Tag: Content

How to Make Seasonal Content Marketing More Effective

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

The calendar year is something that rarely changes, so why not play on the annual/every few years seasonal activities and events? Things like Christmas, Easter, Sporting evets like Wimbledon, The Masters, F1, the London Marathon, and numerous endless tournaments, Black Friday events, Festivals like Glastonbury, the list really is endless. But how can you work these into your marketing schedule and include current seasonal content? See some of our tips below….

Get Prepared

While the focus is usually on the upcoming events and although this is important, taking that step ahead is also a great strategy. Take the time to start your preparation for the coming year early and plan which of your calendar events could be the most successful for monopolise on for your business. Using tools like Google Trends will help with what aspects have been/are popular and will be a good indicator for what will really take off next year. Think about content marketing research that you already have and figure out:

  • Be specific and keeping in mind your target audience decide what is the best way to grab their attention
  • Use tools like Semrush for keyword analysis
  • Look at your site’s traffic in previous years and the data as this may be useful to see how products or posts performed
  • Look at testimonials for inspiration

It’s all about the timing

If you are going to create relevant holiday content and make the most of it, it is best to plan when. You do not want to wait too late to pitch it and end up missing the key time slot for this! It is better planning to get articles written early and scheduled out for a future date, rather than rushing them and missing the deadline. To get your content done before time and effectively, use these tricks below:

  • Look back and analyse old content around seasonal topics and start developing ways you can advance it and use it again
  • Whilst building your seasonal products, think about how your content will sit alongside this to help boost your sales
  • Avoid adding dates to URLs around seasonal content so that it can be recycled for the following year
  • Refresh any seasonal content as new, develop it bringing it into the new year. You do not need brand new content for the same events every year

Market each platform effectively

The holiday season is always a difficult time to capture the attention of clients so if you can be prepared with what you would like to publish across each different platform this will be more effective for your audience, and less stressful for you. Knowing who and what to market on each platform is key. Keep in mind:

  • Lists on Pinterest are very popular and a great way to share gifting ideas, your favourite recipes and décor ideas
  • Instagram is great for sharing visual inspiration about gifts, and what seasonal outfits are trending
  • Facebook is great for running competitions for your followers and you can make this interesting and helpful for consumers instead of making it just about your product or service
  • Guest Posts are a great way to advertise to a large audience that you would not necessarily reach in your day to day marketing

If you can prepare in advance and make sure your content is visible and live on multiple platforms, you have the best chance to get in front of your audience. Make the most of creating seasonal content to make it personal and giving the best chance for it to get noticed!

How to Use Content Marketing Help Grow Your Business?

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

Content Marketing is a key marketing driver for many businesses to grow their income and to engage a wider audience in a targeted manner. Here are some of the main ways in which good content marketing can help grow your business:

Research

It is a good suggestion to start by collating a good amount of research around your business that is going to help grow and improve growth on:

  • Exposure – What your current online and social media presence is like?
  • Audience – Who is your target audience and are you successfully engaging with them?
  • Content – Is the content across your business cohesive?

Gaining answers to questions like this will be beneficial when deciding how to apply content marketing, and which methods to use. It will also tell you a lot about your current customers and how you can develop what is currently working within your business and monopolise on their buying habits.

Delivery good quality content

When implementing a content marketing strategy, the goal is to deliver interesting and informative content that your audience will want to engage with and then maximise the potential return on investment in this content through promotion across different channels. Thinking about things like brand awareness, SEO benefits, traffic and sales, and combining this with the interests of your audience, should help you to produce exciting content for your audience.

By sharing good quality content and on a regular basis will keep your audience interested in your business and allow them to invest not only time but also money into your business and grow your sales.

Using a range of channels

With social media and digital services now readily available to help grow your communication channels it can have positive affect and in turn grow your business. Good content marketing will use different formats of digital marketing and target certain audiences to engage with them about your business, encouraging interaction. Judging on your own audience and your content market research you will have understanding of which methods will resonate best. This includes, podcasts, infographic, videos, and blogs.

There are also ways to gain exposure through guest posts, which is publishing your content on another successful website that is relevant to your brand. By gaining exposure to the audience they have already got, will instantly grow yours and enable you to reach customer that you previously would not. Take a look at AI Guest Posts, a platform that has multiple websites to choose from and see which would be most suited to and effective for your content.

