10 Content Marketing Strategies to Market Your Brand

In this modern technological age, marketing is easier, and harder than ever. How can this paradox exist? With the dawn of internet marketing, it’s become quite simple to communicate with audiences of your brand. However, with this ease of access, engagement with content has been slow to rise over the years. As a matter of fact, content marketing rose three hundred percent in 2016, with only a five percent rise in the engagement of the content. With these figures in mind, it becomes integral to have the best possible content when seeking viewers. So, how do you make your content marketing appeal to prospective customers over the plethora of content online? Below, we’ll take a look at ten tips and tricks to better your content marketing.

1. Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

When first developing your content strategy it’s important to ask yourself some questions. Why are you making the content you are making? Who is this content supposed to help? How will your content help them in a way no one else’s will? After answering these questions, creating a content plan is the next step. This entails deciding just what content you’ll be creating and how it will be implemented to your target audience. Developing a content marketing strategy involves critical thinking, studying your prospective buyers, and being creative when making content.

2. Provide Content in A Crisp, User-Friendly Format

By displaying the information you want to get to your audience the most, in an organized, clear-cut, straight to the point fashion, you ensure that potential customers find what they’re looking for immediately, instead of straying away from your content to a competitor’s. This seems like a simple tip, yet is one of the most disregarded aspects of content marketing online today. For instance, services displayed in a user-friendly format like that of Youi’s page can have a good chance of converting visitors to customers.  Having the answers to people’s questions in easy-to-spot headers, lists to break down content, and clearly defining how you can be reached, will greatly improve your chances of winning over those who your marketing is aimed at. We’ll look more into tips to increase the streamlined, user-friendliness of your content in further tips.

3. Visual Aids

Breaking up your content with images and videos, no matter the length of your work, will help keep people engaged and increase the chances of them sharing your presentations on social media. You can assure added value to your content by choosing images, graphics, and video that are relevant and add to the experience of the reader, that support your brand, and provide information to viewers. Images and video tell stories in ways that words alone cannot. You can greatly enhance your work by choosing graphics that add to your brand narrative.

Videos that provide instruction, such as How To videos, videos that provide industry updates, promote your expertise, and complement your written content, are excellent for keeping your audience engaged with your content. Though images can attract visitors, and are necessary for providing social media shares, having videos with your content can add 2.6% more time spent on your page by visitors.

4. Provide Tips, Tricks, and Bullet Lists

One of the most important parts of cultivating interest in your content comes from making it easy for your audience to see the importance of the content you’re offering. When scanning content, if readers notice features such as bullet lists, sub-headings, and clearly defined parameters of your work, they are more likely to view further presentations. There are a few various ways to showcase the worth of your work to the audience.

• Break down lengthy and congested aspects of your content with bullet points. Bullet points allow viewers to quickly scan for pertinent information.
• Use Subheadings to clarify where the most important parts of your content lie. This will allow potential customers to find the information they most need.
• By establishing clearly defined parameters in your content you allow viewers to answer the questions, that originally drove them to seek your content, as quickly as possible.

5. Keep the Length of Your Content in Mind

For many, getting caught up in the ‘perfect length,’ or word count of product descriptions or marketing e-mails can overshadow creating quality content. By keeping in mind that many readers have tight schedules that may prevent them from reading a lengthy work, we can keep our marketing content full of only the best and most pertinent information. Addressing the most pertinent potential customer questions within the first few seconds of being viewed is crucial. In doing this, content should stay clean, streamlined, and effective.

6. Quotes and Citations Establish Fast and Simple Connections with Viewers

We’ve all seen quote boxes somewhere online. While they’re not all the excellent attention gainers we’re talking about here, by selecting the right quote, you can give your content more credence, while simultaneously breaking up your writing to alleviate reader anxieties caused by long texts. Quotes should be from leaders of your brand, satisfied customers, or industry insiders. Quotes and citations give an air of professionalism to your content and provide sources from which viewers can see you have gained your information.

“Using a quote in your content helps break up the text and lend credence to the story you’re telling.” -Cassie Gillette; ‘3 Easy Tips to Keep Your Readers Engaged Longer’

7. Never Bury the Lead

The easier information and knowledge can be found in your writing, the better your audience will respond. This includes viewing your further presentations, sharing your content on social media, and recommending your brand to others. Always display your content in a way that showcases the most important aspects of your brand first and foremost. This can be easily achieved by highlighting the most important aspects of your article with italics, underlines, headings, and bullet points.

8. Provide a To-Do List for Your Viewers

With a prominent To-Do list, you provide viewers with a call to action that will prompt them to engage with your content. In doing this, you ensure prospective clients know the steps to take to become customers.

• Develop a content marketing strategy to know who your target audience is, how to speak to them, and what content to make to do so.
• In making content, be sure it is short, concise, and to the point. Answering prominent quest that viewers may have is the most important aspect of your presentation.
• Be sure your content speaks to your customers about what it is your brand can do that no other can.

9. Provide Clear and Defined Takeaways

By providing clear-cut take away for your viewers, important information is allowed to become the central focus of your writing. These few simple take away can help you begin to implement changes in your marketing strategies:

• Add images with a value that elevate the reader experience and connect with your brand narrative.
• When producing videos, start small. This will allow you to test varying styles of video, like instructional, or interviews, to determine what works best for your audience.
• Structure content where readers immediately find value in your presentation.

10. Allow Ideas to Aerate

Cultivating a thought process that allows you to look at each content marketing piece as a way to get ideas out and test them, lets you figure out what works for your target audience and what doesn’t. This thought process should replace thinking that each project we produce is the end. This allows our content to grow over time depending on our audience needs and their likes and dislikes.

Conclusion

By developing a content marketing strategy to determine your target audience and then creating content that is of the utmost quality, you can attract new customers and repeat clients alike. In having the flexibility to aerate our ideas we can determine exactly what our audiences respond to the most and what motivates them to engage and further allow our content to evolve. Go slowly implementing these tips one at a time to find what works best for you. Before long, your content will be attracting massive crowds of viewers.

Helen Cartwright

Helen Cartwright is a passionate blogger, who excels in the Digital Marketing and Technology niche. When not wired in marketing strategies she ghost-write for a variety of authors who have their work published on leading online media channels such as The Huffington Post and Entrepreneur.com.