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5 Things to Consider When Creating Content

04/19/202310/04/2022 by scmarketing

Creating content that resonates with your audience is essential to growing your business.

However, devising a content marketing strategy that suits your needs can be daunting – especially if you’re not sure where to start.

Here, we’ll outline five key factors you need to take into account when creating your content marketing strategy. So read on – and get started putting together a plan that will take your business to the next level!

1. Who is your target audience?

This is arguably the most important question you need to answer when putting together your content marketing strategy. After all, you can’t create content that resonates with your audience if you don’t actually know who they are! Defining your target audience will help you determine what kind of content to create, where to distribute it, and how best to reach them.

2. What type of content will resonate with your target audience?

Once you’ve identified who your target audience is, it’s time to start thinking about the type of content they’d actually want to consume. This can be anything from blog posts and articles to infographics and video tutorials.

If you’re not sure what kind of content will work best, consider conducting a survey or doing some market research.

3. Where will you distribute your content?

In order for your content marketing strategy to be effective, you need to make sure you’re distributing your content in the right places.

Firstly you need to ensure your website design is user friendly and appropriate for your audience. This will be the main hub for your content as you will want to lead people back to your website. It’s the place to add your blogs, Q&A’s, infographics or eBooks for download.

It’s also important to know which social media channels and online platforms your target audience is using – and then creating a presence on those channels. For example, if most of your target audience is on Facebook, then it makes sense to focus your efforts on that platform rather than others.

4. How often do you need to create new content?

Creating new content on a regular basis is essential to growing an engaged online following.

However, how often you should produce new material depends on a number of factors, including the size of your team and the amount of time and resources you have available.

A good rule of thumb is to aim for at least one new piece of content per week. But remember the old adage – quality over quantity!

5. How to drive traffic to your website?

The fact that you’ve identified the need to create a content marketing plan places you ahead of your competition. This is because one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website is to create compelling content that speaks to your target audience.

Once you have high-quality content, promoting it through social media and ensuring that you optimise the content on your website will form part of your ongoing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) activity which can help bring users to your website.

In addition, paid search advertising such as a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign with Google Ads can be a great way to reach potential customers who are already interested in what you have to offer. As people type in what they are looking for in search engines, a well curated PPC campaign with relevant keywords will offer the opportunity for your campaign to be shown as an Ad in search results.

By utilising a mix of these strategies, you can help to drive traffic to your site and growing your business.

Digital marketing consultant Croydon

We are a Croydon based digital marketing agency offering a range of marketing services including web design, content writing, keyword research, local SEO, PPC campaigns such as Google Ads to help improve your online presence and visibility online as your SEO experts.

Content strategy is the ultimate winner in digital marketing

05/21/202408/17/2022 by scmarketing

A digital marketing campaign relies on a number of elements, but it’s content that’s key above and beyond anything else – and for good reason!

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a term that is used to describe the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content with the aim of attracting and retaining your target audience.

Posting new, high-quality content regularly will help you build brand awareness while engaging with your target audience. It can help to drive action such as social shares, downloads or PPC clicks.

For long term success you need to get a content marketing plan together. You then need to understand your target audience as well as when, where and how often they consume information.

In this article, we outline a few tips on developing a content marketing plan for your business.

1. Understand your target audience

In order to create successful content marketing, it is necessary to understand your target audience. You need to know their needs, interests and behaviours in order to develop the type of content that will engage them.

By understanding your target audience, you can also better understand what type of content will be most effective in reaching them.

Start by creating a buyer persona, which is a profile of your typical customer. This will help you focus on the right topics and tone for your content marketing efforts.

2. A content marketing plan that gels

If you’re like most business owners, you probably think of content marketing as a way to generate leads and drive sales. And while that’s certainly a key goal, it’s not the only one. A successful content marketing plan should be holistic, taking into account all aspects of your business as well as the digital marketing channels that you use.

Whether email marketing, social media, Pay Per Click advertising and video, whatever channels you use, your potential new customers will consume your content online in a way that suits them, therefore all your content needs to be aligned.

A content marketing plan can ensure that everything meets your brand guidelines, helping to raise brand awareness this builds confidence with your target audience as they want to feel familiarity with your brand.

3. How to approach creating engaging content

Any successful content marketing strategy must be built on a solid foundation of research. By understanding your audience and what kinds of content they respond to, you can create material that is both informative and engaging. Once you have a content marketing plan in place, here are some top tips for creating engaging content:

Keep it fresh – make sure your content is up-to-date and relevant to your audience. Regularly publishing new material will keep people coming back for more. This is where your content marketing plan will help you.
Make it visual – incorporating images and videos into your content will make it more eye-catching and engaging.
Be concise – get to the point and make your content easy to digest.
Use strong headlines – a well-written headline can be the difference between someone clicking on your article or scrolling past it. Make sure your headlines are attention-grabbing and accurately reflect the content of your article.

4. How content marketing gets your business seen online

The digital world provides vast opportunities for businesses to reach a large number of people at a relatively low cost. Moreover, effective content marketing can help to improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts, making it more likely that your website will appear higher up in search engine results pages (SERPs). In other words, content marketing can be an extremely powerful tool for getting your business seen online.

Digital marketing Croydon

There are many different types of content that can be used for content marketing purposes, but it is important to ensure that whatever you produce is valuable and relevant for your target audience. By doing the necessary research to understand what kinds of content they respond to, you can create material that is both informative and engaging.

