It’s not news to anybody that your online presence should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. It’s obvious to all business owners that the internet has taken over traditional marketing forms and most companies are putting a big chunk of their resources into it, as they should be. But there are still too many people that don’t really know what they’re doing.
Social media is one piece of the puzzle that people tend to get right most of the time. As long as you’re posting interesting information in a relatable style that isn’t too formal, you should find that customers engage with you more. That engagement will hopefully transfer into increased sales somewhere down the line.
Having a good website is another obvious part of your online presence. By now, everybody understands the weight that a good website carries, and the damage that you can do by having a sub par one. An outdated website tarnishes your reputation and makes you look unprofessional. In a world full of impatient consumers, a clunky website will send them elsewhere in just a few clicks. But making your site look slick isn’t enough to keep people coming back, which brings us to the area of online marketing that people seem to struggle with; content marketing.
Ask a business owner if they use content marketing and they’ll probably say yes, but the chances are, they aren’t getting everything that they could be out of it. They probably realize that having a website full of good quality content is going to draw potential customers to their website, but they often think of it as nothing more than a marketing tool. The truth is, it’s much more than that. There are a couple of different reasons that people aren’t getting the most out of their content marketing, but luckily there are solutions as well.
Trying To Do It Yourself
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you can write all of your content yourself because you are an expert in your field. While it’s true that you do have the knowledge to write good, informative posts, that’s only half the story when it comes to content marketing. One of the reasons that you do content marketing is to improve your SEO and that requires more than just good information. You need to get the right amount of keywords in your posts and make sure they are well placed. If you go overboard you’ll actually end up getting penalized. Linking with other sites is also important but, again, you can get bumped down the list if you get it wrong. To get all of this stuff right, you need to be an expert in SEO, which you probably aren’t.
It’s far better to hire companies like Davidcarralon.com to do it for you. They understand exactly how all of the algorithms that affect SEO work, and they can help you go through your content and ensure that you’ve got everything right. It’s not worth risking doing it without expert advice because if you mess it up, you’ll go way down the rankings and customers will never be able to find your site when they’re searching online.
Using The Product Team
Lots of companies make the mistake of thinking that the best people to write content for your site are the product team. They know the most about your products so they are best equipped to write content. That’s not quite true. They might know the most about your product, but the content doesn’t need to be specifically about your product. Instead, it should cover a wider range of topics based around your industry. Even though they might know the most about the product, that doesn’t mean they are good writers either. If the content isn’t enjoyable to read then it doesn’t matter how good the information is, nobody will get to it anyway. You need a specific content writing team that specializes in writing entertaining posts that are informative at the same time. Of course, they will collaborate with the product team sometimes, but don’t leave them to do all of the writing.
Presentation
The way that you present your articles is far more important than people realize. Readers don’t know they’re doing it, but as soon as they start reading they are making lots of judgments based on the font, spacing, and size of the text. Even if they are enjoying that actual content of the piece, they might still stop reading if the presentation isn’t right. When you tell people this, they’ll often say that it can’t matter that much, surely? Well, in a study conducted by a psychologist, the findings showed that it makes a massive difference. Two groups were given the same article, one had a good layout and the other had a deliberately bad one. The group reading the badly laid out piece took longer to read it, and showed visible signs of frowning as they did so. They were also less clear about the actual arguments and ideas expressed in the piece than the other groups, even though the words were exactly the same. The group reading the well laid out piece read it quicker and reported enjoying it more.
Fonts are also important because they say something about your company. There is no golden rule to choosing a font because it depends on what your readership is. You need to be clear about who you are trying to target with your content and tailor your font choice to them. For example, if you are writing posts about the business world, you’ll want to use a more formal, traditional font. But if you’re writing a computer or tech post, then your target demographic are likely to be younger and so will respond better to a more creative font. If you misjudge the font choice, you might put off potential readers.
Proper paragraphing is also important. Readers want to be able to skim and find the relevant information quickly. They also need the content to be easy to read. Without proper paragraphing, the content won’t be clear to readers and if they’re faced with a solid block of text without breaks, they might not bother reading it in the first place. The best web content writers use the Flesch-Kincaid readability test as a guideline. The test was originally created for government documents but it serves as a good set of instructions on how to write clear and concise copy that anybody can understand. Visit https://expresswriters.com for some more tips on this great method.
Overcrowding your site is another fatal error. When you’re reading something, your eyes don’t track along the page in the way that you would assume. They jump back and forth a lot, and if there are other things to catch their eye, they’ll become easily distracted. In some cases, you want their eye to be drawn to other things, like your Twitter feed or the other articles on your site, but you need to get the balance right. If you pack your site full of loads of stuff down the sidebar, people will struggle to read your article because their eye will be repeatedly drawn away. They’ll finish the article after not paying proper attention and that will leave them feeling as though there wasn’t much useful information in there, even if there was.
Think Of Content As A Product
Content is an afterthought for most companies. Naturally, you’re going to focus on your products and directly marketing them, but too many people think of their content as an added extra on top. But the truth is, your content is the main way that you communicate with your customers. It also brings them a valuable service, and that’s the way you should think of it. It should be considered a product just like any other and should get the same amount of resources. This will help you to create good quality content and make your site the go-to place for your customers.
When you’ve got a product, you try to sell it. Too many people forget to do the same with their content. Your own site is going to be the main place that you sell your content, but you wouldn’t put any other products up on your site and just leave it at that. Content should be no different. You need to be proactively selling your content on social media. Linking to your new articles on Facebook and Twitter will extend your reach and bring more new customers to your website.
The biggest mistake that people are making with their content marketing is that they are treating it as an afterthought and aren’t putting as many resources into it as they should. You should be manufacturing and then marketing it just like you would the rest of your products. You wouldn’t release a product until you were sure that everything was completely perfect, so don’t release content if it isn’t completely polished.
