There was a time when discounts and deals were the strategy people would use in order to get new clients. When sales declined, they would give people incentives to purchase their products or services.

Buy this, and get that, or buy this at 20% off and also start earning points for store credit.

The number of deals, discounts and sale offers was huge, and everyone felt that this was the best way to balance things out when sales went down.

The problem with this strategy is that eventually everyone was offering discounts and everyone was offering ways for people to feel like they got more from their purchases.

This started to become a huge issue because the customer was no longer interested in those deals, they could get the same deals from any other store.

This was a huge turning point for marketing both online and offline, but now that marketing has merged both the real world and the virtual world, there is no question that something needed to be done in order to evolve out of this situation.

This was the moment when content marketing was born. This is the latest marketing strategy that is being used by thousands of people all over the world now.

This article is going to explain the most important aspects of content marketing, and it will give you some important insight on how you can start running campaigns with this essential strategy in mind.

You need to know your audience

One of the biggest mistakes that content marketers make is that they don’t write for their audience, they simply write content they think is of good quality.

The problem with doing this is that you end up writing content that is not going to be seen by your buyers. It’s like writing an amazing review on a rock album when only people who like blues are reading the review.

It will be useless and it will provide no conversions at all.

The best way to avoid this is to learn all about your target audience. What is it that they would be interested in reading? What kind of information do they find valuable and worth sharing?

Learn all you can about your audience before you write a single line of content.

Think evergreen

Evergreen content is the kind of content that is always going to be valuable to people.

For example, if you write about a movie, you are writing about something that is not going to be a trend for a long time. This is not long-lasting content, on the other hand, you could write about why movies are good for stress relief and this makes the content evergreen.

This is a topic that is going to interest people today and ten years from now.

Learning to write this kind of content is going to be extremely useful in every aspect of your marketing strategy. It will give you the chance to create content that people will find important and useful regardless of how long it has been since you wrote that content.

Be critical of your content

When you write a new piece for content marketing, you need to be very critical of your own writing and always ask yourself if this is something that you would consider worth sharing with others.

This is very important, but you need to be honest with yourself when you do this. It’s quite easy for someone to know if their content is good as they write it.

Many top marketers have said they found themselves stopping at the middle of an article and starting over because they knew it wasn’t going to be worth publishing.

Be consistent, but make quality the priority

One of the most difficult things about content marketing is that it requires consistency and quality at the same time. This is the main reason why most marketers fail to achieve the best results.

They publish a lot of content but they sacrifice quality, or they worry too much about quality and publish sporadically.

There is a balance that you need to have when you create content. Being able to come up with quality often is a difficult thing, but no one ever said that achieving success was easy.

Never forget that everyone would be successful if it was easy.

Always track and analyze your publications

It makes no sense to create new content and just see what happens without any kind of tracking involved. You should look into your publications individually in order to see which ones are attracting the largest number of viewers.

Knowing what is happening and what kind of results you are getting is going to make a world of a difference in your campaign.

You can gain a lot of insight from seeing the traffic that your posts generate and the number of bounces.

Now it’s easy to track how long someone stayed on a page and this will also indicate if they read the article or if they left the page quickly.

Those are the kind of things that will make it easier for you start polishing your writing and making content that attracts your audience.

Avoid deceptive titles

One of the biggest sins of internet marketers in modern times is to create very deceptive titles with content that is hardly related to the title.

They usually stick to the same topic, but they don’t even deliver on the focus of the title and this makes people feel cheated.

If you want to look for the fastest and easiest way to get people to unsubscribe from your blog, this is going to be a great way to do it.

The point being that using deceptive titles (click bait) is a huge mistake.

There are plenty of marketers out there who use deceptive tactics to get some people to check out their sites, but this often results in those people leaving immediately after they feel they have been deceived.

This makes it very hard for that person to even want to conduct any business with that site ever again, so the reward is definitely not worth the consequences.

Make it visual

A great way to add appeal to any kind of post is to have images and video on it. It’s obvious that this is going to make the process of releasing good content even harder, but the time you invest in creating quality videos and images is going to be very helpful for this purpose.

You can be sure that any post you release with image and videos is going to be much more attractive to any kind of audience.

If doing this can significantly increase your hits, you are definitely going to be glad that you invested time in this process.

Some marketers even go as far as creating voice over versions of their written text so people can hear their articles instead reading them.

There is software that converts text into speech, but it sounds robotic and it’s tedious to hear. The best way to do this is to have an actual person talking.

Never forget that we are living in mobile times and this means people want images and videos when they are browsing from their phones, so by having images and videos, you are increasing your chances of being seen by a larger audience.

Always involve social media in the process

The use of social media is always a great way for you to measure just how effective any of your posts can be.

The number of likes and shares is going to be a clear indicator of how many individuals found the information to be useful to them.

Joining Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and any other relevant platform in social media is always going to be useful and helpful.

Don’t neglect this aspect of marketing because it serves as a great tool to measure how effective each of your posts can be when you release anything new. This is definitely the way to go for numerous marketers all over the world.

Conclusion

There is no way to know how long it will be until content marketing starts to lose power and becomes something everyone does.

Once this happens, we are going to have to evolve into another marketing strategy and that is a never-ending cycle.

The only difference is that we are all connected to the internet now and this means that everyone finds out about new marketing strategies much faster, which in turn, means that those strategies become obsolete much faster.

Until then, everyone should be taking advantage of content marketing and the excellent results it brings to their business.

This is definitely the most essential way for anyone to achieve results in modern times, so try to become as efficient as you can when using content marketing for your business.

Your competitors are working hard to stay on top, so you need to see this as a constant race with those who stop, inevitably coming in last.

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PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published March 16th 2018