5 Key Components to an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

There’s more to your content marketing strategy than your content. You can create as much content as you want. But, it won’t get you anywhere without brand visibility, repeat traffic, social media marketing, and other factors.

The following 5 key components will help ensure that you put your content to good use. When you spend time or money generating content, you don’t want it to be wasted. Pay attention to these 5 components:

• Brand visibility
• Website traffic
• Calls to action
• Multiple channels
• Quality content

Brand Visibility

The first component is brand visibility. This includes awareness and familiarity. When customers see your content, they should be able to immediately recognise it as coming from your website. The easiest way to achieve this is with branding.

Your content should include your branding. This means adding your logo, using the same colour scheme that you use on your website, and making sure that your brand name is prominently displayed.

Website Traffic

You need traffic. Otherwise, how’s anyone going to find your content? So, the next key component of any content marketing strategy is website traffic. This includes referral traffic and repeat traffic.

Referral traffic lets you know that people are linking to your content or talking about it on social media. If you’re not getting any referral traffic, you need to incorporate social media marketing.

Share links to your content on social media. This should help get the ball rolling. 

Calls to Action

Every piece of content that you create needs a call to action. It doesn’t matter if this call to action directs the visitor to a product page or to a lead magnet. The goal is to get them to move onto the next step.

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Writing Web Content Your Prospects Will Read

Creating web content is hard sometimes. Creating web content for your small business that people will actually read is even harder. When it comes to writing for the web, you have to create content carefully and intentionally. People on the internet have short attention spans and with all of the content out there, you are competing for every second of their attention.

Grab our free Social Media checklist and content marketing training here

Many web content creators don’t really understand the people who read content online. This is the major problem that causes web content to go unread. People don’t read content on the web, they scan. They want to pull out the important things from the articles without spending a lot of time on it.

Thankfully, there are some things you can do to make your content more attractive to those people that scan. Here’s a quick guide to creating web content people will read.

Not every word will be read

7 Ways To Make Your Subscribers Love Your Emails

Email marketing is still the single most effective form of online marketing. People check email frequently throughout the day and read, respond and buy things due to emails sent.

Email addresses are special and personal. When someone gives you their email address use it wisely. When you have a specific email list, you can add value to the lives of your subscribers very easily by delivering them information that is important to them.

But email inboxes are busy. You want your emails to be read and for your audience to actually look forward to getting an email message from you. Here are 7 ways you can create effective email marketing messages.

30 Free email templates here ow.ly/5U0l30daA29

1. Personalise

Putting your subscriber's name at significant points in your email message can bring the information home in new way. You want each email to sound personal to the recipient instead of like a mass email. But don't over use personalisation as it can get a bit creepy when you read it.

2. Invite Your Subscribers To Other Channels

Content Marketing - Make Sure You Avoid These 11 Mistakes

In the near-limitless universe of the Internet, the art of marketing content can be a tricky one. You've got to know your target audience and what they want, and always be one step ahead of the competition. Add to that the constantly emerging new channels for your content, and you have quite a challenging task ahead of you.

However, before you jump into this war of words, here are 11 pitfalls to watch out for:

1. Not doing your groundwork

You can't construct a skyscraper without laying the foundation. What is the purpose of your content? Who are you targeting it to? Is it in line with your brand personality? If you don't brainstorm on these questions and build a concrete plan, you might fail before you even start. It also helps to double-check your content and see what you can do differently from the competition.

2. Not having a clear take-away

Humorous fluff pieces are fun to read on the Internet, but don't let their popularity sway you. Good content needs a solid take-away - a message previously unavailable to your readers. Give them something new through your content, and they'll be hooked on to your every word.

Email Marketing Etiquette to Get Yours Opened and Read

You can reassure your prospective customers that the emails you send are safe and reliable by following a few simple email marketing etiquette rules:

1. Don't Sensationalise the Headline

The default setting for Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, and the other popular email providers is to show who the sender is and the headline. In some instances, the first few words of the email text itself will appear on the user's email queue.

That makes the headline the first important element of your email. If it is overly exaggerated, makes extraordinary claims, or is otherwise sensational, there's a better chance that the email will either be sent directly to the "Spam" folder or deleted by the user without being read.

The Power of the Email Marketing Pivot

If you have an email address, you're probably very familiar with e newsletters. And, as we all know, familiarity can breed contempt, which is why so many of your email marketing missives are routed directly to the spam folder. Audiences are tired of seeing the same old thing presented in the same old way. Which is why we suggest pivoting away from the traditional "two column" format to a more accessible and easily digestible "links only" newsletter.

Most email marketing efforts involve a very traditional newsletter in the two-column format that allows you to tell a few brand stories, offer a content marketing resource, and maybe include one of your popular blog posts, space permitting. But, imagine if you radically overhauled your format, moving away from the standard design to what can best be described as a "links only" format.