Naitik Mandalia

Ultimate 2020 Content Marketing Guide Did you know it was Bill Gates who first coined the term - “content is king”? This is a timeless statement, no doubt, but in this day and age of highly competitive digital space, marketing the content strategically with the right insights is of utmost importance. In this article, I will share with you an easily palatable and practical content marketing guide for 2020. I have condensed this step-by-step content marketing guide from my years of experience in driving staggering ROIs for businesses. Before plunging in, let me lay out some groundwork for you: 1. Long-form content (>1500 words) outperform short-form content in 9 out of 10 times. 2. Search engines love perfect grammar, punctuation, structuring, to-the-point answers and freshness in the content. 3. An effective content marketing strategy need not be a complicated one. It could be a series of simple reminders as well. Now that you know the basic rules to follow, let’s get started. Step 1: Knowing thy audience (collect demographic data) Marketing endeavors without understanding the audience is like shooting in the dark, a sure-shot way to put all your content marketing efforts to waste. The first and foremost step is to identify your target audience. And, then market your product or services to only that cluster of people. To find a target audience profile your average customer, and then everyone who fits this template also known as customer persona is your target audience. You need not have to have a psychology degree to profile your customers only common sense and data. Fill in the data in the manner shown below and you’ll have a customer persona ready to create a target audience. You can have more than one type of customer persona based on the product or service you are selling. In order to increase sales, you need to understand the goals, challenges and pain-points of your customers. Consider that you sell baby products. Your customers are mothers in general. A mother’s need is to purchase diapers for her baby, if you have created a persona of this mother, you will also see that one challenge she faces is that the diapers give rashes to the baby. This should motivate you to market “rash-free”, “skin-friendly” diapers. Step 2: Without Keywords it's diary writing & not content writing Keywords are what binds you, the customers and the search engine together. You need to find long-tail keywords, short tail keywords and LSI ● Do not ignore long-tail keywords Long-tail keywords have multiple words, they do not have a lot of search volume, but they can help customers reach you the quickest For instance one of your product in the product line of radios is a space-blue (branded color name) colored wireless radio with Bluetooth, then you should target the keyword “space-blue colored wireless radio with Bluetooth” along with short tail keywords like “radio”, “radio with Bluetooth”, etc. ● Easy way to find long-tail keywords and blog topics If you want to become a content machine, you need to make your blogging game stong. Create blogs upon long-tail keywords by focusing on the intent and purpose. Suppose you own a store of organic seeds. Here what will be the intent and purpose of your target audience? The possible intentions people could search for an organic food store selling seeds could be: I want to learn gardening I want to eat a healthy diet I want to spend more time outdoors Purpose always follows intent, see how I want to learn gardening because I love learning new things. I want to have a healthy diet because I want to lose weight. I want to spend more time outdoors because I want help with my depression. You now have the following long-tail keywords 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Learn gardening Eat a healthy diet Spend time outdoors Love for learning new things Want to lose weight 6. Help with my depression Possible blog topics 1. Learn Gardening in 5 DIY steps (find our store for seeds) 2. 5 Ways to Make Eating a healthy diet easy (grow your own produce - find our store for seeds) 3. 5 Hobbies that allow you to spend time outdoors 4. If you love learning new things - start with these 5 5. 5 Practical & Smart tips to lose weight 6. 5 Ways you can help yourself treat depression You can always check Google Trends, Ubersuggest, Keyword planner to see the search volume of keywords, but make this a secondary practice. Step 3: Define Goals To define what you need from your content marketing endeavors in the short-term and long-term is important. These goals will depend on whether your business is looking to spread awareness, wants to make help people make a purchase or help existing customers. It will also depend on where are the majority of your customers or potential customers stuck in the marketing funnel It is advisable to write blogs for all the three agendas and keep the goal to be always sales. Step 4: Use the best for reference By now, you’ll have an elaborate and precise list of keywords and the topic you want to write blogs about. The next step in the ultimate 2020 content marketing guide is to identify which articles on the topic you are planning to write is currently ranking out there. Google the keyword The 1st page of results will be the articles that Google has loved for this keyword. Save a list of 10 or more of these articles. Learn from their tone, style, and structure, add your own value and you are good to go. You can also filter from these 10 articles regards to which article has the most number of mentions and backlinks. These backlink checker tools can come handy The Ahrefs Backlink Checker, SEMrush Backlink Audit and Moz Link Explorer. Step 5: More than one way to convert The point is to enlighten, engage and convert. Do not forget that. And there are many ways to do it than just blogging. ● Video content Youtube’s massive success is proof that video is a great medium for gaining attention, increasing visitors and generating leads. Videos engage visitors differently from and text and images - it reportedly increases conversion rates by 80%. Video works best for generating social media buzz. Even if the video is extremely promotional, it can easily be shared. Research shows that 24% of people are happy to share a video ad they saw on their social media. ● Guarded Content Checklists, Ebooks, White papers, Research Papers, can provide immense value to the customers. Since they are guarded they have an element of surprise to it that would force visitors to punch in their data. This data is a precious remarketing resource. ● Podcasts People now crave depth, originality, and something that takes them on a ride. In the age of milli-second attention needing content of TikTok and Instagram, podcasts are driving in millions of loyal users. Step 6: Content Distribution Channels that work best Increase your online presence where your audience is at. It is no good to market insurance policies on Pinterest. After you have exhausted your common sense use web analytics. In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition » Social » Overview to see the in which social networks where your content is being shared. Buzzsumo is also a great tool to find similar data. Go to their Content Analysis tool then type your domain name into the search box. You will find the following data: ● ● ● ● Shares by network Shares by content type Shares by content length Top content in the past year Refining the search will give you more detail as shown above. Step 5: Get up-close and personal Leverage the data you have of your audience, retarget them with emails and newsletters. Personalize the content as much as you can. Do not be overbearing. Give offers, provide value. Step 7: See how your content is doing It is of no use if you can’t measure it. Use the Content Audit tool from SEMRush. For this, set up a project and choose the part of your site you want to audit, such as your blog. Enter the URLs that need to be audited and press Start Content Audit button. A complete analysis will give you the following ● ● Content titles and descriptions Content length ● Backlinks, ● Social shares, etc information: ● Auditing tools can also help you know ● ● ● The pieces of content that are effectively driving the best revenue The ones that need some improvement or updating to meet desired goals And the ones that need to be removed or replaced