Content Marketing Strategy 2017

Nowadays, the secret every business owner knows is: Content marketing.

With great content, you can build your brand’s online reputation.

Have you ever wondered what was the most important element of content marketing?

It’s the website. It has to be fast, good-looking, and powerful. It needs to invite the potential customers to take action and make the purchase.

If you want more sales, you need more traffic. If you want more traffic, you need a better approach to content marketing. Do you see the connection?

How exactly do you direct your content marketing strategy towards the goal of getting more traffic? That’s what we’re here for today.

Your Way to Improved Traffic

1. It’s Not All about the Quality

Brian Dean, the person behind Backlinko, struggled for years before making a website successful. He started by publishing high-quality content in the nutrition niche. He cited research studies and made sure to deliver value to the readers.

There was a problem: no one cared. He was not publishing the right content; the kind that readers would care about.

What’s the right kind of content, you might ask?

What do people search for on Google?

What’s the most popular content for the keywords you aim for?

What kind of content gets comments, likes, and shares?

When you take these answers as the foundation for providing high-quality content, you’ll be on the right track.

2. Host Webinars

Why do people use the Internet so much? This would be the answer of many: “for fun.”

Learning, however, is also an important reason for people to hit Google. If you meet people’s need to learn through fun and effective webinars, you’ll be on the right track.

Send out emails at least a week ahead, so your subscribers will sign up and plan their time.

You should also archive that content for later viewing, since some of the recipients will be busy at the scheduled time.

Don’t forget about social media promotion.

3. Contribute to Influential Websites

More content. This time, it won’t be for your own website.

When you contribute high-quality content to other sites that have gained authority in a relevant niche, you’ll drive many visitors your way.

It’s not easy to become a featured contributor to top-notch websites, though. You’ll have to start small and work your way up. In other words – you’ll be writing content every single day. That can be a problem for a business owner. If you can’t invest that much time and effort into writing, you can always rely on a writing service like Australianwritings.

4. Invest in Paid Advertising

You may be writing the best content in your niche. You may use all the right keywords and write on topics your audience is interested in. Will that be enough? Not quite.

The promotional steps you make are crucial. If this is a new business, it’s important to invest in paid advertising on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other channels.

The best thing about paid online advertising is focus. Your ads will be seen by people who are interested in the products or services you deliver.

5. Get Inspired by Influencers

When you want to see what your audience is interested in, you clearly check out the stuff influencers are writing about. You observe their style, but you’re mostly interested in the topics they cover.

Get inspired by those topics! Do not copy them, though. Find your own twist and deliver something different to the same audience. Offer new solutions to the same questions and issues, and make your content easier to read. That’s always a bonus.

6. Videos!

Text-based content is still important. That’s how you infuse all the right keywords and attract traffic via search engine.

However, it shouldn’t be the only type of content you’re publishing. Video is a valuable addition that will make the website more engaging. One study showed that 3 days after watching a visual and verbal presentation, people remembered 65% of the information. They were able to recall only 10% of a lesson they read.

Videos are a great way to grab attention, especially on social media.

7. Improve Your Email Marketing Approach

Newsletters are awesome for driving traffic towards your website. Make sure to elevate your email marketing campaign. How do you do that?

Make a special offer for people who subscribe. It may be a free eBook, a promise for special offers, or valuable content they will get on regular basis.

The email newsletters have to be great. You need to feature high-quality content and make it visually-intriguing. Needless to say, these newsletters need a call to action, since you want the recipients to visit your site.

Automate these emails! You can use a tool like Mailerlite, MailChimp, Hatchbuck to do that.

8. Try Podcasting

We made it clear: textual content is important, but it’s not the most engaging kind of content for most users of the web. They are looking for something they can see and hear.

Images and videos are already a standard in content marketing, but here’s another type of content you can use: podcasts!

Busy people like listening to podcast when they’re driving or working out. This kind of multitasking allows them to achieve few goals at the same time. If you can turn some of your content into a podcast, that would be great.

9. Make the Content Shareable

When you create content that gets tons of shares, you’re not the only one promoting it. You’re getting audience-driven promotion.

