Strategies for Exceptional Content Marketing WHITE PAPER SERIES
Welcome message from author
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
Strategies forExceptionalContent Marketing
WHITE PAPER SERIES
Our Hard-Earned Internal Strategy Tips and Tricks
Managing content is 100% about meeting your business needs through meeting the needs of your users. Your content journey will always bring you to the door of your intention and the question “what are my users looking
for? How can I provide them with the information they require on a given topic that will make a difference in their day, provide insight, help them accomplish a task, etc.?” The best pieces of content become bookmarked, dog-eared, maybe even printed out and shared items that users find they cannot do without.
If we’ve learned anything from years of content marketing, it is that your user can see right through you, and does not want to - or need to - be marketed to. By providing authentic resources and truly useful tools, you meet users right where they are, in a place of need, and meet that need with satisfying deliverables that guide them through your conversion funnel. Whatever type of content your particular situation calls for, taking the time to create the best value for your user will make all the difference in your digital marketing success.
webfor.com | 1
Why Content?
If you’ve downloaded this white paper, content is a bug in your ear. You may be a business owner who’s heard about content and wants to learn everything you can. Or, perhaps you work in the digital marketing industry and are looking to refine your own practices around content creation, management, and marketing. You may have heard the now-cliche phrase, “Content is King,” which continues to ring true. Whatever your goals, understanding what content is and how it fulfills your marketing efforts is essential to succeeding in our digital age.
Content can be defined as any words, images,
graphs, visuals, or video used on or off
your site to share your brand message.
But why does content matter?
What type of content is appropriate for a
given purpose?
Content matters because, through its many forms, you can communicate and connect with your customer. When done right, great content improves user experience and can convert one-time visitors to your site into brand enthusiasts. Google’s entire focus is on providing the absolute best UX available on the internet, which makes sourcing sites that offer top-quality content a top priority, all while ranking those offering sub-par experiences lower in searches. If your content rocks, chances are, your rankings will, too. More importantly, you’ll make deep, lasting connections with a receptive target audience.
webfor.com | 2
Search Engines and Semantic Algorithms Search engines in 2016 are highly advanced and can assess content at varying levels of complexity. Googlebot crawls and indexes billions of web pages (try multiplying the text content of the world’s libraries thousands of times over!). With all of this data amassed, Google can begin to piece together contextual meaning through observation of particular terms and phrases, combined with incidence and frequency. At its most basic level, Google calculates the relationships between two or more terms and/or phrases to determine whether or not they have a semantic relationship. This search giant also analyzes, in detail, individual pages or sections on a page. Doing so helps the algorithm identify tight connections between words/phrases that appear close to one another in sentences or paragraphs. Google engineers continue to advance and refine these techniques, producing an artificial intelligence with a watchful eye on semantic connections.
webfor.com | 3
Where SEO and Content Meet
So where does this semantic understanding leave us? A good deal of head-scratching can be avoided by understanding how this knowledge translates into optimizing your content. The following tips will help you make your content understandable to search bots:
Structure your website to make semantic sense: Organizing your site in a logical manner can help search engines piece together your content. Often, structural logic comes naturally when content is cohesive and high quality. However, the work of a top-notch design and development team can make all the difference.
Build documents and pages using relevant phrases and terms: Targeting criminal defense lawyers when your content focuses primarily on divorce negotiations is not going to help you or your client. Define what your key services are and build pages around those, using terms and phrases recognized by your target users, whether they are peers in the industry or individuals seeking a specific service.
webfor.com | 4
Structure your website to make semantic sense: Organizing your site in a logical manner can help search engines piece together your content. Often, structural logic comes naturally when content is cohesive and high quality. However, the work of a top-notch design and development team can make all the difference.
Assess why a page is ranking: You may be wondering why a specific page is ranking, especially if the domain strength and links pointing in don’t seem to be offering much support. In cases where you’re left scratching your head or feeling confused as to why a competitor’s page may be surpassing yours, note that semantic connections and topical relationships can play a powerful part in what ranks and what doesn’t.
Link build with the best, semantics-wise: If you’re writing content for a town’s local bird sanctuary, linking to or negotiating a backlink from the actual sanctuary’s website can build authority and semantically benefit the page on your own site. The term co-occurrence, or the identifiable frequency of terms in two comparable documents, can be an excellent vantage point for determining whether a linking relationship with another page would semantically complement yours.
Think ahead, because Google does! Sooner than you think, Google may be able to determine the intention behind your writing and extract psychological information from phrases and sentences around links, all of which may play into future weighting of links and link trust. Keep your eyes on trends and adapt your strategy accordingly.
webfor.com | 5
With these basic tips, you can optimize almost any content type. However, coming up with the right type of content to create is a completely different story.