After focusing some time to try and improve these areas is a good checklist to help your business. By combining these simple elements and implementing them into your existing business will help to grow your sales, exposure and then hopefully customer base. You do not have to struggle your way through this though, there are useful tools like SEMRush and Hootsuite that can help you plan your content more easily and ensure you are getting the most out of your content marketing to improve your business growth!

The Most Common SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

SEO is the process of how your website becomes ranked above others in a search engine. With search engines like Google and Bing having sophisticated algorithms, it is important that your website does not end up at the bottom of their users’ search results. Having a really interactive and well-designed website may look great but if you do not include a good SEO strategy, no one will see it! Here are some of the main points to avoid for bad SEO and making these mistakes…

Knowing your target audience

The success of your business is based on how much money and sales you can make, but to do this you need to engage with the people buying your product. It is vital that you know who your target audience is; what interests them? Is there a need for your product? What social media platforms do they use? By answering questions like this you will gain an understanding of your product and then how to market it and apply this in your SEO. If you know that your audience are very active on Instagram, it would be worth creating strong social media posts to keep them interested. This could result to them in turn sharing your posts, tagging you and basically doing your marketing and gaining exposure for you!!

Not researching the right keywords

To make sure you are gaining the correct exposure it is important to use the correct keywords within your content so that you will appear in the right search engine results. By meticulously choosing the right keywords that are very precise and relevant to your business will flag the interest of your audience. Do not use vague or broad keywords, this will higher the number of results that go into the search engine and is likely to be unsuccessful. By doing some research into specific words and if they will be effective to your SEO. To help with this, there are many tools like Semrush that will be useful in this stage of the process.

Producing low quality content

To improve your SEO, you also need to keep in mind the quality of your content. Researching your target audience and keywords will help you to produce content but be mindful of what you are sharing, is it relevant? Will this engage your audience? Do not create duplicate content either. This will force the search engines to choose which of the duplicates will be ranked higher, making neither of them rank very highly. You can use tools like Google Analytics and other analytics tools that can show you how well your content is performing and indicate what would need improvement. This is then easy to target where to improve you SEO and highlight any issues!

Not Posting Enough

Having awareness about finding the right balance for you, your business, and your audience when posting good quality content is important but posting needs to be regular and manageable for it to be successful. Getting this right is by no means an easy task but it will be a huge benefit if it works! There are techniques to help with your posting and ensuring that you are gaining the right kind of exposure, like email marketing, vlogging and guest posting. There are so many aspects to SEO but by avoiding some of these mistakes above and not getting left behind with the latest SEO processes, it will help you keep on top of those search engines and their algorithms, leading you to that top spot!

Top 5 Content Marketing Problems and How To Overcome Them

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

Getting the aspects of your marketing just right can be a long process and it may not be successful first time. Here are some of our hints at tips at how to overcome some of these problems:

1. Creating high-quality content

In today’s market, there are so many ways to promote your brand but one of the most effective is creating quality content. With the masses of competition, it is hard to write something that hasn’t already been written but if you get this right, it could lead to great success. Researching into what your competition is a good place to start as you can compare the standard of the content. With many search engines using ranks to present information, it is important to create high quality content and get ranked near the top to generate more traffic to your site.

To create this content, ensure you have researched into your audience, and you are including interesting points that are going to keep them engaged. Think about how you can provide answers to their questions and present information that they will not have read before.

2. Generating content consistently

To be taken seriously and grow loyalty to your brand, it is important to engage with your audience regularly, whether this is through social media posts, articles, or website updates. By creating a content strategy can help you keep on top of your content and how often you share it. Creating regular content is a huge benefit to driving more traffic to your site and improving that all important SEO.

You can include content about, design, creativity, and technical skills but the key is to prioritise where and when is the right time to use the content to ensure you are being effective with your content.

3. Understanding the audience

No matter how large your audience is, there will be a variety of people who all look for certain content in different ways and this can be hard to share the right type of content. To create a better understanding of what they are looking for, will help you to create content that really interests them. Do your market research and analyse their interests by looking on their social media – what things are they sharing or liking? What type of accounts do they follow? See what days or times are most popular to engage with people? Simple tips like this should help with exactly why they are reading your content.

