What should my website content include?
Build your website with a content marketing strategy to emphasize your key business services, based on the customer needs that your products and services address.
There are as many types of content marketing as there are types of content–far too many to cover here. My intent is to give you an introduction to content marketing and get you thinking like a content marketer so you’ll see the opportunities all around you. Soon you’ll be coming up with 50 content marketing ideas every day. You won’t be able to stop seeing opportunities to create content. Here are five examples to help your mind start percolating.
These are generally long, vertical graphics that include statistics, charts, graphs, and other information. If you need some examples, here are 197 infographics on the topic of content marketing curated by Michael Schmitz, head of Content Lab at Publicis, Munich.
Infographics can be effective in that if one is good it can be passed around social media and posted on websites for years.
Try your hand at creating an infographic. Here is free provider - click here, and here is another one.
A decent infographic will usually cost you at least $1,000 to have designed, but can cost several thousand dollars if you are hiring a contractor or agency to include strategy and planning, research, copywriting, and design. There is also the matter of promoting that infographic to bloggers and the media. Or you could set up a board on Pinterest and curate infographics on a topic related to your business. That is also a form of content marketing, and it costs nothing but your time.
What’s the difference between a normal webpage and a webpage that is content marketing? Consider The Beginner’s Guide to SEO from Moz, a provider of SEO related tools and resources. This resource, offered for free, has been viewed millions of times, bringing in countless customers who otherwise might never have stumbled across Moz and the services they offer.
Michael Hyatt, author of the best-selling book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, practices what he preaches. His “This is Your Life” podcast is downloaded 250,000 times each month. As Hyatt elaborates on his blog post 4 Reasons You Should Consider Launching Your Own Podcast, “A podcast gives you visibility in a completely different world—primarily iTunes.
I have had scores of new people say they had never heard of me until they stumbled onto me in iTunes.” Hyatt gives valuable information and advice in his podcast–all for free. But that podcast leads to more sales of his books, signups for his courses, and requests for him as a speaker.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a master of content marketing using online video, just take a look at his YouTube channel. He got his start creating videos to promote his family’s wine store and through those videos and other online marketing he eventually grew it to a $45M empire.
Like movies, people often think of books as selling themselves, but savvy marketers don’t sell books just to sell books, they sell books as marketing tools. With self-publishing it’s easier than ever to publish a book, there is still the perception that it’s difficult and that only reputable professionals can publish a business book. Publish your own, and even if people don’t read it you can still use it as a form of content marketing every time you’re introduced as and Author.
Those are just a few examples of content marketing.
What Are The Benefits Of A Content Strategy?
Let’s review the steps of a buying cycle.
Prior to awareness a customer may have a need, but they are not aware there is a solution.
Once a customer is aware there is a solution, they will perform research to educate themselves. For example, a car buyer will try to find out what different types of cars exist, and which one will fit their needs.
At this point the customer starts comparing different products from different vendors to make sure they’re getting a high quality product at a fair price.
Finally, the customer makes their decision and moves forward with the transaction.
While traditional advertising and marketing is effective in the first two steps; content marketing taps into each of the steps.
The return on investment for content marketing can be over the top if executed correctly. With quality content the majority of the success you can have will be traced to the content you have produced.
Content marketing is about education using quality content and that is where traditional advertising misses the boat. Plus, when you have good SEO then your content appears as organic search results for the long haul; unlike the yellow pages where you have to pay a fee to be in the book every year.