Types of Content Deciding what type of content to create is as simple as understanding your purpose and the options you want to create for your user. Content is never created for its own sake. As much fun as we have making content, we need it to work hard for us, producing intended effects that fulfill the user's needs and in the end generate leads, conversions, and the return on investment we seek.
To shed some light on the content creation process, we’ve compiled a list of situations and content types specific to each.
You’ve Started A Blog TYPE: Text
Are you a new voice in the blogosphere? If so, you’ll need to build up your credibility and entice an audience to subscribe to your posts, comment, and share your work on social media. What this means is that, whether you currently own it or not, you will need to build up yourself as an expert voice on whatever topic you are writing. As any writer knows (myself included), getting started is the hardest part. When a blank page stares you in the face, you stare it right back, then snarl and fill it with words. Okay, you can skip the snarl if you want to, but adding high-quality text is essential to your success. Your goal? To build a high-quality, in-depth experience for users relating to your topic of choice. Think of yourself as a fountain of knowledge on
webfor.com | 6
whatever topic you choose (from baking to tax filing), and write from the perspective of someone whose inexhaustible knowledge cannot help but overflow.
TIP
Keep in mind that when Google re-indexes your website and notes a change, you get a new chance to rank for more in-depth material. Additional, high-quality content that deepens the usefulness of any page makes the little Googlebot smile, and your site may just get its wings (aka, a boost in ranking). Making changes and additions to older blog or site content can cause Google to take notice. As a general rule, write as many words as it takes to cover the topic. However, if possible, in-depth, long-form content of 600+ words is an excellent goal to keep in mind when building up your authority as an expert. Dress to impress, as they say.
You Want to Engage Your Social Media Users TYPE: Infographic
Instagram has far surpassed Twitter in popularity, and there’s good reason. Social users love visuals! Adding a strong visual piece to your website or blog can boost the shareability of your content, as well as the engagement on both social media and your blog. While social signals are not a confirmed ranking factor, we have seen many instances of strong social signals contributing to boosted campaigns over time, perhaps helping to enable wins like Google referencing your content as an answer to queries for its Knowledge Graph. Even without a boost in ranking, social
webfor.com | 7
helps deliver your content to a broader audience, which puts your infographic or other content piece well on its way to drawing the conversions you seek. Infographics provide a share-worthy blend of words and images that may also entice bloggers to reference your work in their writing. Who doesn’t love a juicy, Easter-egg link to a spell-binding infographic? For this reason, be sure to include your personal or company logo on the graphic to mark you as the author, preferably in a place where it would be difficult to crop it out. Creating an infographic involves blending written text with visuals, both easily-consumable and visually striking. Infographics are best used to show and explain statistics, demonstrate a process from start to finish, or conveying ideas in simple terms. Canva provides wonderful options for building beautiful infographics, quickly and with little to no experience.
You Want to Teach a Process or Skill TYPE: Video
It’s no surprise: creating a 3-5 minute video engages users like nothing else and builds highly-shareable information directly into your website. Once created, you can embed it on your site and upload it to your new or established YouTube Channel to generate page views and catapult your brand to new audiences. We offer video production services, and are pretty passionate about making informative and entertaining work. However, you don’t need to hire someone else to mastermind the user-friendly video footage of
webfor.com | 8
your dreams. Using just your smartphone, you should be able to capture the recordings you need and edit with various apps to make your film share-ready. Hosting a video yourself is a fantastic option that will draw leads to your site. However, this is far from your only option. Time lapse videos have taken social media by storm, so if you work in a building or designing industry in which visual progress can be shown over time, bust out that Iphone and start recording! The process is simple: rest your device in a stable place, or on a tripod, and leave it recording while you work. With the help of a video-editing software or our team here at Webfor, you’ll be able to speed it up, save, and share it out to hundreds or even thousands of viewers who will delight in your process!
If embedding your video into a blog post, be sure to use introductory written content to inform users of what they are about to experience. This way, they can both get excited and understand that your content is indeed worth their time. Also, a buzz-worthy title on YouTube, including some of your business keywords if relevant to the video, will help your piece get found and seen.