From doing this you will engage with them on a better level and realise the best formats to do this, such as social media, blog posts, podcasts, and website articles. Whichever way you are sharing your content, make sure it is delivering value, insight, and solutions.

4. Measuring your achievements

Is analysing metrics in your strategy? Without looking at the metrics you will not see how successful your content has been. Look at software like Google Analytics to monitor your posts, traffic flow surrounding your content, the domain authority, your email marketing, and social media posts.

Imagine if your post becomes an overnight success? If you are not checking on these metrics, it could be weeks before you knew how successful it had become and you would be missing out on an opportunity to gain this traction across the rest of your content. Setting yourself targets whether this is the number of followers, monetary value or increase in web site traffic, this is an effective way to track your progress and use these metrics effectively.

5. Choosing the right platforms

Lastly, now you have a better understanding of your audience, the formats in which to post and how often, you need the right platform to post on. With thousands of marketing channels and platforms available, it is important to focus ones that best connect you with your audience.

Take time to understand which platform would be most suited to your target audiences, if you publish on the wrong platform, they will never get to enjoy the content you have created for them.

Although there are many ways and channels to do this, the most effective is to promote your content using paid digital advertising via social media, reputable industry publications and other online platforms that organically grow traffic.

Some of these content marketing challenges may not be the easiest to overcome but by allowing some time each week to focus on these aspects, the success with SEO will show in those metrics you are now monitoring!

Brand Awareness in Marketing

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

Brand awareness is the recognition of a brand or business by its name, logo, or any other defining features. Being able to recognise a brand or business by these features boosts a brand above its competitiors. Brand awareness can be considered the first step of the customer journey, if customers are aware of your brand or products, they are more likely to buy into them.

By elevating your brand awareness, it can enable you to learn different ways to grow your business and its success. There are 3 things you ideally want your customer to know or recognise:

  • Your brand name
  • The products or services you are offering
  • The attribute that puts you above your competitors

To create your brand awareness campaign and achieve these three points, you need to be giving informed and consistent communication to your customers. Firstly, you need to know what kind of awareness your brand already has before you can start work on improving it. Are you a brand-new business? Or have been around a little while and have some kind of following (even if it is small)?

To give you an indication of this you can look at things like your social media accounts and any way that you communicate to your customers: –

  • Your mailing list — how many people have signed up to receive communications from you
  • Your social media — how many people follow you on social networks like Facebook and Instagram
  • Social listening — how many people are talking about your brand online
  • Your website hits — how many unique visitors you get to your site each month
  • Your search data — how many people search for your brand name in Google and other search engines.

These are all measurable aspects so it doesn’t matter where you are starting from, once you have improved your brand awareness, you will be able to see the results in these figures. On your brand awareness journey, assess your starting point and think about the following methods and how you can implement these into your business, if you don’t already:

  1. Use guest posting sites to spread your content – guest posting is the process of writing and pitching blog posts for another publication. You can publish your content on someone’s blog and add links back to your brand. There are many sites out there that will host your content, so it is best to make a note of which platforms specialise in which industries and have the audiences that you are looking for. Sites like Neil Patel, AI Guest Posts and My Blog Guest have great sites to begin your guest posting.
  2. Look at your social media presence – make sure you are maximising content on your social media for the following you already have. Are you making the most of these followers? It is important to post good, shareable content with good graphics. If you post incentives for them to tag a friend or share to their stories – this is an organic way of increasing your brand awareness.
  3. Develop a voice for your brand – whatever angle you are going to resonate whether it be, funny, emotional, smart, or sentimental, it is imperative that your stick to a particular style for your customers to trust in the brand.
  4. Start a podcast – podcasts are a great type of marketing and are now very popular. They can give great insight into a brand and allows the customer to see what they are buying into. The more value you can add to their lives, no matter what channel, the more likely they are to invest time and money with your brand.
  5. Take part in brand partnerships – collaborating with other brands can be a great way to introduce yourself to a new audience and if you have the same values as the other company, their customers are sure to be interested in you too! This is beneficial for both parties and builds trust with both customer bases.
  6. Give something away for free – entice your audience in by engaging with a competition. This could be encouraging them to share your website or post with friends, or even a freebie for someone. Bringing in the communication and interest of customers, will bring in more interest than the price of giving 1 product or service for free. 

