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Content marketing is the best way to market your online business. It allows you to target the people interested in your goods, which increases the chances of making sales.
But that`s only possible if you know what content marketing methods to use and what platforms to market your business.
Content marketing comprises paid and unpaid/organic methods.
To get quick results, you have to use paid methods, which involve paying for ads or influencers.
However, if you don`t have cash, you can use organic methods, which you don`t have to pay for, but it takes time to get results.
To be able to pick the right methods and drive sales, you should know what these methods are, and how to implement them—that`s what this content covers.
Organic Methods
You don`t need to spend money to use organic methods. All you need is consistency and patience because it takes time to see benefits through organic marketing methods. These methods include:
Blog Content Marketing
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This involves creating content on blogs to market your business.
You can create blogs using tools like Namecheap, where you register for an account and choose a plan that you can afford.
You can choose the personal site maker plan, which goes for $3.88 per month, or the business site maker plan, which costs $8.88 monthly. All these plans have a 14-day free trial, after which you can opt to pay or decline if the services satisfy or don`t please you.
What`s nice is this platform has a drag-and-drop feature, allowing you to create a website even without web development skills.
Furthermore, you get a free SSL certificate despite the plan you choose, to protect you from hackers.
To help you save money, Namecheap provides a free placeholder domain name—a service you will pay for in the other web hosting companies.
Here is more about how Namecheap can help you build a successful online business.
After building your blog, create content to convince your audience to buy your products or services.
For your content to attract readers, it should appear on relevant searches, and that can be possible if you optimize it for SEO. To conduct SEO optimization, you should incorporate the keywords people use when searching content related to yours.
And that requires conducting keyword research and using high-volume keywords that have low competition. This enables search engines to align your content with relevant search queries and rank it high on the search results.
However, even if the content ranks, it can`t appeal to clients if it doesn`t align with their persona and answer their intent. Therefore, also ensure that it solves people`s problems and speaks in their language.
If your content is about how to make money online, for example, specify the method, and don`t go off-topic. Plus use a language that suits such an audience.
Use formal language if you are targeting people with high educational backgrounds, e.g. lawyers and professors. Otherwise, use casual language so you can reach people of various educational levels.
Also, break down your content into readable sections and use simple language to make it easy for people to understand. Besides, use actionable language to intrigue people to perform your calls to action.
Social Media Marketing
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Unlike blog marketing, social media marketing doesn`t require SEO knowledge. All you need to consider is your niche and business model.
A niche is your business specialization and a model refers to how your company conducts its business.
Business models are categorized into business-to-customers (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B).
So if you have a clothing warehouse, your target audience is wholesalers. That`s a B2B business and your target audience is other businesses.
If you are a retailer, you should focus on the end user, which means you have a B2C business.
Both of these businesses have different client needs, and your content should align with them.
To know your audience's needs and create content relevant to them, check your competitors and see how their clients interact. That will help you know what they like and dislike, and the language they use.
That`s how you can learn your business weaknesses and strengths and create relevant content that has the potential to drive conversions.
To attract more people on social media, create more videos and images than text-based content and be consistent. Social media favors videos more than texts because that`s what people interact with the most.
To enhance consistent content creation, you can create content for a whole week or month and schedule it.
That will help you publish content even when any inconvenience holds you from creating content.
All social media platforms have built-in free-scheduling tools, but that means you will have to navigate from one tool to the other to schedule content.
To make it easy, you can use tools like Hootsuite or Getresponse. They help schedule content and publish it on all social media platforms, which saves time.
Here is more about how to use GetResponse.
When your content is helpful, you will easily convince people to make purchases.
Some of the best social media platforms to market your business include
Here is content covering social media marketing practices that increase sales to your marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing
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This is the most personalized way of marketing. It targets a specific person, which increases the chances of making sales.
The good thing is that, unlike blogging or social media marketing, it can`t be affected by algorithm changes or social media regulations.
It involves building an email list to which you can market your content.
To facilitate email marketing, you need to create a professional email address relevant to your business. This builds trust in your audience and makes it easy for them to identify and relate to your business.
To build a trustworthy email address, you can use tools like Getresponse.
With this tool, you can build an email address for only $15.58 per month, billed yearly, on the email marketing plan.
However, there are marketing automation plan, which goes for $48.38 per month, and eCommerce marketing plans which cost $97.58 monthly. All plans are billed yearly.
What`s better, in all the plans, you can
- Set email autoresponders
- Do email segmentation
- Create websites and landing pages
- Create sign-up forms and pop-ups
This enables you to create personalized content to market your business and build a targeted email list that converts.
If you don`t have a website, on Getresponse, you can create one for free.
Read this GetResponse review and see what it offers.
You can market your business through email marketing by building landing pages and promoting them on your websites or social media platforms.
To build effective landing pages, create lead magnets to persuade people to submit their emails. When they do, you can send them promotional emails and sell your goods.
Here is more on how you can do email marketing.
Paid Ads (PPC) Content Marketing
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Also known as pay-per-click (PPC), this refers to the process of paying search engines so your adverts can be placed on the top pages of search results.
Advertisers pay search engines for actions performed on their ads, which depends on the bids.