SITUATION : You Want to Try Email Marketing TYPE: Newsletter
Remaining top of mind needn’t be complicated. Direct, or email, marketing is alive and well, and newsletters are some of the best ways to reach your users where they operate each day. However, in order to make sure that the individuals you target do indeed receive your valuable messaging, it is essential that your newsletter visually and
webfor.com | 9
contextually engages each audience member and provides calls-to-action that prompt him or her to take business-boosting actions. In addition, you may wish to produce content for your newsletter, including custom visuals, authoritative text on relevant topics, as well as company updates and industry-related news. While newsletters are an excellent way to showcase your branding, be sure that you have clarified a company content voice and tone, before releasing your newsletter to the world.
You Want to Share Examples of Your Products or Services
TYPE: Case Studies / Projects Page
Your company produces incredible deliverables. Now it’s time to showcase your very best work. By creating a Projects Page, chock full of images and descriptions of jobs you’ve worked on or products you have created, or a Case Studies page which utilizes the power of storytelling to share data and images associated with your project, you share the cream of your own crop with your users. By dedicating specific real estate on your website to your best offerings and absolute proudest moments, you shout it out to the world: I believe in my work! From there, the world cannot help but follow suit.
webfor.com | 10
Content Best Practices Once you’ve established that A. you want to create content and B. you know what type to create, it’s time to refine your practices to ensure that what you build will bring the results you seek. The following best practices form a very basic guide. Consider contacting a content professional for more in-depth information and guidance, especially if you’ve never built a content campaign from the ground up.
Intention As discussed above, keeping your focus on individuals in your target audience is essential to creating content that makes an impact. Consider the following :
● What would my target searcher ask in a Google search?
● Is my content visually-appealing and easy to read?
This best practice is simple, but not always easy. If you can, take a day or so after creating your content to “cleanse your palate” so you can better revise it and make sure nothing is clouding your message. Your finished content should be a complete, immersive experience for your users, whether that experience is constructed of words, images, video, or a combination of all three.
webfor.com | 11
Keywords Hey, let’s not forget, this is content for SEO. Although quality matters above all else, keywords are king (see what I did there?), so you’ll want to make sure you utilize terms with a topical relationship to the targeted context. For best results, keyword phrases should appear in your:
■ Title element ■ Page headline (H1 or
Bold Headline) ■ Page content ■ External anchor links ■ Image alt attribute
■ URL ■ Image name ■ Image search ■ Internal links, within reason. No
spamming your generous readers, please.
How do you know what your focus keywords actually are? Look to your services and calls-to-action. Where is your content guiding users? What do you want them to do with the information you’re providing? If you run a towing company, for instance, your keywords for a piece on auto auctions would include both towing-related terms and auction-related terms, as well as car, truck, vehicle, etc. Prioritize these items in order of importance, choosing two primary keywords or long-tail keyword phrases to focus on. However, be sure that the keywords you choose also serve the user’s intention for visiting your page, and reflect terms that he or she would actually search for, relating to your topic. In order for users to properly receive the keywords you’re sharing, they’ll need to feel that they attained value when visiting your page.
webfor.com | 12
Create a Content Marketing Strategy Wait, come back, don’t run away! This is the best part. Content strategies, in my experience, are some of the most rewarding creations in marketing. They do, however, require, thought and planning. If you’re looking for the best practice to end all best practices, this is it. Content marketing strategies focus on engaging your audience and managing content assets in ways that profit your business. But what exactly is included in a content marketing strategy? And how do you begin to draft one?
✓ Develop user personas: One of the most important aspects of building a content marketing strategy is setting expectations for who you would like to read and engage with your content, and where you would like these individuals to find it. User personas are imagined profiles of your ideal customers, based on demographic data and information gleaned from your business experience, or that of your clients. Each persona usually includes the name, age, and occupation of your ideal client, as well as personal information about their preferences and possible conversion challenges. Once you have a basic outline of the individual, consider where this person might encounter your content, based on his or her personality. User profiles like these provide invaluable focus as you move forward in developing your overall strategy.
✓ Create an editorial calendar: Depending on the size of your client or project, you may want to include more or less detail. A basic editorial calendar should include the topics you plan to write about, the purpose of each piece and a call-to-action, as well as whether or not that piece is for on-site (blog or service page) or off-site (guest blog, press release) posting. More complex calendars should include social
webfor.com | 13
posting goals and metrics for content tracking and analysis.
✓ Coordinate your strategy with social media: Having a social media presence is invaluable to getting your content seen and experienced! We’ve dedicated a separate white paper to all things social, The #5WH Social Media Worksheet. However, for your editorial calendar, know this: coordinating the publication of content pieces with social posting is indeed a best practice, and should always be featured in editorial calendars for strategic or high-profit clients.
