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Posted by Gayatri Tomar
February 20, 2014
“By creating and publishing remarkable content in the form that educates, informs, inspires and entertains; marketers can begin to build relationships with prospects early on in the buying cycle. This fundamental shift is changing the mantra from ‘Always be Closing’ to ‘Always be Helping.’”
From the quote above, it is understood that using a unique and quality content the marketers can stand out from the content crowd. No doubt, content is a powerful marketing tool for many companies and have became a prime method for success in 2013. It will not only become a definitive marketing tool in 2014, but will also experience extraordinary growth.According to a report developed by the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, around 93% of B2B marketers are utilizing content marketing in their strategy. Moreover, 42% of B2B marketers say they are efficient at content marketing. So, in order to stand out from the content crowd, the marketers need to utilize some of the best practices. However, you must be aware that best practices don’t mean the practices which, we were using few years ago. This is because; the today’s content marketing best practices are very much different from the practices which were utilized few years ago. To be more clear and precise, just read the below mentioned points:
• Earlier, in order to appear first in the search engine results, companies were just aiming at publishing right amount of articles with the exact amount of links and keyword phrases. Now, this is not the scenario!!
The situation is different now, after the Google’s penguin update and more recently it’s Hummingbird update, the search engine have become more smarter to distinguish quality websites and online content from spammy ones. You need to ask yourself, the content that you are posting, who is this helping? Make sure that the content that you are delivering is providing the information to the consumer that he is looking for.Furthermore, Google can now recognize synonyms, which mean you can no more repeat your exact keyword phrase over and over again. If you do so, you may be penalized.
• If you are utilizing any black-hat SEO tactics, stop it now. Google wants brands to write and publish content by keeping in mind the potential customers rather than search engines.
As far as backlinks are concerned, creating and buying links for every keyword from a number of sites including those who are not in any way relevant to your business, is not the right solution. Instead, creating and publishing a useful and informative content can itself bring backlinks for your website.
•Furthermore, stop exclusively promoting your products and services in your content. People are more interested in getting information rather than your brand.
So, instead of pushing your products over and over again, just relate your content to the needs of your customers.
So, how you can make your content marketing practices more appealing and successful in 2014? Well, below are few tactics that can really be helpful in a successful content marketing:
Stick with quality over quantity
Instead of putting everything including putting tons of information in your content, try to create an outstanding quality content.
Unlike earlier days, you are no longer required to publish something everyday. People prefer those sites that offer something which is really beneficial to the reader. So, just focus on quality for your audiences as well as for search engines. No matter, you publish your content once a week.
Create best and attention grabbing titles for content marketing
No matter, you have written a very well informative and unique content by putting giving your best, all your efforts will be of no use if nobody clicks on the link. So, what you can do is, create a title that intrigues people and seems like something that people would type in when searching Google.
Yes, a title, which is well planned and researched, can be of great help in engaging your target audience and drive traffic. Whether you are writing your content for blog posts, guest posts, social media updates, etc., the title should be unique and must be able to grab attention of people and lure them to click on the link and read your content. After getting success in grabbing the attention of your readers, the work is still not complete. You need to keep them reading your content until the very end of the piece. For this, you must add sub-headings for various sections, or you cam also use bullet points to break up the page visually.
Make use of relevant keywords
The days are over when search engines get impress with the keyword stuffing in meaningless content. However, when speaking of SEO, you must use well-chosen keywords when writing online content.
Moreover, including relevant keywords in your content frequently (not too frequently), can bring readers to your online content. Also, remember that the keywords that you choose must appear like a natural part of what you are writing.
Share your content on relevant social channels
Social sharing is a good indication for Google regarding your content usefulness. Definitely, if your content is good and helpful, people are going to share it with others.
So, it will be worth putting some time and energy to share your content on relevant social channels such as Google+.
So, these are some of the effective tactics applying which, the marketers can be able to build a strong content marketing strategy in 2014. A strong content marketing strategy will ultimately increase your business leads and improve sales.
Just focus on creating quality contents that can match the reader’s requirement and let the customer decides whether your content is quality content or not.