By investing time in your brand awareness, you will create an established brand that will meet the needs of your customers and more importantly keep them interested. By doing it in stages makes it a  simple process to achieving a great brand, and remember you don’t have to do it alone – make it easier and more effective by using tools like AI Guest Posts, social media analytics, podcasts and collaborations with other brands!

How to Use Article Marketing to Improve SEO?

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

Included in article marketing should be useful, informative content, created with its online audience in mind. When a specific topic in the article is searched for in a search engine, such as Google, it shows in the web pages, along with blog posts and other sources related to that topic that it is listed in.

Article marketing is a content marketing technique that combines writing and posting articles across different platforms, with the aim to promote the desired business or website through its backlinks included in the article.

The highest-ranking pages are bought to the top of a search engine, this means they have good SEO. So, when an article is being written you can adapt the content and optimise it to help you reach the top of the search engine. Optimising your content can be a very important aspect of your marketing as it can lead to a huge increase in traffic to your website and business.

Article marketing is not only a strategy to improve your SEO; it can also generate traffic through many different channels, such as social media. With businesses growing their reach across different audiences, they can adapt their content with their posts to suit the platform. Here are some of the platforms listed below:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • Other blogs
  • Guest posts
  • Email campaigns

When starting your article marketing it can be easier to create bitesize steps to establish what best fits your business and the users you are trying to reach. These are some of our recommended, simple steps for you to get your content exactly how you would like:

1. Choosing Your Topic

Firstly, you will need to choose a topic that you know will be of interest to your audience. Create a list of these areas which you think will be the most effective whilst thinking about the key parts to your business that are most enquired about e.g. cost, designs, content, service?

2. Research Your Keywords

Now you have your topic and aspects that are going to be included, you will need to plan the keywords that are relevant and will be most searched for in a search engine. There is no use including words that are not used in your field or are never searched for.

To help with this step, there are many tools like Semrush that will be useful in this stage of the process. By doing some research into specific words and if they will be effective to your SEO.

3. Writing Your Content

With your research done, you can now start taking on board what you have learnt so far and begin writing your content. This is also a good time to analyse your content and make sure it has great SEO, helping it to rank higher in the search engine. Some of the aspects include the following features:

  • An interesting title and clear headings throughout your text.
  • Ensure your content is interesting.
  • Adding internal and external links.
  • Using a good URL structure.

Another feature that would be beneficial to add at this time would be different types of media. Add some creativity into your article with images, videos, digital tools and PDF’s which will attract a larger audience and improve your SEO!

4. Publishing Your Content

Now your content is ready to go you will need to find a platform that will publish your work. It is important to find a platform that has the right audience for your content, and provide the best results. There are many platforms and blogs, that will host your article on their site and include a link back to your website to drive more traffic. Look at useful platforms like AI Guest Posts and FAT JOE, that will publish you articles for a small fee and you will benefit from their large audiences and reach across popular industries.

Now the hard work is done, watch the results of your article marketing and see how successful it will be to your SEO and bringing traffic to your website.

The Types of Content Marketing

Posted on | by Jennifer Spencer

Content marketing is the creation of information and content and how this can be shared across different materials and formats, such as videos, blog and social media. The main idea is to entertain or inform the audience, whilst delivering a business goal. Here is an example of some of the variety of content marketing that is used across different businesses:

  • Blogging
  • Video
  • Podcasting
  • Infographics
  • Email
  • Visual content
  • E-books
  • Newspapers
  • Presentations
  • Quizzes’/tools
  • Checklists
  • Courses
  • Webinars
  • Free apps
  • Social media posts

When thinking of content marketing, the two most popular ways, which have grown hugely, are blogging and podcasts. The statistics for blogging have increased globally, but in the U.S. the number of bloggers between 2014-2020 increased by 10 million!! Similarly, the global growth for podcasting is expected to increase by 31% for 2028. With huge markets like these, is it understandable how content marketing has become so varied and can appeal to larger audiences.

Here is a more in depth look at some of the most popular types of content marketing:

Blogging

After being around for such a long time, blogging still accounts for a large percentage of the content marketing that is out there. With most blogs being written about products or services relating to a business, it is easy to see the results made from creating the blog and why they are so popular. Alongside this, blogs also carry a non-expensive price tag – ideal for small businesses or those on a tight budget. You can find free options or choose platforms to post your blog that you know will reach a much larger audience.