How do you create shareable content? Well, people like to share things that make them look good. If the content is funny, smart, shocking, or unusual in any other way, they will share it.

Don’t forget to add the call to sharing action at the end of your post.

Feature sharing buttons for every piece of content at your site. It’s important to make it easy for the visitors to spread the message.

10. Feature Internal Links

Getting backlinks is important. That’s how you get audience from other websites. You’re getting those backlinks through guest posting, and some bloggers feature your links in their posts just because you give high-quality content that’s worthy of a link.

Internal links are just as important. When a visitor lands at your site for a particular piece of content, you want to keep them there for as long as possible. Link to your products or services, and other content they might be interested in. Don’t go overboard with the links, though; that may lead to a counter-effect.

There you have them – the 10 simple, but important content marketing tips that lead to website traffic boosting. Every business owner can benefit from those actions. Where will you start?Jessica Freeman is a blogger and freelance writer from Sydney, Australia. She enjoys covering various topics, from education and technology to motivation and productivity. Check out her new post about freelance writing. Follow Jessica on Google+ and Twitter.

Content marketing was HUGE in 2016. And judging by everything that has been going on in this field in the last 12 months – it’s getting bigger! A LOT bigger. Like Bruce Banner when he gets all super angry.

Digging through various different research results these last couple of days, it became crystal clear to me that content marketing is still on the rise. It’s still growing and provoking interest in all sorts of different circles. Even those you’d least expect.

Personally, I know a couple of small time entrepreneurs who made this 2016 their most profitable year yet just by adding content marketing to their overall marketing mix.

These days, loads of people I know are actively reading up on content marketing and trying to figure out how to make it a crucial component in their 2017 marketing strategy. They have finally started seeing this marketing technique for it truly is – a perfect solution for engaging and educating your target audience.

But why now? Content marketing isn’t something new, so why is it trending now? Why is it suddenly so important for all types of brands to regularly feed their followers and leads with all sorts of webinars, blog posts, use cases, case studies, infographics, etc?

Because in order to truly interest someone in doing business with you in this day and age, it’s imperative that you constantly showcase your worth. A well thought-through, organized, and executed content strategy is one of the best ways to pump up your brand awareness and convert your leads into actual paying customers.

As a tech company that operates in a very specific market, we at AltusHost constantly find ourselves in situations where we need to create additional understanding about our services and generate new interest in our brand. That’s why content marketing has been a huge part of our business these last couple of years.

Even though it’s never easy, when done right – content marketing has the power turn even the most obscure brands into genuine industry leaders.

The Rise of Content Marketing

In this highly-competitive world, the only thing that can really sell your products and services is your skill to demonstrate their value.

Never forget that.

People aren’t really interested in classic advertisement anymore. Studies have shown that modern shoppers are far more interested in starting personal relationships/conversations with brands, instead of just reacting to generic discounts and proposals.

When you dig in deep and analyze consumer behavior (in general) on a much larger scale, you’ll easily see that people don’t really buy things anymore just because they look pretty. No. They’ve finally stopped picking up random items from the store shelves and hoping for the best. Today’s shoppers know better than that. They’re far more educated and harder to manipulate.

Modern shoppers have only one thing in mind, and that’s value.

Especially in the B2B world. After crunching their numbers, the guys behind Curata claim that by the end of 2017, 51% of all companies will have an executive in their organization who is directly responsible for developing their in-house content marketing strategy.

But that’s not all. It is also said that now around 50% of B2B buyers rely more on content to research and make B2B purchasing decisions than they did a year ago.

So, What Do These Numbers Actually Tell Us?

Well, just that the habit of making uneducated guesses is now officially dying. In this day and age, shoppers want something that’s serves some real purpose or solves a particular problem for them.

The golden age of 30 second TV commercials is long gone, my friend. A lot of brands today are building their marketing strategy around a genuine consumer collaboration model that builds buzz and get people to partake in your content creation process on their own terms.

In order to convert a certain lead into a sale in 2016 (and the upcoming 2017), you need to convince your potential shopper that your products and services are really worth his/her time and money. The only way that you can do that is by creating all sorts of amazing content that proves that you’re better/different than your direct and indirect competitors.

