Content creation has become a driving force in 21st Century commerce. Your business’ sales leads, current customers, prospective customers, and active audience members demand valuable content from you to earn their loyalty. This content needs to organically reach your intended audience or target market in a way that feels natural, if not even conversational. To pull this off effectively calls for a content marketing strategy that is designed to attract, engage, and convert your audience.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic approach to connect with active audience members in a way that resonates and converts them. This is a process of planning, creating, distributing, and sharing content in a way that reaches your target audience to boost things like brand awareness, and sales. It also helps to expand your reach within your industry or niche, as well as increasing customer loyalty.

The content needs to be “Targeted” without feeling targeted to the consumers who are reading, viewing, or engaging with the content. One of the best ways to do this is to create a narrative both within the content, but also about your company in general. This “Story Telling” approach has many facets. Each of which deserves its own spotlight.

Social Media Content Marketing

Social media is everywhere and it’s estimated that more than half the global population is engaged in social media activity on a frequent, if not daily basis. This means your content has to have a presence on multiple platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Linked In, and Snapchat, just to name a few.

Of course, each of these platforms tends to appeal more to certain demographics. This means your content on each platform needs to be tailored to those demographics and actively managed. Simply copying and pasting content from one platform to the next proves to be an ineffective and outdated social media strategy.

This is why many of the most competitive and successful businesses hire content managers and third-party social media managers to customize content throughout their active platforms. This includes responding to audience members who engage in things like posting reviews, making comments, or actively reacting to posted content.

Infographic Content Marketing

The modern-day audience has come to appreciate data they can easily interpret. Of course, most people respond best to visual engagement, which is part of what makes Infographics Display Content so effective. It delivers easily digestible information in an easy-to-understand graphic format.

Data shows that infographic content is most effective when the graphics are integrated with a mix of simple wording, and short statements that improve interpretation. It is an especially effective strategy in awareness campaigns where you want to educate your audience on a complex topic in a way that doesn’t feel overly persuasive.

Blog Content Marketing

Blogging has long been a powerful tool for connecting with target audiences. It continues to grow in popularity and effectiveness as a way to demonstrate activity both to search engines and prospective customers who want to know more about your company. The topical nature of blogs also makes it easy as well as seemingly organic to target specific niches. This allows you to produce quality fresh content, establishing yourself as an expert in a a wide range topics closely related to your offering. Doing so will give Google a better understanding of what you are about, hence, in turn showing your website to more people. An effective blog content marketing strategy also gives you the ability to promote other internal and external content via links, and social share buttons.

Podcast Content Marketing

Podcasts are increasingly popular and offer a platform for businesses to speak directly to their target market in a way that text and graphics simply can’t It is a highly effective tool for demonstrating authenticity as well as potentially generating revenue via sponsors. A lot of successful podcasts also bring in outside “Guest Speakers” who further strengthen the brand image, while also becoming an effective way to make the most of back liking.

A podcast can also be a highly creative platform that lets you entertain your audience, which goes a long way toward converting them into long-term loyal customers.

Video Content Marketing

Human beings are visual creatures. Videos that are posted online give you the ability to inform, entertain and promote awareness. When positioned and developed correctly the content can be “Evergreen” or geared to be episodic. When you are posting a video series, an active audience member is likely to return to your site over and over again to catch up on the new content.

Ultimately, video content tends to be a great vehicle for boosting conversions, while optimizing ROI and help you build relationships long-lasting connections with audience members. Video content can also be very versatile as it can be placed on social media platforms, landing pages, or even on a co-marketing website.

Paid Advertisement Content Marketing

Paid advertising might seem a little old-fashioned for platform-based content marketing. Though time and time again it has proven to be an effective tool for reaching a broad audience, while also giving you the ability to position yourself where you want to be seen. This type of content marketing strategy tends to be the most effective when it is paired with inbound marketing. This includes using paid ads to drive people to engage in your social media, visit your landing pages, click on banners, or engage in sponsored content.

Developing An Effective Content Marketing Strategy

There’s no doubt about it, content marketing and effective content managing strategies are here to stay. If anything they are only going to become more important vehicles for building brand identity, fostering brand awareness, and converting audience members into loyal customers.

An effective content management strategy needs to start with identifying your primary and secondary target markets and the platforms that the most active audience members engage in. This will let you prioritize what platforms and media vehicles will help you the most.

From there you can start to develop effective content strategies on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Linked In, Snapchat and others. Rich visual infographics and videos will help keep new and existing audience members engaged. You can further demonstrate the activity to your audience as well as important search engines by routinely posting blogs, hosting podcasts, or seeking out paid sponsors and guest bloggers to help generate quality backlinks.

This sort of comprehensive approach is a great way to make sure your company has a broad reach, while also offering the kind of authentic content that audiences want to consume.

To learn more, contact little guy branding at info@lgxbranding.com or check out our website, www.lgxbranding.com.