According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the very first occurrence of content marketing was almost 300 years ago, when Benjamin Franklin published his first version of the annual Poor Richard’s Almanack to advertise his printing business.
Since then, content marketing has obviously developed hugely, and is now considered to be one of the top two inbound marketing priorities for any business.
So how can content marketing benefit your business?
Content marketing comes in many formats, including
- Case studies
- Email newsletters
- Opinion posts
- Vlogs
- Videos
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Press releases
- Social media
Crafting informative, useful and interesting content to share with your audience helps to build brand awareness and engagement, encouraging loyalty and trust in your business, products and services.
A clear content marketing plan will allow a company to have a long-term focus on building a strong relationship with the target audience. This in turn will boost conversions, grow the customer base and drive the business forward.
Here are our top tips to ensure you have everything covered in terms of content marketing for your business:
- Develop a content marketing strategy – it’s the first step in defining what you and your business would like to achieve, and is a more long-term view of what to aim for.
- Identify your target audience – create relevant, engaging content for them.
- Create a style guide – consistency is key.
- Know how to reuse and repurpose content – in order to make the most of the time and effort put into creating engaging content, adapt and reuse it in other formats (for example, a blog post could be turned into an infographic).
- Aim to produce content which can perform over a longer period of time – if it is not too time-sensitive you are likely to achieve better reach.
- Create readable content – break up blocks of text with headings and subheadings, use short paragraphs, highlight key points, add images etc. This improves the readability of the content and helps to emphasise the points you are making.
- Search Engine Optimisation – needs to be considered for all content marketing in order to gain more traffic.
Interested to find out more? Why not give us a call on 01326 250879 or email thecrew@fastnet.agency. We’d love to discuss ways in which we could help your business reach its full potential.