Blogs are also a great form of content marketing to use whether your business is small or large. If you have a small business and you begin posting a blog, this will entice the following you are looking for or alternatively, if you are an established business, the personal touch of a blog will add a genuine nature to your business and show your audience you are a trustworthy brand.

Social Media

Like blogging, social media is also huge in the content marketing industry. There are now so many different channels to engage with your audience, and this element does set social media apart from other types of marketing. By creating a social media post, the ideal result is to be seen and engage with your audience with an almost instant reaction or feedback from them.

Like blogging, this is also does not take much funding, unless you are looking to push this further and track your results and analytics. By tracking the results on your social media content, you will be able to see what is working and generating the most traffic to your site.

Podcasts

With podcasts, the initial cost of equipment and set up is a little more to take on than blogging but the potential audience for this could be huge. It is important to plan what you are going to say in your podcast to make sure it is not just ‘off the cuff’ and meets the reason of why you are doing the podcast. After all, the main aim of the podcast is to raise awareness of your brand and target those areas that are harder to reach with other types of content marketing.

Like with social media, there are lots of celebrities who have also joined the world of podcasting as a way of creating a relationship with their fan, just like businesses can do with clients. Podcasts can be found on many popular apps like iTunes, Spotify, and many radios stations and websites. They are convenient for people to listen to on the move, and they can do this at any time.

Conclusion

Whichever type of content marketing you choose for your business, remember you need to create a clear and well-documented plan. When creating your content marketing strategy, you should:

  • Consider who your target audience is
  • Define your brands identity
  • Understand your buyers’ journey
  • Know the benefits of your products and services
  • Identify measurable goals
  • Create an action plan

Creating a content marketing strategy sounds like a daunting task, however if it’s done right, there is no reason why you shouldn’t start seeing some immediate results!

What is Guest Blogging?

Posted on | by root

One of the ways to promote your personal or corporate brands is through guest blogging, also known as guest posting. This is a content marketing tactic that involves writing and publishing articles for other websites. Although personal blogging has been around for quite some time, guest blogging is a method which has become progressively more popular to expand a business’s reach and to generate more traffic to their site. It is common for guest bloggers to write on similar blogs to their industry to be relevant and more effective. It can now be seen as a necessary tool in giving opportunities to engage a new, fresh audience and enhance social media presence.

With many aspects in life now taking a strong digital turn, online presence for businesses has never been more important. You must be seen to be heard. With guest blogging allowing you to reach your desired audiences and build on your exposure across new fields, it is important to show that you are providing a credible source for your audience.

The aim of guest blogging is to direct traffic back to your site, it is an effective way to both raise awareness and build authority within your niche. You can do this by improving that all-important SEO. SEO or ‘search engine optimizer’ is the processes used to organically improve the visibility of your sites when someone searches for it. An essential factor of SEO that can be included in your article are quality backlinks. Including different types of links that can be naturally added into your content will boost the value of the article and prove to readers that your article is genuine. If you are struggling to create quality backlinks there are many sites which can help you understand about links and help generate them such as: Semrush and Moz. One tip to make this successful is to keep them up to date with current issues and good links that are natural and come from high quality, relevant sites. 

By creating good SEO, this then coincides with a positive effect to the domain authority of your site too. The more quality content that is published by your brand, the more its audience will trust your site and remain interested. As a result of these key guest blogging features, your name and business will become more established to its relevant audience, making you reputable to others and possibly develop great relationships with contacts in your industry.

Guest blogging is a mutually beneficial exchange between the writer of the article, who gains exposure, but also to the site publishing the article. It enables fresh new content brought into their site, keeping their readers engaged with a constant stream of new content available. The first step in guest blogging is to choose the best site that is going to work for you, taking into consideration the target audience of the site and research so you know exactly what their niche is. Analyse any posting guidelines to ensure they match with what you are looking for and likewise, they will accept your content to match their brand. Platforms like AI Guest Posts are a good way of finding sites which welcome posts and they have lots of brand sites to choose from, covering a range of industries so you are sure to find something which suits your content. These types of exchanges are now something which is working for people across all fields, helping to navigate through different realms of business, one post at a time.