How content marketing can bolster your bigger web marketing efforts
24. June 2012
Content marketing involves using dynamic, engaging site content as a tool to complement growth in other areas of PR and web/marketing. It is an integrative means to help drive marketing and revenue.
This post on web professionals blog Smashing Magazine gives a good overview of the art of content marketing.
A good first step is to always be creating. Remember the content marketing mantra “content is king”. Proactively create evergreen material. This relieves the pressure to force unnecessary web communication during times when you have no news, events or promotions. Provide content that not only entertains and informs but creates value for your reader.
Use your knowledge area to engage with topics of the day through blogs and social media. Thus you will create the attention necessary to sustain your own information network. In a sense, you are creating an e-publication, generating a readership composed solely of your public, and relating with and marketing to them directly.
Properly managed, content marketing can engage your end-user, increase your SEO, drive sales, and help provide the traffic volume necessary to generate funds through ad networks like AdSense.
Social media is used to promote content. Twitter and Facebook are where your users see "headlines" for your stories. One of the strengths social media provides to organizations is the ability to broadcast a message to groups in an unobtrusive way. Organizations can address users as a whole knowing only a proportion will be interested but that the remainder will not be annoyed or put off.
Links to social media accounts should be prominently placed on the homepage, the “Contact” page and any other relevant locations. Before you can use social media as a viable promotion tool, you obviously need a following. Social media contests are a good place to start. In fact, you’re probably going to want to run promotions fairly regularly to keep your followers on their toes and tuned in.
Mashable magazine provides a good primer on how to properly execute a social media promotion.
There are basically two kinds of social media promotions. One type of promotion involves offering swag (books, tickets, merch) to the first so many people to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. It could be the first 10 people to sign up each day for a week, for example. Or the first person each hour of the day to “like” or follow us.
The second type of promotion involves actual engagement to earn prizes. This would involve users answering questions about Texas history or the museum itself, or any other number of prompts, in order to claim swag.
Frequent such giveaways would provide users with a continued incentive to keep us in their feed.
This is the portal by which a large majority of consumers of your content will access it. Most organizations will be lucky to have any users who visit the site specifically for the purpose of viewing news or feature content. Your readers will be your followers who are engaged, who feel that you are providing value, unlike the many organizations who talk at rather than with online communities.
Once you have created the social media venue, all you must do is keep the content flowing and think strategically about using promotions to generate interest and keep peoples’ attention.
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This post on web professionals blog Smashing Magazine gives a good overview of the art of content marketing.
A good first step is to always be creating. Remember the content marketing mantra “content is king”. Proactively create evergreen material. This relieves the pressure to force unnecessary web communication during times when you have no news, events or promotions. Provide content that not only entertains and informs but creates value for your reader.
Use your knowledge area to engage with topics of the day through blogs and social media. Thus you will create the attention necessary to sustain your own information network. In a sense, you are creating an e-publication, generating a readership composed solely of your public, and relating with and marketing to them directly.
Properly managed, content marketing can engage your end-user, increase your SEO, drive sales, and help provide the traffic volume necessary to generate funds through ad networks like AdSense.
Social media is used to promote content. Twitter and Facebook are where your users see "headlines" for your stories. One of the strengths social media provides to organizations is the ability to broadcast a message to groups in an unobtrusive way. Organizations can address users as a whole knowing only a proportion will be interested but that the remainder will not be annoyed or put off.
Links to social media accounts should be prominently placed on the homepage, the “Contact” page and any other relevant locations. Before you can use social media as a viable promotion tool, you obviously need a following. Social media contests are a good place to start. In fact, you’re probably going to want to run promotions fairly regularly to keep your followers on their toes and tuned in.
Mashable magazine provides a good primer on how to properly execute a social media promotion.
There are basically two kinds of social media promotions. One type of promotion involves offering swag (books, tickets, merch) to the first so many people to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. It could be the first 10 people to sign up each day for a week, for example. Or the first person each hour of the day to “like” or follow us.
The second type of promotion involves actual engagement to earn prizes. This would involve users answering questions about Texas history or the museum itself, or any other number of prompts, in order to claim swag.
Frequent such giveaways would provide users with a continued incentive to keep us in their feed.
This is the portal by which a large majority of consumers of your content will access it. Most organizations will be lucky to have any users who visit the site specifically for the purpose of viewing news or feature content. Your readers will be your followers who are engaged, who feel that you are providing value, unlike the many organizations who talk at rather than with online communities.
Once you have created the social media venue, all you must do is keep the content flowing and think strategically about using promotions to generate interest and keep peoples’ attention.