How To Make Your Content Marketing Work Harder
What is the number one reason content marketing doesn’t happen in your business? I’m willing to bet that it’s because ‘it’s time consuming’. But let’s think about other things that are time consuming in your business – making or sourcing your products, responding to emails, doing client work. Those things don’t get pushed down the to do list, so why is content creation not deemed as important as these things?
The reason that content creation gets relegated is because we don’t see how hard it can work for us; it can sometimes feel like you take 3 hours to style one picture that someone will spend 3 seconds looking at. When you make your content marketing work harder for you, it becomes easier to see the value, and justify the time you’re spending on it.
Because really, content is the thing that’s going to last the longest in your business – clients and products will come and go but once you’ve got content created it’s there forever. It’s yours, you own it, and you can use it in lots of different ways. Rather than thinking of content as a time consuming hassle that you put out into the world once and then archive, think of it as a member of staff. You’ve invested into it, sure, but now you can put it to work in other areas of your business.
So what jobs can you get your content marketing to do?
Customer acquisition
Content marketing is one of the best ways to get discovered online. Think about how the phrase ‘google it’ has entered so ubiquitously into our vocabulary and how many times a day you use search to solve a problem. Every single thing you find when you google is driven by content. To make sure your content is working hard for you in the SEO stakes, spend a little time on your keywords.Think about some less-competitive niche keywords you want to show up for (so ‘handmade woollen blankets’ rather than ‘blanket’) and choose some of your existing posts to pimp with keywords. Add the keyword in naturally through the post, change the title if necessary, and ensure you have internal links set up to encourage new users to stay on your site and engaged in your brand. This won’t get you to number one in Google overnight, but it will set you on the path to greater search exposure.
Don’t forget Pinterest when it comes to SEO too – Pinterest is the place you will see the quickest increase in your traffic. Make sure you have a business account and rich pins set up, and that you have pinnable images for your blog posts and pages (a vertical image usually with text overlay – you can create these on Canva). Using the Pinterest search function, research the keywords you want to show up for, and put these in the SEO description of the image on your site. Then pin away!
Email marketing
Content helps you with your email marketing in two ways. First of all, it gets you sign ups. Include a sign up box at the bottom of those SEO-rich posts so that new visitors to the site have an action to immediately take. Look at what your most popular content has been and create an opt-in based on it to incentivise people to subscribe. This doesn’t have to be something brand new – tweak an existing blog post, put two together, focus in depth on one particular element.Once you’re gaining new subscribers, you can use your existing content in your newsletters. Include links to popular posts, show a behind the scenes of your Instagram photo, or reproduce a recent blog post in a reduced form.
Social media
Most of us create specific content for social media, especially Instagram, but there can be lots of cross overs between your existing content and social content. Image-wise, you’ve probably noticed that I use all the same images across all channels: I don’t take different pictures for Instagram, blog posts, Pinterest etc, I use all the same ones, usually more than once.
The same is true for written content. We don’t think twice about scheduling the same tweet multiple times, but for some reason we’re reticent to do it elsewhere. Can you remember what you posted on Instagram on September 21st 2017? If you can’t remember, then your audience certainly isn’t going to either. If a photo or a caption did particularly well the first time, replicate it. No one will notice and why continually try to re-invent the wheel (we go into this in way more detail in Campfire)?
We also often overlook our blog content when it comes to social media. Say you write a blog post with five great sections in it – well there’s five great Instagram captions or Facebook posts. Rework the points you make in a blog post to fit your other channels to get the most use out of it.
Outreach
Possibly the channel that has had the biggest impact for my business this year is outreach – by which I mean guest posting, collaborating with other business owners and podcast appearances (you can see them all on my press page to see what I mean). The great thing about outreach is that it allows you to get in front of your target audience on a channel where they’re engaged, and that they trust. It allows you to piggyback on the reputation of that channel, whilst providing value to their audience.
Outreach is usually the thing that scares my clients the most, probably because it can make you feel very exposed – it’s safe and comfortable hanging out on your own channels, and heading over to someone else’s feels more risky. But your content marketing can help with this. When you’re pitching a guest post, use one that you’ve already written and know is popular. You can rework the content for the publication but still be confident that it will be well-received and valuable. Similarly with podcasts, talk about things you’ve talked about in your blog posts or captions before. You don’t need to come up with new concepts to talk about when the ones you already know are great.