Bids are the actions you want your ads to get, which can include impressions, clicks, views on video ads, and conversions.
For PPC marketing to be effective, ensure your keywords are relevant to your ads, and then create copy that matches the audience`s search intent.
To attract the audience and easily convert, build a user-friendly, navigable landing page so people can see and perform your call to action.
There are several types of paid ads, including:
Search Advertising
This type of paid ad displays ads on search engine results (SERPS).
For your ads to rank on the search results, use keywords that match what people search for.
Display Advertising
This is an advertising type that shows ads on the advertising networks' partner websites.
Search engines match ads with relevant websites where target clients hang out, which increases the potential of making conversions. For example, when you create car-selling ads, they get displayed on car blogs. If somebody opens the blogs, your ads will surface and entice people to click on them.
Social Media Advertising
This kind of ad type displays ads on social media platforms.
You can choose the social media platform you want to market per your business model and target market.
Then, create relevant ads and choose whether they should be displayed on the newsfeed, stories, or messenger.
Remarketing Advertising
Also known as retargeting, this involves creating ads specifically for people who have engaged with your ads but did not convert.
For example, if somebody clicks on your ads but doesn`t buy, you can create ads and remarket to them to persuade them to take action.
To identify who interacted with your ad but didn`t buy, track your ad performance with tools like Google Analytics. You will see the amount of traffic your ads drive and where it comes from.
Google Shopping
These are the kinds of ads mostly used by e-commerce websites. They display product ads with descriptive information on the search results.
On Google Shopping, ads are displayed with information like price, product quality, company phone number, location, and working hours. This helps users to get complete information before they click so they can make a better choice.
How to Plan Your Marketing Content
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Knowing how to plan your content helps solve your audience's intent and create a strong long-term marketing strategy.
To plan your content,
Set Goals
Goals provide the road map to what you want to achieve with your content. These goals can be:
- Increasing brand awareness and authority
- Strengthening customer relationship
- Increasing conversions
If your goal is increasing brand awareness, you should create informative content. That will enable people to learn about your business and be attracted to it.
To achieve such a goal, create educative content like case studies and tutorials.
If you aim to make sales, create commercial content, and convince people to buy your goods or services. That includes product descriptions and comparisons.
Analyze Your KPIs
KPIs or key performance indicators refer to the measurable values used to examine businesses` success. They help verify the attainability of marketing purposes.
For example, if your goal is increasing brand awareness, your KPIs will be sign-ups, traffic, reviews, and social media shares.
If your goal is making sales, your KPIs are the conversions or sales you aim to get.
KPIs for conversions are measured by how many people buy your products or services. Meanwhile, traffic, mentions, social media shares, and sign-ups are KPIs for increasing brand awareness and customer relationships.
Your marketing budget should align with your goals, and knowing your KPIs helps you set funds that can enable you to reach those goals.
Set Your Budget
Your marketing goals, type of content, and marketing platform contribute to how much you need to fund your business.
Videos will require video editing tools, while blog content requires freelancers and keyword research tools.
Besides, you will also need social media automation tools to speed up and enhance consistent content creation on social media.
To set a better budget, measure your KPIs compared to your goals, and adjust your budget to fulfill your marketing strategy.
Your budget should suit the tools and services you need to pay for. If it can`t, reduce it to fit your budget and increase it later if your business improves.
Create Content Consistently
If you want to build a reliable business, teach people new effective ways to solve their problems and you`ll convince them to follow you.
Besides, search engines rank websites that consistently publish new content. That`s because consistent publishing of content increases keywords on your website, hence increasing its rank. And if a website ranks, traffic increases
A website that inconsistently publishes content gets low traffic. That signalizes search engines that your content isn`t helpful, which lowers your site rank.
To consistently create content, create a content strategy. This involves deciding the amount of content you want to publish per month, which can be 4 to 8 articles.
Then create full-month content so you have something to publish within the month even when you miss time to create content.
If you don`t have time to create content, you can hire freelancers, whom you can find through social media or freelance writing websites.
Alternatively, you can search for them through their portfolio websites. To use this method, type your niche followed by freelancers. If your niche is psychology, for example, you can type psychology freelance writers.
You will find various freelance writers you can choose from and hire them to create your content.
Here is more on finding the best freelance writers for your business.
Collect Your Results
Analyzing results helps know your marketing strategy performance. It enables identifying any mistakes and correcting them or re-strategizing your marketing campaigns to drive more conversions.
Therefore, after creating content, ensure to examine its performance regularly.
Your marketing strategy will determine how often you should analyze your content.
If, for example, your goal is increasing sales or traffic within a month, analyze your site after two weeks. If you have not yet reached half of your goals, you can check what`s wrong and tweak your strategy.
To do effective content analysis, use tools like
Choose your favorite tool, and create an account. Then add your website URL and you will get all the results about your website performance.
Utilize Content Marketing and Create a Successful Business
Content marketing helps businesses to succeed. All you have to do is create content that aligns with and answers your target audience's intent.
What`s better, if you have no money for paid marketing methods (PPC), you can use organic ones, which involve blogging, social media marketing, or email marketing.
Moreover, create a content plan and follow it up. This will help you know what does and what doesn`t work so you can publish content that draws clients and increases income.
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