7 Shocking Secrets No One Tells You About Content Marketing

Content Marketing has replaced most other methods of online marketing out there. As it is one of the most effective means of reaching out to a target market.

 

With a well-thought-out content marketing plan, your business could connect and build a strong relationship with the most important people in any given business, be it partners, potential hires or possible customers. Therefore, your content has to convince and convert people to your side.

 

According to OptinMonster, “72% of marketers say content marketing increases engagement. Also, 72% say it has increased the number of leads”.

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What is Content Marketing?

According to Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and keep a defined audience — to drive profitable customer action”.

 

The number one reason to use a very good content marketing strategy as part of your marketing plan is that your audience is online and marketing content is a great and cheap way to reach them where they are.

 

Let’s take a look at these 7 content marketing importance and secrets no one has talked to you about:

 

Tip #1: It Takes Empathy, Generosity and Courage

 

If your potential customer is looking at your content and he is not nodding in agreement, then your content is missing one of its most important ingredients: Empathy.

 

Brand-centric content is irrelevant in today’s marketing scenario because your target audience has easy access to information and options. There’s always the possibility of losing a potential buyer to a competitor whose communication is customer-focused.

 

So, you need to focus more on what concerns your potential customers and suitors, talk about things that are valuable to them, concern them and solve a problem for them. Put yourself in their position and see things from their perspective.

 

Successful contents are contents that add value and have an impactful takeaway on the audience.

To optimize your content for your customers/audience, ask yourself

• What do they think about it?
• Why does it matter to them?
• How do they regard their challenges?
• What are their goals?

 

Tip #2: You’re Ignoring Your Most Valuable Assets

 

People are your most valuable asset. They drive social media. They are the biggest social media marketing assets. Without their participation in terms of uploads, likes and shares, social media would stop to move and become static like any other website on the internet.

 

Your article, content or blog post should help the viewer achieve a goal and overcome their current or future problems. Information is easy to get on the internet now and even with no cost but useful and actionable information is rare.

 

Tip #3: First Impression Matters (Focus on Titles, Meta Description and Lead Image)

 

There are over 2 million blog posts each day. Facebook posts published each day are over 4 billion. While there are over 500 million tweets each day rolling on Twitter. LinkedIn also has over a million professional article publishers. Thus, it is important to be aware of what and who you’re competing against.

 

You will want your post to be among the few noticed and clicked on by your social media audience. How do you ensure that it is?

 

When you scroll through your social media feed, what do you see? A title, descriptive text and an image. This makes your content get enough recognition it needs and that is all that is required.

Regard your title and lead image as advertorial copy for your content

Only a few percentages of the total posts published get read on social media and to be on the higher side of the statistics, you need to have an effective and attractive title. A good title is specific, interesting and intriguing when you:

Craft the title after your article is written

To define your article and give it a definite direction, you could use a working title. But reserve the creation of the actual title for after your writing is done, that way you are better positioned to title it with better material.

Add urgency, emotion and a reference to your audience

Calls to action words are compelling and action-oriented. Words inciting emotion are also compelling. Use both on your title and address your audience when you can.

Optimize for search

An important factor in earning that click is discoverability. Include the right search keywords in your title. The right search keywords are words that your audience is likely to enter into a search bar when seeking the content that you’re publishing. You must plan your content marketing for SEO.

Use visuals as a social media imperative

Humans were made to be visual. The brain is likely to keep 70% of what it sees than texts. Text is in fact ‘unnatural’ to our brains.

 

Include a great visual to go with your content. People connect well with images that have human faces expressing an emotion.

 

Tip #4: Marketing is  as Important as Content

 

The critical element that separates content writing and marketing is the intent. Content, created for marketing purposes should align with the product you’re trying to sell. It should also have a motive driving your audience to some conclusion that benefits both them and your brand.

 

If you’re sharing your content on social media, the Call to Action should drive your audience back to your blog or a sales landing page on your website.

 

You can drive more traffic to your blog by focusing on search engine optimization (SEO), sharing blog posts on social media groups and relevant pages that discuss your industry, include influential social media users and companies where possible.

 

Tip #5: Current and Trending Content is Key

 

Following current happenings in your industry and expressing your take on it is an excellent way to develop your authority as a thought leader.

 

Put yourself in the position of your audience. How they would think and react to the current situation. Website or blog traffic is a function of the relevant audience spending time on the internet, your visibility, timing, and how interested they are in the content you share.

 

By identifying the wave early and riding it, you could drive extra traffic to your blog. The tactic follows logic like that of SEO. You’re attempting to pull your audience towards an online presence by leveraging a well-searched term.

 

Read the news and look around you. After you track developments in your industry for a while, you would be able to identify stories that may turn into something big.

 

 

Another tool you could use to leverage current and trending content is Google Trends. This is a very useful website created by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages.

 

Tip #6: Original Content Need Not Be Created

 

The most successful content marketer isn’t the most hard-working, but the most resourceful. Like social media or content marketers, you have access to an excessive amount of resources that you could tap for excellent content that’s valuable social capital.

 

Leave detailed and valuable messages in other experts’ comments sections and feature them when creating your content. Also, ask to write and publish articles on their website or blog (Guest Posting).

 

Those are valuable use cases for user-generated content, employee-generated content and customer-generated content. Any content sourced from outside your company/team is great material to draw insights from.

 

Tip #7: Video Content is a Serious Winner

 

Statistics show that adding videos to landing pages can boost conversions by up to 80% and users are 64% more likely to engage or buy a product online after they have watched a video about it.

 

According to Hubspot, “93% of brands got a new customer because of a video on social media“. Over 2 billion logged-in users visit YouTube each month, and every day people watch over a billion hours of video and generate billions of views.

 

Video content marketing can be integrated into blog posts or hosted weekly or monthly to complement blogs and increase conversions.

 

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Conclusion

Content Marketing is great. It is one of the best, easiest, cheapest and most popular ways to grow traffic to your website and convert users into customers. Yet, there are important aspects of content marketing in most articles don’t talk about. And these secrets are beneficial to everyone especially if you are starting a website or getting started with online marketing.

 

Having the courage to create content is such a wonderful skill that a lot of people do not possess. It takes time, effort and dedication to create superb content in the audience loves. Create content which adds value to your customers or solves a problem for that customer.

 

Optimize your content title and description for SEO as people tend to click on articles or videos with an interesting titles. Also, provide a clear image that represents the featured image of your content as users tend to respond well to a clear image that describes the topic of your content.

 

Contents that are current and trending in your industry have a high chance of appearing on the first page of Google SERP.

 

Partner with other content creators and feature in their blog posts or video shows, to gain more attraction and increase awareness of your products/services to potential customers.

 

And lastly, leverage the full use of video when producing content for marketing. As humans, we retain more of what is presented to us visually than any other mode of communication, which is why video content is a very important part of content marketing that mustn’t be left out.

 

So, here we have it. These are the 7 secrets and benefits of content marketing no one told you about. Now that you know all of these important and useful tips, kindly take action and put these methods to work and start getting results immediately.

 

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Which of these tips have you used as part of your content marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments below, which other tips you recommend we add to this guide.