✓ Look at competitors: A wise person once said, “the only one you have to compete with is yourself.” While this is true and an excellent mantra for happy living, success in business comes from setting your own benchmarks based on an awareness of what has made others successful. Competitor analysis is not always lumped in with content strategizing, but it should be. Simple comparisons, like those between calls-to-action or link profiles on competitor sites, can give you an idea of what to aim for if you want to complete with/ surpass a specific industry player. Play your own game, but do it while besting those who stand in the way of your success.
✓ Set and track goals: Content has a pesky tendency to get itself created and then hang out, un-tracked, as if existing is all it needs to be doing. In reality, content should move - get mentioned on social media, linked to in guest content, referenced by industry writers and speakers. Setting up goals and tracking them at the outset of your project is a great way to ensure that your work doesn’t sit stagnant, but instead progresses forward in your intended direction.
webfor.com | 14
Rope In Your Design Team
It can sometimes feel like your content and design teams exist in separate universes. Yet, let this sink in: it’s not true. Both creative, both working on different sides of the same content coin, Design and Content MUST communicate frequently if the work you produce is to truly shine. At Webfor, we’ve adopted a Content First policy for web projects, which means that the assigned writer maps out a site’s text content before design ever sketches an image. The results are potent, but this requires close communication between the two departments, so the content team can map out the correct sequence of events and Design and Development can build out the visuals.
webfor.com | 15
Employ the Joy Mangano Method
Anyone who’s seen the film Joy cannot help but be inspired by Inventor Joy Mangano’s gumption and spirit. The creator of the Miracle Mop, a revolutionary yet incredibly simple tool for anyone who’s ever had it with hand-wringing dirty mops, Joy achieved QVC and later, HSN fame and wealth by hawking her wares on air herself. Her motivation for inventing? Taking an existing tool or process and asking, “How can I make this easier? How can I make it work better for people?” In your content creation, I dare you to ask yourself, again and again, “How does this help? How am I making people’s lives easier?” A big part of building content that truly serves people is focusing on the nut-and-bolts usefulness of your endeavors. Does this blog/infographic/video functionally make people’s lives better? To thrive in today’s saturated content market in any industry, it needs to.
webfor.com | 16
Content Doesn’t Have to Win A Pulitzer As writers, we often set lofty goals for our web writing, expecting each piece to be a chunk of literary gold. Time limitations aside, content creators do best to remember that what we are creating, while it does and should involve engaging storytelling, does not and should not meet the same standards are literary writing. Web writing, in order to be most effective, is to-the-point and written in colloquial language that people from a wide range of backgrounds and educational levels can understand. Web writing is for everyone, and should be artfully constructed within the time frame you have, with a focus on simple directions, clear formatting, and concise presentation. All that said, I know it’s hard to believe. Balancing your high standards with the time you have requires constant juggling. Keep at it.
webfor.com | 17
Tell Me A Story Storytelling has become one of the most successful and authentic ways to reach your audience. Current audiences, particularly those made up of millennials, are incredibly savvy and understand when they are being marketed to. Instead of forcing a cliche tagline, try crafting a story, which can be shared with visuals, video, and/or words, one that creates that the user will then associate with your brand. Video is a particularly potent way to reach your users, so allotting budget to a video project to promote the launch of a new service or product can be a great choice. Creating useful, relevant content that helps you reach your goals is a passion of mine. If you have content concerns and/or questions, my door is open. Please feel free to reach out @webforchelsea on Twitter or by sending Webfor Chelsea Terris a message on Facebook. I look forward to speaking with you further!
webfor.com | 18
About Chelsea
About Webfor
Chelsea is proud to serve as Senior Content Strategist at Webfor. She spends her days developing content strategies and populating the pages of the stunning websites her team creates with dynamic written copy. She’s also an enthusiastic member of Webfor’s Leadership Council and TED (Team Experience Development).
A lifelong writer, Chelsea's work has been featured in CEO World, Evolving Wellness, The Durango Herald, The Choice E�ect, Those Aren’t My Shoes Productions, and many more. In her spare time, Chelsea loves writing fiction of all kinds, choral singing, and her beautiful family.
Webfor is a tight-knit group of dedicated individuals who are passionate about digital marketing. We utilize the latest techniques in search engine optimization, web design, content, and social media to empower businesses to succeed. Winner of the Vancouver Business Journal’s
Fastest Growing Business Award for 2012, and a finalist for the Fastest Growing Business in the 6-10 years category for 2015, we balance growth with sustainable practices that serve our clients and maintain a fun, vibrant culture.
Thank You For Reading!For more resources check out webfor.com
Related Documents
