Content marketing is a vital part of the current market trend. Still, there are people who are not very aware about it and even do not know how to use it effectively for their business promotion. Are you one of those? Do you consider it the same like blogging? If yes, then you need to understand the basic difference between blogging and content marketing.
Let’s go into the details and clear out the misapprehension that prevail regarding the content marketing.
Content Marketing is not the Same as Blogging
Blogging involves writing regular posts but content marketing involves posts supported by podcasts, white papers, articles, e-books, newsletters, videos, etc. aimed at converting potential customers into clients by establishing trust in them. Content Marketing is non-interruption marketing and instead of pitching your products or services, you deliver information to make a potential customer more intelligent.
Random Content is not Advisable
Lack of content or content clogged with irrelevant keywords, phrases or sentences can irritate the users largely. They might frame negative impression and just opt to leave the page. Provide only the specific, precise and relevant content to the user.
Write Specialized Content for a Niche Audience
While creating content, remember to target the niche market and not the masses. Whether your industry is specialized or technical, it simply does not matter. Write things only related to your industry featuring all possible questions of the clients. Endorse your knowledge and skills to deliver the products or services.
Buy your Customers before Selling them Content
Content marketing is all about just giving away valuable content to provide the prospects exactly what they are looking for. The idea is to convince the customers and impress them to make a purchase. This establishes strong attention, value, authority and trust between a site and its customers.
All the above points clearly show that content marketing is all about highlighting your valuable assets rather than just telling random things. With this, there are higher chances of the audience being converted into clientele.
So, Which Type of Content is required?
Creating content no longer remains a cup of tea. It requires time, interactivity and dynamic feature capability. The very basic process of content marketing involves, first get your users engaged. Try to convince them with an appropriate message and finally go for the leads to convert the prospects into customers. Let’s look at various types of content through which you can implement this process.
Content Involving Interaction
It is the type of content found in the form of a contest, trend, survey or a poll. It guarantees participation and feedback. After filling a contest form and subscribing to a trend or participating in a survey, the user is enticed to have a look at the results. If a personality test is conducted, the user shares his/her information with the site. This way, content is exchanged in an intuitive manner rather than pleading for the user details.
Spread Content in a Collaborative Fashion
The content is useless if it is just limited to you. More involvement of users in the form of shares, likes, comments or discussions will make your content fruitful as the exchange of knowledge takes place resulting in more leads and hence more business. Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn are the best examples of this.
Content Available in Real Time
Time always plays a much bigger and rapid role in bringing the content on the web. You need to be the first one to bring the latest news or updates regarding the surrounding world. Such latest and quick content have higher chances of creating an impact. The only thing that has to be kept in mind here is how speedily you jump on the hot burning issues. Other things to be taken care of include the content medium, exact deployment time and how to tailor content effectively to deliver it rightly to the users.
Where Content Marketing Lacks?
- Essential facets of storytelling are being skipped. A story without important sections or probably a conclusion might confuse the users as to what exactly the content is all about.
- Not analyzing the content present in the articles written by blog experts, website owners, experienced people or company owners. This fails you to understand the purpose behind writing patterns and content methodologies.
- Different forms of media are not explored. More media sources such as presentations, videos, related blogs, movies, books, articles, infographics and others should be tapped to include every minute detail to satisfy the target audience. This way you can also know as to which the medium works best in your favor.
- Writing content on all subjects can be time consuming and fatal. Pick subjects that are of your interest and caliber.
- The audience should not be kept on the second priority while keeping content on the first. Whatever you write, it is for the audience. They have to get fascinated after reading your content. Therefore, frame your content providing lots of information and knowledge.
- Telling fake things or lies in your content is not permissible. This can land you up in a mess. Always, speak truth supported by the facts, figures, statements, declarations, etc.
- Talking about irrelevant things could frustrate users and ultimately annoy them. While expecting a lot from you, the customer get’s fed up with seeing the content that’s not relevant or not related to your business. Write something that shares your personality and talk about your business while being engaging and compelling at the same time.
Ways to Improve the Content Quality
The need for a content of extremely high quality is what the marketers wish for. This is because the high quality content takes ample time to create and the marketers have just no time framing it. So, let us look at a few simple ways by which the marketers either can create high quality content in no time or can actually modify the existing one to improve the content quality.
Check the Facts
The content should be factually very much correct because inaccuracy can cause a big blow to the overall quality. Put content that is extremely reliable from knowledge or information point of view. Be confident about the authenticity of the content before actually publishing it.
