To succeed with marketing online, once you’ve got your foundations in place you then need to think about getting links to your website from elsewhere on the world wide web. Now there are some ‘quick wins’ that can be achieved, directory listings, links from suppliers, business associates and customers, but for longevity, you need to be thinking about other areas on the web where you can place links to your website. The trouble is a lot of these links will require some content. For example, you might want to use some of these tools to get links:
- A blog: Well you need to think about how frequently you can update it and what you’re going to write about
- Video: What is your video going to be about? How many are you going to make?
- Articles: How frequently, where are you going to place them?
- Press Releases: again, how frequently and where are they going?
- Newsletters: What are you going to say every month?
So you can see with all of this activity you will need a clearly defined content strategy so that you know what is required at what stage.
So What is a Content Strategy?
Well put simply it’s a plan that will determine the creation and publication of relevant content that will
- Be a useful resource for your target market and customers
- Drive traffic to your website via links
It’s that simple to define, but not always so easy to carry out.
So, where do you start?
Well the first place is to identify what you as a business will actually be able to achieve, if you’ve got a marketing department then all of the above content items will be achievable, if you’re a sole trader then you’re busy enough running your business, so can you realistically complete the above (or get someone to complete it for you) or can you do a subset of it?
Once you’ve identified what the content items are then you need to understand why you’re writing them, what’s the key message? Whats the tone? Whats the keywords? Where are you going to publish? How are you going to promote?
This is what your content strategy will determine.
The most important thing to remember is that the strategy should be repeatable, so as an example if we take writing a blog your plan might be as simple as-
- Write a blog post twice a week
- Tone is friendly and informative
- Keywords that we want to include are keyword 1, keyword 2, etc…
- Once published we’ll distribute via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email marketing
So your process is the same every time you write a blog. Once you’ve written a couple, you’ll know how long it will take you to complete the process so then you can allocate that time in your diary every week for content creation.
Remember the whole of the Internet is compiled with just content, useful information (and some not so useful!) and nothing else, so if your business is not creating its unique content how is it realistically going to take part?
Need some help with your content or Internet Marketing Strategy, contact JCK Marketing now