My wide guess is you landed on this page while searching for things your content marketing company should be doing?
The idea behind content marketing is the exact opposite of all forms of paid advertising. Rather than push loads of ads in front of your target customers, you allow them to come to you in their own time through your contents. For example, a search engine user searching for information on “organic dog foods” is a potential customer for a nearby vet clinic. Imagine if as a veterinarian, your vet practice blog has useful information on “organic dog foods”. It is easier to convert this visitor to a client.
When a lot of people hear the term content marketing, they often think of it as blogs, articles and stuff like that. But actually, content marketing involves much more than that.
Content marketing is a conscious strategic approach of developing and publishing varieties of contents with a goal to attract, convert and retain a target audience. Businesses today are looking for competent content marketers to perform this task for them. A recent research revealed that 70% of customers would rather learn about a business through an article rather than through any kind of paid advert.
Things Your Content Marketing Company Should Be Doing
For businesses that have made the decision to hire a content marketing company, a major question often on their list is “how do we know the things our content marketing company should be doing before hiring one”.
If you’ve already made the decision to hire a content marketing company for your content needs, this post will tell you 7 things your content marketing company should be doing when you eventually hire one.
1. Blogging
Blogging is probably the long arm of content marketing. Your content marketing company should have a solid plan for blogging. Here is where your CMC creates relevant articles, guides and sorts around your business niche. The advantage of this is that when combined with good SEO, it helps your web pages become more visible to your target audience on search engines.
Blogging is a great way to get organic traffic for your website. A research proved that 70% of customers would rather learn of a business through contents than any form of ad pushed into their faces.
2. Keyword Use and Keyword Research
Your content marketing company should be ranking your blogs and other content pages for relevant search terms known as keywords. There are 4 key locations in blogs where keyword usage is highly recommended – title tag, headers & body, URL, and Meta description.
Apart from use of relevant keywords in your content pages, your content marketing company should also be conducting an in-depth keyword research. The fact that long tail keywords produce higher conversion rate should not be neglected. A good content marketing company will take spying on your competitors’ online strategy seriously. This is to enable them to gain valuable insights on how best to launch your content marketing campaign. Part of the gaining insight process should be to know what keywords your competitors already rank for and how they can utilize lesser volume keywords (where necessary) to compete favorably.
For instance, this particular post you’re reading has been optimized for the long tail keywords, “things your content marketing company should be doing”. The implication is that this post is automatically optimized for “content marketing”, “content marketing company” as both keywords are contained in the long tail keyword used.
3. Social Media Posts
Social media marketing is the aspect of content marketing that deals with social media campaigns. Social media posts are a great way to pass on information about your brand to potential customers.
For that purpose, your CMC should have a competent copywriter engaged in developing social contents for your social media pages. You’ll learn more about the role of a copywriter in your content marketing campaigns further down this post. Other forms of social media marketing which your CMC should be engaged in while promoting your brand could include social media engagements, promotions and influencer marketing.
4. Link Building
Link building is a search engine optimization technique that utilizes a combination of internal linking and back linking to improve ranking of web pages on search engines. Web pages with high link profiles, especially backlink tend to rank higher on SERPs as against those with lesser backlinks.
To understand why backlinks are important to your SEO process, you should think of it as a vote of confidence or approval of your contents from other site owners in similar niches. This goes to tell search engine bots that the contents on your web pages are so trustworthy that other pages are referencing it.
5. Copywriting
Copywriting is quite different from content writing. The goal of copywriting is to sell your personas on your brand. Copywriting is the art of selling your brand to the public. It tends to combine the product and ideology of a brand to create a brand. The main idea behind copywriting is to pitch the product or services to target customers.
A good and subtle way to achieve this in content marketing is by the use of anchor texts, calls-to-action and interlinking of related web pages.
6. Content Planning
It is not just enough that your content marketing company is involved in developing contents relevant to your business or niche. A content plan is important to reach your target audience maximally up to the point of getting them hooked on your contents. A content plan is a strategy that will help your CMC to program the contents you wish to serve to your target audience.
To achieve desired results with your content marketing, it is important to plan your contents ahead of time before setting out. The first step towards developing a content plan for your brand is determining the best format to use, and then break things up into contents for blogs or social networks.
7. Pillar Page
Pillar Page is a practice in content marketing where all aspects of a broader topic are discussed in a single post. A typical pillar page is then supported by interlinked web pages discussing more specific topics mentioned in the pillar page. Those are known as topic clusters. For instance, a pillar page with title “Types of Website Traffic” can be interlinked with cluster topics such as “how to improve organic traffic of a website, How to track website traffic and other topics relating to website traffic.
The reason for this pillar page and topic cluster strategy is to increase the number of page views per unique visitor.
Conclusion
Content marketing has taken center stage in SEO techniques of the moment. Search engine optimization is the overall process involved in making web pages rank higher and become more visible on SERPs. Apart from the smaller units of SEO like keyword use and link building already discussed above, SEO practice as a whole is very important to the success of your content marketing.
We hope you’ve found these 7 things your content marketing company should be doing very helpful for choosing the right company.