Almost every business, regardless of its size, has a website these days. What sets the most successful websites apart from those that never quite make it is the content that they offer. The best business owners understand how to make their customers want to keep coming back to their websites time and time again – yes, even when they aren’t planning on buying anything.
Content marketing is a difficult art to master, but it is essenttial if you want to harness the power of organic search and pull in as many visitors as possible. In fact, some search marketers have gone so far as to call content marketing the new SEO.
Mailing Lists as Content Marketing
One thing that a lot of webmasters forget is that their mailing list is not just an extension of their RSS feed. If you collect information about your customers, such as their date of birth – you can use that to send them vouchers and birthday wishes. Milleys Cookies does a very good job of this, running seasonal and “special date” offers for their customers. Since Cookies are a special treat, this works well to get them thinking about the brand at certain times of year, and encourages repeat purchases, as well as helping to remind people that cookies make a great gift for their friends’ birthdays or other celebrations. You could achieve a similar result if you were a jewellery store owner.
Fresh and Funny
One company that has truly grasped the idea that search and social have a synergistic relationship is the Innocent Drinks company. This brand makes fresh, nutritious drinks, salad pots and noodles. Their brand image is a fun and friendly one, and their content marketing strategy reflects this. They use a combination of informative articles about healthy living as well as funny videos and links to interesting content they have found on the web as a way to engage their customers. They rely on the “feel good” factor and it has worked very well for them, generating a lot of social media shares and reinforcing the idea that their brand is a wholesome and friendly one.
It is important that you understand your target audience. Blond Ideas Group a brand innovation agency will have a better understanding of the local market than a web design agency based in the USA. Even if both have equal technical competence, there are cultural differences that will shine through in the design and in the tone of the content. Just look at they way that insurance companies advertise in the USA (quite aggressively pushing the financial side of the policies) versus the humour and the quirkiness of the Direct Line and Churchill advertisements in the UK.
Content marketing is a powerful strategy, and it is well worth investing the time into finding a good writer, infographic maker or videographer and starting a structured and consistent content marketing strategy. It may take several months, but you will see results.
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