Content marketing is an effective communication strategy that involves the creation, publication, and sharing of meaningful work. While content marketing is commonly used for social media sharing and SEO, it can also help support a brand’s reputation and overall web presence.
Keyword-relevant content can certainly rank in Google Search. But user-valued content is what produces an influx of high-quality inbound links. This in turn can help grow a site’s domain authority and organic search potential as a whole.
In this post, we dive into several creative ideas in which you better leverage content marketing to help speak to users’ needs while enabling you to grow a site’s organic search traffic.
This sort of thinking will help lead you to the next step, which helps identify the context and medium of your content marketing strategy. Engaging content also helps attract quality links from other referring sources who find value in your work. A solid set of considerations to keep in mind when exploring viable search terms include:
1. Create Audience Personas
The first thing you need to do is to create your audience personas. Your content needs to focus on specific issues, questions, concerns, problems, challenges, struggles, etc. – things that your target audience is seeking solutions to that you’re working to solve. Before you even contemplate specific topics for content marketing, you need to figure out who you target audience truly is. In other words, who’s your ideal person you want reading, watching, and/or listening to your content? And why are they there in the first place? One of the best resources to help you develop audience personas for content marketing can be found at the Content Marketing Institute. The first and one of the most important things you’ll learn is “audiences are not just buyers.”2. Define Your Personas’ Common Search Terms
Once you have created your audience personas, or have at least gained sufficient perspective of the type of people that you want visiting content, you need to create a SEO-focused keyword list that is based off your audience’s common search terms. Why?
This sort of thinking will help lead you to the next step, which helps identify the context and medium of your content marketing strategy. Engaging content also helps attract quality links from other referring sources who find value in your work. A solid set of considerations to keep in mind when exploring viable search terms include:
- Long-tail keywords that reflect a very specific need, question, or problem that your content can help address.
- “Google Predictive Search” and “Searches Related To” – both apart of Google Search that can help you narrow-in the right search terms.
- Related website and competitors who are actively optimizing for specific keywords or creating content around specific themes
- Your target demographic and any specific geographic parameters involved.
3. Narrow the Type of Needs, Questions, Problems, etc. of Your Personas
Once you have determined some good themes for your content marketing strategy, you then need to narrow-in on the best type and context of each piece to help maximize its level of meaning and engagement. Remember, the type of content that you create should be based off the needs of your audience. Meaning that, if your audience performs a search related to installing a laptop hard drive, a simple blog may not suffice. Rather a video or step-by-step guide with lots of images would likely work better. Alternatively, if your audience wants to learn about 20 different ways to increase their productivity, they may find an article that they can go back and re-read, to be more valuable than a video. When it comes to determining the ideal type of content that you should be focusing on, some of the questions you should keep in mind, include:- What is your audience search for through Google?
- What is your audience’s intent behind their searches?
- What are the problems that they are trying to solve?
- Which type of content would encourage them to either, click, stop or consume?
4. Develop A Personality That’s Attractive To Your Audience
Every successful brand has their own unique personality and style. If you think about it for a second, you more than likely gravitate towards people who are like you. In the same breath, people will gravitate towards brands, that portray a personality or style of their own. As such, not only do you need to figure out what your audience needs, you need to figure out how they like it styled. This takes some content marketing creativity but will ultimately help shape your voice and tone in your work.5. Be Consistent With Your Posting Frequency
At this point, you have gained some perspective on who your audience is, what they want and how they are going to receive it. Now, you need to figure out how often this is going to happen. Some tips to consider when it comes to doing just that, include:- Take a look at “Curata’s Content Marketing Pyramid,” it can give you some great insight as to how frequently you should be posting, based on your content type.
- Determine how frequently you should be posting based on your audience’s behavior, i.e. when are they the most active?
- Create a calendar and schedule your posts.