Have Data to Back your Content
While dealing with data, it should be properly cited by giving an appropriate source. In addition, refer the reputable sources for using relevant data in your content. Be very much critical as well as transparent while taking any decision related to your data.
Support your Points with Good Examples
Using different cases, may be hypothetical or real, along with data can help users to understand things with clarity. It also makes your content appear authentic.
Explain things with Visuals
As it is rightly said, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Visuals enable users to grasp the whole content by looking at it and entice them to read the entire thing even in case of time shortage or a disinterested state. You can also make use of infographics, but you do have to know how to make it great.
Include Real Life Quotes to Make an Impact
The best way to deal in case you have less text is to include real life quotes by the industry experts, renowned personalities or technical people. This saves a lot of time spent in research and even increases the content credibility.
Language should be Free of Jargons
High quality content is just not the one that provides relevant information or knowledge. It should be jargon free and simple to understand. Do not use any technical words other than targeted keywords to ensure that your user understands each and everything. Crosscheck your content with different levels of people to know about their views.
Integrate Visuals and Formatting Wisely
The formatting might be a process of a few minutes, but it helps your content to scan through easily as compared to dense and unformatted text. For this, include high quality images, headers, numbering style, bullet points, etc.
Proofread & Even Edit Content if Required
It is not necessary that the earlier framed content is perfect. Check it again for any imperfections like misplaced punctuations, spelling errors, grammatical errors, etc. For this, hire a proofreader who can point out the mistakes and correct them. While an editor can rewrite it, in case it is needed. With the help of an editor and a proofreader, all the content comes in an organized manner and reads completely error-free. In addition, that is the most desired factor the audience looks forward to.
Jaimie
Great tips here! Supplying your readers with supporting data, whether it be in the form of charts or links to case studies and white papers, helps increase your credibility because any commentary that you provide in your article or blog post is based on solid fact.
Winson Yeung
a picture worth a thousand words. it’s so important to include images on post to make the post interesting. Infographic that combine with tutorial, facts, examples are a great to share content too.
Michael Pina
Without images your post looks dull and people will not engage in it for a long time. Infographics are a very good way to represent your content in an image format which is easily understandable and attractive.
This is true Winson that content should engage the reader and spark interest in them else content will be of no use. I am gonna use them all for my next content marketing campaign for sure.
Stephano
I guess I am not fully clear on your distinction between blogging and content marketing. Are you saying that content marketing is much bigger and not limited to blogging?
Michael Pina
Yes, content marketing is much bigger than just blogging. You can share your content in various ways like press release, podcast, Infographics, videos, newsletters and much more.
Merlin
Yes, it is true that only writing content will not help market it. Some amazing content written to target the audience will surely make a difference. Writing and marketing is so much different. A great way of marketing the content can be sharing links on social networking sites. It works!
Michael Pina
Yes, I agree with you Merlin. You wrote an effective content but if you don’t do marketing, people will not know about it and read it and your content is just useless. Social media sites are a most popular and easy way to market the content and to target potential customers.
it’s so important to include images on post to make the post interesting. Infographic that combine with tutorial.
Michael Pina
As I mentioned, “A picture is worth a thousand words”, you can easily attract viewers to your post with an image. A creatively designed image tells the story itself. So it’s best to use images within a post to make it good looking.
george
Content marketing is a good thing but it takes so much time and that is what which freaks me out
Michael Pina
Yes, content marketing is a time consuming process. But when you apply effective strategy and techniques it will help you to gain profit.
Stenn
Content marketing can be done with help of various tools. SEO tools have always worked the best for content marketing on the web. Social media marketing also has given great results when it comes to marketing a website or the content on it.
Michael Pina
We can see that nowadays people are more in communication with each other on social media platforms. You can easily target your audience on various social media websites and market your content, services and products and increase your sales.
Connor Harley
Now I perfectly understand how blogging and content marketing differ. Content marketing is quite broader than blogging.
Michael Pina
Glad to hear this from you Connor. Blogging is a part of the effective content marketing strategy.
Evan
Actually you just opened my eye with your post. For me blogging and content marketing were pretty similar areas, well, almost the same. You have a great skills to present the info that way that even noob like me will get the sense) Thanks a lot!
Sandra Barker
Content marketing can be done with help of various tools. SEO tools have always worked the best for content marketing on the web. Social Media is definitely very helpful as well for marketing strategy. Thank you fro this information. And I’m truly looking forward for more updates from you.