what Google can display in its search results.
Conclusion
Crafting compelling content takes time and practice. It doesn’t have to be daunting, though; think of it as a creative challenge that can have a huge payoff: more prospects!
Well-written, creative content will help you stand out from your competitors in search results and drive traffic straight to your site.
If you plan carefully and think critically about what kind of content is likely to resonate with your target audience, you can take free content a step further by weaving subtle calls to action into your message.
