How to start with content marketing

Hello good friends, welcome again to yet another insightful and thought provoking article that we bring to you any other day every week. Come on and let's jump into it!

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is?a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind when it's time to buy what you sell.

Not all digital content is created equal. With the wrong strategies, digital content can underwhelm. With the right ones, it can educate, entertain, convince, distinguish, inspire and more. Whatever goal you set for a piece of content should drive its composition and mode of delivery.

If your goal is to use content to make your brand an industry leader, be intentional. It won’t happen just by putting out fresh content regularly, using the right keywords. What you say, how you say it, and?how you distribute it?are all necessary components.

If you want to use content to boost your brand’s industry leadership, you’ll need the right layering of content strategies to get there. One strategy in isolation may perform acceptably, but aligning the full range of them will provide the biggest bang for your content buck.

While knowing the technical of content marketing, dealing the obstacles like fear of judgement, imposter syndrome, being in-front of people and being criticized are some of the skill set you need conquer before you embark on this interesting & creative journey.

Here’s what you need to line up when choosing the right digital content strategies to boost your industry leadership.

Start with thought leadership strategy

You can’t own your industry unless your audience is looking to you as a critical source of information. Winning that role requires research and planning.

When was the last time you made a list of?thought leaders?within your company? If it’s been a while or you’ve never done it, start now. Your brand has invested in a lot of talent besides your CEO, so leverage it.

Your head of marketing and branding is keeping up on innovative marketing strategies that will shape your company. Your HR lead is keeping tabs on workforce trends. They probably have some prescient thoughts to share about how marketing, branding and HR affect your industry niche.

Research the existing chatter in your industry, then master your internal thought leadership and get ahead of it. Your shareholders, competitors, prospective customers and the media want to hear what your company has to say. So give them what they want.

This is the part where most people stop, do not overthink thought leadership start delivering informed and inspirational content in consumable portions. And do so using a layered strategy that incorporates CX, SEO, and influencer marketing, it can be topped up with a little paid amplification. Here’s how.

Use CX to Highlight Your Brand

Customer experience (CX) has been a tried-and-true way of elevating companies for a very long time. It is, as they say, the best publicity money can’t buy. CX can be a highly effective layer in your industry leadership digital content strategy.

customer experience is a totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral consumer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase.

If you're not taking care of your customers, your competitors will - Bob Hooey

There’s a tendency in thought leadership content to use search engine–friendly—words that mean little in themselves but can contain a whole lot of meanings that need to be unpacked. In your content, go ahead and unpack these words for readers and listeners with a podcast. Use concrete examples from your own company or its products and services.

If your content sounds like a sales brochure to media outlets, they won’t give it any play. So make sure you serve a healthy portion of vision with just a bit of brand sprinkled on top. Publications in search of lead-worthy content will eat it up.

SEO Fundamentals

SEO is like Christmas and New Year celebration, which comes first? I'm not going to argue this with you. How about on, the thought leadership content or the SEO that allows it to gain traction? Regardless of which side of the christmas-or-new year debate you choose to land on, understand that some things may be both or which one you feel easy to start with.

Of course, you will want your content to include keywords that are hitting on all cylinders right now. Remember, though, that your goal is to become an industry?leader, and that means creating tomorrow’s hot keywords in your space. Search for semantic gaps and focus on filling them with inspiring educational content.

Content that fills these gaps will emerge organically from the crowded jumble of ubiquitous keywords. That will attract not only others in your industry, but backlinks to media and other content as well. You’ll be?using SEO survey?to firmly establish your brand as an authority to be reckoned with.

Subject the Influence

It’s not only what you know, it’s who you know or who knows you. I’m talking about influencers, these are the people that you connect with. Especially here on Linkedin who you connect with and talk to is a major step. Linkedin is a unique platform that allows you to make connections unlike any other platforms these connections are not supposed to be the people you know but rather the people whom you would want to learn from. Then you forget the aspect of them being strangers or friends. Then from that you gain credibility from sharing your comments and opinions on influencer's posts so that you gain traction to your personal account, from that you ask some influencers to recommend your skills. Below is an example from one of my former colleagues and brother Evans Marufu who gave a recommendation on my linkedin profile.

Trust is the key element in influencer marketing. Find an influencer who has their followers’ trust and whom your brand can trust, and their followers will trust your brand. Partnering with the right influencer can help your company take a leadership role.

Although you should always create content that’s relevant to your target audience, influencers will help keep it that way. They’ll make sure your content emerges from the chaos for their followers. In turn, that will extend the life and magnify the impact of every piece of content you produce.

Choose your influencer partner carefully. One who loses the trust of their followers will take you down with them. The right one, however, will elevate your brand and make it shine.

Pay for an advert

I'm not a great fan of this but in my team we have some who are good at this, personally I mastered organic traffic and it works for me but it might not for you so let's jump into paid ads. Once you begin reaping the rewards of aligning these layers, lock in your leadership position. Amplify your content with well-placed paid advertising designed to increase the number of views on it.

Naturally, you’ll use social media to get your forward-thinking piece into broad circulation. The paid ad link on the right will make it even more visible. That, in turn, makes it more clickable, reactionable, likable, and shareable.

Don’t neglect to measure your paid advertising ROI. Metrics like referrals, organic queries, and impressions can indicate growing leadership recognition. You might find your brand a pay-per-click away from turning up the volume on your content.

Get your chase pieces into play

Thought leadership content shouldn’t end conversations; it should start them. Aligning key digital content strategies from concept to delivery keeps those conversations going.

If you want your content to earn your brand an industry leadership role, don’t let it languish on your website. Get your chase pieces — and your strategies-in a row. They’ll look calm on the surface while there’s strategic paddling going on underneath.

That's it for this week,?I hope you've extracted some insights from this newsletter and please subscribe to our emailing list for more exclusive updates and promotions from?Digital Mate Inc.

Leon Mandigara?is the?CEO & Founder at?Digital Mate Inc, & marketing consultant for so many brands and individuals. Want to schedule a meeting or call with him??click here.

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