Engaging Content Is King
Most top websites are popular due to the content, not necessarily the design. There are plenty of popular sites that look bad, but very few cool-looking sites with poor content that ever get recognized.
Great content can make you a thought leader and increase brand recognition, trust, credibility, customer loyalty, and authenticity.
To create great content, start by listening to your customers and asking them questions. You can also use social media listening tools like Radian6 to see what people are saying in your space. A new tool called Bottlenose can help you quickly identify what keywords are buzzing, and Google Trends is helpful for seeing which topics are trending up or down. However you do your research, make sure you write more about the topics your customers lose sleep over than just the topics that are part of your sales process.
When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), content is and always has been king. Search engine “spiders” need relevant, fresh content to chew on if a website is going to rank highly with the search engines. Social media is just a mirage if it’s not based on quality content, and public relations (PR) that doesn’t tell a story or share a trending topic is not worth anyone’s time to read. So get on board the content marketing train and customers will be pulled to you instead of you always pushing stuff on them.
Clearly, search and social is now a hungry content monster that needs to be fed, and link building is nearly impossible without content.
The emphasis on content means you are, in many ways and no matter what your business, a publisher. If you want to think like a publisher, you need a content marketing plan. The first step is creating a calendar.
Leave a Comment!