Core Basics for an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

No matter how powerful social media and the presence it creates can be, efforts towards social marketing are inhibited by a company’s ability to publish high quality content that accurately — and subtly — publicizes the brand’s messaging. There is a lot of clutter out there on the Internet, and to keep your company alive and surging you need to form the right strategy in order to stand out against competition.

Content publishing – whether it is a whitepaper, blog, press release, news article, or webpage – requires interesting and informative material. People often skip right over chunks of text, because there are so many other (shorter) options to read; it is crucial for marketers to form well-found messages and write content around them.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

·      Timeliness: Whatever the post or piece is, it needs to come out at the proper time. This is especially important when companies are sharing industry-related trends and popular information that could get lost in an upsurge of publications.

·      Quality versus Quantity: The age-old battle is easily settled in the content war. Companies can benefit by promoting as much pro-marketing content as possible, without sacrificing its quality. This is important for reasons explained in the next section.

·      Exposure and Ranking: The primary goal of online publishing is to support a brand’s websites and online assets. Every article, mention, blog, and post increases the chances a potential client will find a company in the first place. Due to technical reasons with modern search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo), Internet powerhouses have begun efforts to meet the needs of online users in order to provide well-meaning content on search results. In essence, poor-quality content is ranked lower and disappears. Long-lasting, quality, and timely content on the other hand, can silently generate exposure with minimal effort.

·       Share-through: Create content that is worthy of a share and post it on major platforms where is can easily be seen and forwarded.  This necessitates making sure the content is relevant and interesting and taps your audience’s attention to want to take the time to pass along and/or share via word of mouth with other people within their social networks, both online and offline.