As you know, if you have been revisiting this site for quite some time now, content marketing is a subject that I often cover on this blog. During these last 18 months, I’ve done my best to help you understand how to create amazing content and prove its ROI.

Looking back on everything I wrote here in these last 12 months, I would say that the key takeaways from my 2016 content marketing efforts are:

1. Design multiple, precise customer personas;
2. Focus on quality, not quantity;
3. Always do your best to create “original 10x content”;
4. Make different types of content that speak to your audience in every stage of your marketing funnel;
5. Don’t just write fluff – solve problems for your reader;
6. Data is a great sidekick, but a terrible leader – use your numbers to guide your content marketing efforts, but only to a certain extent;
7. Always tell a story, don’t just list facts;
8. Always write for an audience of exactly one;
9. Find your short and long-tail keywords, but don’t just settle for what Google’s Keyword Planner has to offer you;
10. Measure your success, be patient, focus on content that offers direct, collective and second chance return of your investments;
11. Combine your SEO and content marketing efforts.

These are just some of the major takeaways from 2016.

Even though I shared a lot of value here and tried my best to teach our audience such things as: the [Persona] + [Use Case] Formula, proper storytelling, how to use data to supercharge your content marketing efforts, etc – the truth is, I never really discussed strategy with you.

So, having this in mind, I’ve decided to make the rest of this post all about content strategy:

The 2017 Content Strategy

In this upcoming year, in order to make content marketing worth your while, you’ll need to build your strategy around an idea that actually stimulates people to communicate with your brand and recognize your content as something more than that just another text or image online.

Every 2017 content marketing strategy should be built around that. You want to create content that provokes people to act and react on what you share online. In 2016, one thing was clear – dynamic storytelling is king! Every brand that decided to think beyond traditional media formats and really focus on interaction has won big in this department.

In order to grow your business online, you need to do a lot more than just create content. You need to get people to really read it, understand it, and in the end – amplify it. That’s why your content needs to be more about your customers, than your products.

The guys at Coca-Cola have a great understanding of that. They call this strategy “liquid content”. Why? – Well, because, its prime objective is to easily and freely flow from one consumer to another. That type of content basically begs to be shared. It’s irresistible and so contagious that it cannot be controlled. It immediately sparks a lot of interest from its targeted audience.

Liquid content is important for brands because it:

1. Often (if done right) outgrows your expectations and helps you learn a lot of new things about your audience;
2. Positions your company as an expert in its field;
3. Builds up brand awareness through entertainment;
4. Spikes up customer interests in your company, services, and products;
5. Creates loyal raving fans and followers that money cannot buy.

Adopt the 70-20-10 Rule

Even though liquid content should be a huge part of your 2017 content marketing strategy, that still doesn’t really mean that you should kill everything that has been going great for you so far in this department.

Sure, in this day and age, a lot of people are interested far more in interactive content than anything else, but there’s still a huge demand out there for case studies, white papers, webinars, and all sorts of videos and blog posts that educate users about your products and services.

Traditional content formats aren’t dying, they’re just transforming into something far more powerful.

Regardless how many blog posts and case studies get published every single day online – this type of content will never go away. I truly believe that. Creating how-to content around relevant short and long tail queries is still every content marketer’s bread and butter, now and forever.

But, you cannot stop there. You need to mix it up a bit if you want to rise above your competitors and become a top player in your niche. That’s why I suggest the 70-20-10 investment principal for everyone who plans to see significant ROI from his/her content marketing efforts in this upcoming year.

In case you’re not familiar with this strategy, allow me to explain it to you:

A 70-20-10 rule is a content marketing principle in which certain brand invests 70% of its resources into creating low-risk content, 20% into new trending formats, and 10% into risky ventures that could become tomorrow’s 70% or 20% content.

By following this blueprint, regardless how you do in these last two stages, you’ll instantly turn your business into something more than it already is. Innovation is a big part of content marketing. Apart from chasing old KPIs in this field, you should always try your best to change the game and bring something new to the table. Even though if you first don’t succeed, it’s only a matter of time when you’ll be rewarded for your efforts and bravery.