However, writing great content isn’t enough – you also need to make sure it gets seen by the right people. That’s where Smart Cow marketing comes in. We are experts at helping businesses like yours reach a larger audience and grow their business with effective digital marketing strategies.

So, if you’re looking for help taking your content marketing strategy to the next level, contact us today and let us show you what we can do!

You may also be interested in this article: The secret to content marketing

The secret to content marketing

08/19/202212/02/2021 by scmarketing

For small business owners we know that you’re tight on time. There’s so much on your plate to running a successful business and so many roles you have, from sales, marketing, HR, recruitment and finance to name but a few. With this many hats you’re wearing, thinking about regular content marketing may be blue sky thinking, however the benefits of fresh and regular content are vital for helping your business be found in search engine results pages (SERPs).

So, with the little spare time that you have, how can you ensure you’re sharing regular content across multiple channels?

The secret is to utilise and repurpose the content that you have.

When you write a blog and upload it to your website, you’ll have spent time writing at least 500 words or so. Therefore, use it. Whilst a blog in itself can help with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), as search engines look for fresh content with relevant keywords on websites, there’s so much more you can do for SEO.

Follow this simple process to maximise one blog to its full potential:

Write social media posts. Review the content of your blog and break that down into bite size chunks. You’ll find that you can schedule a number of different social posts simply by lifting a few sentences from the same blog and sharing them on social. You may have to tailor them slightly for the different social channels you use, but it will take you a lot less time than having to think up fresh new content.
Remember to add a link back to the full blog post and add an image (your own image or purchase a stock image – do not use google images as these carry copyright).
Get your employees and colleagues to also re-share what you post on social media to spread the news through your social network.
Conduct a poll question relating to your blog. This is particularly good on LinkedIn as it engages well with your network and allows them to comment.
If you have an Instagram or Facebook account, share the social post to your Stories to highlight that you have a new blog post. The gifs on Instagram are great for stand out.
Add a summary of the blog as an update to your Google My Business page with a ‘learn more’ button with a link back to your blog. And, if you are on any other listing directories such as associations or event websites, check if they have the option of adding regular updates from you as this all helps with link building.
Send an email to your marketing database. If you have an email database then start to utilise that. Create a template for an email. Platforms like Hubspot allow you to create great looking email templates. Then use a small snippet of the content from your blog in your email and add a ‘read more’ button.
If you want to build on your creative skills, why not create a short video with information taken from your blog? You can record a message simply on a mobile phone. Check out our blog with ideas for creating video for your business.

You can chat further with us about video creation if you want to know more about the scope of what you could do.

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All this activity will help with search engine optimisation (SEO). With the blog itself, ensure you have keywords included (the words and phrases that you want to be found for in search engines).

For social posts, email marketing and business directory uploads always ensure that you have included a link back to your website. Link building with quality links also helps show search engines that you are a thought leader as well as improves brand awareness and lead generation.

We provide digital marketing including SEO, Email Marketing, PPC campaigns and social media marketing.

The importance of video content

08/19/202211/10/2021 by scmarketing

Video content can provide a great deal of value in your overall business strategy and it’s worth considering how best to incorporate it into your wider marketing plan.

For businesses, it makes sense to take advantage of this trend and create videos for your customers or clients. If you, don’t have much experience with digital marketing, no worries! This post has some tips on how to get started with creating video content and some helpful pointers on making videos work for you.

Why video content is important

With almost nine out of ten people wanting to see more videos from brands, this makes for a strong case for utilising video in your marketing strategy in the year ahead.

Video content should be treated just like any written blog, Google ad or social media post. It’s a key part of your overall digital marketing strategy and should provide information of relevance to your target audience, position you as a thought leader and help to generate leads to your website.

With so much noise online, video helps to create stand out from your competitors. It’s a well-known fact that having imagery on your social media feed or website can help engagement.

Explainer videos have been extremely popular, with the majority of people (94%) watching explainer videos to learn more about products, with 84% swayed to make a purchase.

These stats highlight a huge benefit to utilising video in your marketing plan.

Types of videos you can make for your blog

It’s all very well saying you should utilise video but where do you start with what to create?

As you would with any blog you’re writing, think about your target audience and what you can say that will help them overcome any challenges. What are your customers pain points and how your products or services help them.

So, initially work through your products and services and think about creating a product explainer video whilst remembering to highlight how you can make their life easier.

Effective content is always about keeping things simple. Here’s a few areas you can cover in videos:

Product focussed videos – what are the USPs of your products
Educational/Tutorial
Interview with a key client
Testimonials
A walk through your office / footage of products on shelves
Create a live video on social media
About you & your business – how did you set up your business? Bring your brand to life showcasing your story

You can create a simple video with your smartphone these days. Most importantly it’s about being natural if you opt to put yourself in front of the camera. You can also do a simple presentation style video with graphics, captions and a voiceover which, when edited together, you can create a simple and factual video.

Digital marketing Croydon

Video has quickly become one of the most effective ways to reach your target demographic.

It’s also a great way to show off what makes you different from other companies in your sector.

If you’re not doing it already, now is the time for video marketing! Whether you want funny or informative content, video provides an opportunity for SEO optimisation and engagement with customers that can’t be found anywhere else online. We can help you get started by providing consultation services – contact us today!