Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
How Do I Start Content Marketing
- April 10, 2019
- , 9:44 am
You know you should be putting out content related to your industry but you don’t know where to start so you keep skipping until the next week, then the month, until the blog on your website is empty or outdated.
Content marketing is a great way to get your name out there and demonstrate your expertise or even to learn more about your industry/business.
Well what is content marketing?
As described by Wikipedia, content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online.
It is often touted by marketing experts and alike as the number one way to drive traffic, increase conversions and grow your business so let’s see what all the noise is about…
Research Your Competitors
You’re probably going into an industry/field of business that is already being operated in by a competitor.
This is good news so don’t fret!
If you have competitors then you can check on what they’re already publishing and either add to what they’ve already published and provide your audience even more value or you find gaps that they haven’t filled…
Steps to take in order to research your competitors:
Make a list of known/potential competitors
Go their blog page – (usually in the format of www.thegoodmarketer.co.uk/blog)
Analyse what they’re talking about. What is their take on it? What is your take on what they’ve written/produced?
Then ask yourself the question, “Can I provide their audience with a better insight/more value?”
Consider yourself lucky you are able to spy on your competitors so openly with the introduction of the internet. You can literally see what everyone is doing and find ways to improve what they’re already doing just by typing in their website and have a look over their blog.
Create A Content Calendar
So you’ve got an idea of what you want to write/produce, and you’ve seen what other businesses are doing…now what?
Write up a schedule on Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel and either make a table for a 5 or 7 day a week schedule.
You don’t have to put out content every day or even every week but don’t expect to get the most out of content marketing if you’re not putting out volume and quality content.
We normally opt for two a week here at The Good Marketer as a digital marketing agency in London so this is a good goal to set yourself.
If you’re passionate about your business/industry then you should find it easy to put out valuable content to help your audience because it will come to you like second-nature.
How Long Should My Content Be?
f we’re talking blog posts, then try to aim for at least 500 words, but Google (and people), love long-form content.
Again, it goes back to the V-word…VALUE!
9 times out of 10, the person who writes 1,000 words is going to provide more value than the person who writes 500-word blog posts because there is twice the content right.
However, a good strategy to start off with is putting out 500-word blog posts, waiting to see which ones are getting the most traffic and then adding to them.
Double-down on the winners and spend less time on the losers.
Video is slightly more complicated because it is more dependant on your audience, your industry and what the standard is.
You might find that people don’t want a 30-minute video talking about a subject, and instead, a 5-minute easily digestible video is all people want so they can get on with their day.
This comes down to your knowledge of your industry, and it’s up to you to do your due diligence.
A popular form of content that people absolutely LOVE are infographics.
What are infographics?
They are a mixture of imagery and text that are highly visual and easy to digest.
A graphic designer may be required to design an infographic unless you can get a stock infographic off the internet and customise it yourself.
Types of Content You Can Include Into Your Marketing
Blog Posts
Ebooks
Case Studies
Templates
Infographics
Videos
Podcasts
Social Media Content
What’s The Best Form of Content For Your Business?
We don’t want to give answers such as “it depends” here at The Good Marketer.
We want to give you our opinion rather than sit on the fence and leave it up to you to decide if you think our opinion is relevant to your business, or at all!
Our opinion is that blog posts are still the best form of content for your business, yet we fully appreciate that video is setting up to take the largest share of the market.
What if we told you, you could have a 2-in-1?
That you could write out a blog post and then make multiple videos out of the blog post you’ve already typed up?
You’d agree that it makes sense and that it’s a great idea right?
Well, our opinion is that it’s a great idea and one worth considering if you’re putting out plenty of written content because you can turn pieces of text from a blog post into snippets of video so that you’re ahead of the curve and your competition when video does “take over”.
And that article can be turned into a podcast and then if your content is really exceptional, a whole book like Ryan Holiday’s book, Growth Hacker Marketing, which started out as a blog post and morphed into a best-selling book!
Summary
If you got to this page then that itself shows the power of content marketing because whatever you typed in on the internet led you to this very blog post.
Like us, you no doubt have an opinion about your industry/topic/business and you should let people know what it is, as long as it is valuable and provides something positive to peoples lives.
The downside to content marketing that we didn’t address in the article is that despite its potential, it is time-demanding and typically pays off way down the line unless you’re first in or your article goes viral.
And if you’re a business owner, then we doubt you’re going to put much time into content marketing when you have a list as long as your arm to do.
This is where we swoop in here at The Good Marketer as a Digital Agency based in London because we know what it takes and can do this for you…
Book a FREE, no obligations appointment today with one of our Content Marketing specialists and let’s get that ball rolling!
