How to win against redundant content marketing?
Content marketing in all its forms and shapes has been around for as long as one could remember. Starting from Benjamin Franklin’s yearly publication of Poor Richard’s Almanack, to every small and large business involved in the storytelling aspect of marketing their business, content indeed proves to be a king. Content is the foundation for the organic growth of every business — product, or service alike. Even when the cost of creation, distribution, and promotion is calculated, content marketing turns out to be a strategy with one of the highest returns on investment.
However, with more than 600 million blogs, 43 million podcast episodes, and endless social media handles, online content appears to be saturated. It becomes hard to distinguish experts from amateurs and good content from bad content. There’s no dearth of self-proclaimed ‘experts’, ‘serial entrepreneurs’, ‘consultants’ and ‘influencers’ on the internet for outsourcing work. Though, it becomes difficult to find the right quality fit with all the noise.
Even with Google’s constant search algorithm updates, low-effort, keyword-plugged, template-based content is common to find on the web. It’s fairly easy to manipulate the system by maximizing the quantity alone, and with minimal regard to the quality. Bots and automation for content creation and syndication make it easier for anyone to write and publish content regularly and beat the algorithm to rank on the first page of Google SERPs to gain more visibility and business. The only discretion is the audience and it’s up to them to consume what they deem worthy of their time, attention, and money.
So, how do you play to win the game? How do you overcome the noise to make your content seen and truly engaged with? The following tips can come in handy for a small business, a start-up, or a solopreneur dipping their toes into the content marketing pool for the first time.
· Consistently improve your creation strategy. While most businesses and publishers are intent on creating and sticking to an annual content strategy, it needs frequent updates. The constant evolution of topics and formats along with a barrage of new information and trends means you have to continuously update your content creation strategy to stay relevant and relatable. It’s okay to have an overarching theme but leave enough space for flexibility and improvisation.
· Focus more on longtail keywords. The fight (to rank one on Google) gets harder as you focus more on broader and short-tail keywords. While long-tail keywords may not have much traffic, but they are more targeted towards the audience you want to grab hold of, and have lower competition, generally. A great tip for someone who’s just starting out their content marketing journey.
· Offer new information. No matter what topics and keywords you choose, it’s been definitely already written about. To make your content received well, try and differentiate your content by adding more research, more anecdotes, more information, more storytelling, and more value to it.
· Narrow down your audience. In continuation of choosing longtail keywords, defining your audience well goes a long way to scaling your content marketing success. In fact, this is the most basic thing you need to do, no matter what your marketing strategy and channel is. Create detailed audience profiles to understand their interests, aspirations, problems, and values to understand the type of content they consume, their preferred channels, and behavioral patterns. Your audience profiles and buyer personas will continue to evolve as and when you interact more with your audience, but a basic no-frills-attached understanding of your audience is an important first step to create a marketing strategy.
· Build your own syndication network. While there are numerous targeted syndication networks for every niche, their effective costs might be out of budget for a start-up or a solopreneur. To save costs, create your own network of publications with a similar profile as your business and moderate to high domain ranking. Building a relationship with even five to ten of such publications is a better deal than feeding hundreds and thousands of dollars into established networks.
· Engage with your audience personally. For a business to truly succeed, it needs to have an empathetic human touch. Especially for start-ups and budding small businesses, it’s imperative to have a personal one-on-one engagement with their audience. Social media platforms provide a tool for instant communication. An unconventional but totally acceptable approach to human communication is through phone calls and letters (yes! Bring back the snail mail and postcards.) Your first fifty or hundred clients can very well turn into your brand ambassadors if you communicate with them persuasively.
· Be persistent. People and businesses often want to succeed as soon as possible. And this is where (quality) content marketing fails. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. You have to consistently create valuable content, build authentic networks, and engage with audiences to succeed. Content, much like organic growth channels, doesn’t offer instant success and needs a year or more to provide a substantial return on investments. Virality, of course, is an exception, but there’s no fixed formula to it, and it’s a topic for another time. Be ready to invest in content marketing for the long run.
Most of the groundwork for content marketing to stand out lies in strong research and strengthening the basics. Once you’ve nailed the foundations, you can expect steady growth and loyal clientele.
