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Complete Guide To Conducting A Content Audit In 2021

content audit

As Bill Gates once quoted- Content is King! That is what makes it an essential part of marketing. That is where the need for content marketing is being emphasized. However, content marketing goals can be achieved only when you create new and eye-catching content. As day by day businesses are moving and growing online, it clearly shows the importance and buzz of digital marketing. Coming back to content, it is a crucial part of digital marketing. A content audit is a process in which you evaluate the whole website, as it reveals the strength of your content. It helps you to cover your content gap, connect your audience with you for a long time, and enhance your online presence.

Content plays an essential role in taking your business from ground to zenith. Before coming to content marketing, you need to take an overall look at your website and do a content audit. If you’re thinking you haven’t done a content audit yet, then don’t be upset as you’re not the only one. Before coming to the step-by-step guide for a content audit, let’s first take a clear view of what Content Audit is and why you need to go for it?

What is a Content Audit?

A Content Audit is nothing but a complete systematic analysis of all the content of a website to assess its strengths and weaknesses. The main motive behind the content audit is to find the strengths and weaknesses of the content on a website. In simpler terms, you need to check out your website thoroughly and find what’s lacking compared to your competitors, if it is. In addition, comprehensive content auditing takes a massive time because it focuses on quality alot instead of quantity. 

Why do you need content auditing?

The major question comes to everyone’s mind: why do we need content auditing on a regular basis? In the light of the fact that identifying the weak content helps you to focus on your content marketing. It helps you in competing with your competitors and make you stand out in the market with them. 

Obviously, there are multiple reasons why you need content auditing. We’re compiling the list of major 3 reasons behind this are as follows:

1. Enhance SEO Performance

Content Auditing helps in enhancing your SEO performance by identifying the weak content in your website. The key to attract an audience is to write creative and engaging content. 

In addition, Google loves and also gives more value and preference to the websites that regularly update their content and hence it helps in boosting their SERP rankings. Without content marketing, it’s very hard to rank your website on Google when everyone wants fresh and engaging content. Overall, it doesn’t not only attract users but also enhances the complete SEO performance of your website.

2. Boost Engagement

If you’re still thinking about why your website doesn’t get enough engagement to stand in the market then you must focus on content audit. As fresh and trendy content along with a complete strategy helps you to boost your engagement. Moreover, when you analyze your content on a regular interval then you can easily cut off the content that your audiences don’t like. 

3. Identify The Content Gaps

When it comes to identifying the content gaps, content audit plays an important role. Finding the long-hanging, decay content and optimizing it strategically helps you overcome the content gap. Sometimes, there’s no need to post new content every time, you just need to analyze your old crawled content and update it. Google loves new quality content with completely knowledgeable recent information more than just new blog posts.

In addition, you can easily identify the URLs having old content that your audience don’t like through a variety of SEO tools like Screaming Frog, Semrush, Ubersuggests, and many more.

Here is the ultimate guide on how to perform a complete content audit within just 4 simple steps. By following these 4 steps you can enhance your rankings and focus on an effective content marketing strategy.

Define Your Goals

Every business has a particular goal to achieve their targets. Similarly, content marketing also needs specific goals so that you can make a plan and gather information to fulfill the content gap. In between defining your new goals, you also have to analyze your current content strategy like where it stands, what’s your new target and how you deal with it in the future.

Make A List Of Content Assets

After defining the goals, the very first thing is to gather and make a list of your website content assets. You can do it on spreadsheets including date of the published content, type of content, length of content, source of content, keywords, author, etc. either manually or by Screaming Frog, Site Indexing Tool or any other content marketing tools. There’s no specific way to define and make a content inventory, you can do it according to your business 

Collect Asset Data

It’s not necessary to make another spreadsheet for this, you can do it along with the above. Here is the list of potential SEO data points that you need to gather but it completely depends upon your audit.

1. Target Keyword
2. Meta Description
3. Word Count
4. Outdated Content or Evergreen
5. Page Score
6. Review Date in Future
7. Conversion Goals
8. Shares & Comments
9. Social Media Engagement
10. Meta Tags
12. SERP Ranking

Analysis and Evaluate Content Metrics

Once you gather all the information regarding your website content, your next step is to make a strategy and improve it. To improve the performance of your brand’s website, developing a rating scale is 1 to 5 is the best way to analyze it.

As the answer of the rating scale decides whether the existing content strategy would help you in the future to achieve your target goals? Therefore, rather than simply wasting the time on content writing, write and make the content strategy that talks with your audience.

Conclusion:

Summing it up, Content auditing is not a one-day task, you need to evaluate and analyze the content on a regular basis. You can hire content marketing agency do content auditing according to your business needs. No doubt, content auditing is a massively time-consuming task but it’s completely worth it. In the end, it gives you the results of what you want and what needs to be done. There is no one solution that can fit everywhere as content audit depends on your organization goals.

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How to Bring Your B2B Content Marketing Back from the Dead

B2B Content Marketing

Our industry has been transformed by large and small B2B brands have used to create millions of engagements. In reality, content marketing was used by 88 percent of all B2B brands in 2016.

However, then marketers created too much content that oversaturated the market. This made content hard to stand out. But there were other reasons as well that stopped content from succeeding. 

Marketers in the quest to get more content out as quickly as possible skipped on research and delivered content that offered no value to the audience. If someone spends time reading your content, it should be interesting and worth their time, or they will not ever visit your website to read more. 

The second reason is the distribution of the content which many companies gave an afterthought to. Creating good content is not all, you need to effectively distribute it, so it gets seen by the targeted audience.

The third reason, organizations failed to monitor performance. Tracking and monitoring content enables you to know whether it is working or not. With the insights, you can gauge the performance, improve on things that do not work and ensure the effectiveness of the content delivery. 

With that in mind, in this article, we’ll look at some of the most important B2B content marketing practices you should follow right now…and in the future to add new life into your content while staying relevant and reachable to your audience.

What is business-to-business content marketing?

Creating insightful, engaging, persuasive, and highly useful content that drives leads and sales is known as B2B content marketing. Consistent publishing is important in content marketing because it can change a customer’s behavior.

Build entertaining and motivational content to increase the likelihood of an effect on the reader. Otherwise, it would be useless in terms of selling your product or service.

In the past, one might assess the efficacy of content marketing by looking at website traffic. However, it was not an effective method of evaluating results. You can gain more insight if you calculate the level of interaction with the content and the conversion rate.

The Benefits of Good Content Marketing for Business

So, what exactly does a company stand to gain from investing heavily in content marketing?

The increasing number of visitors to the website. Content marketers see an 8-fold increase in unique site traffic year over year.

There are more leads. For every dollar invested, content marketing generates three times as many leads as paid search.

Thought leadership is a term used to describe someone who is in control of their thoughts. Thinking leaders in their industry are regarded as brands that include important, valuable material, which helps create brand loyalty and authority.

Conversion rates are higher. Conversion rates are six times advanced for companies who use content marketing.

A more frugal budget. A content marketing campaign costs 62 percent less to initiate and sustain than any other form of campaign, according to DemandMetric.

More focus on your business. The internet is used to access the content. Both of these benefits contribute to increased sales, increased revenue, and more long-term business growth. However, it would help if you had a plan to gain a competitive advantage of content marketing. It’s not just about dumping gallons of content out into the world, both online and off. It’s all about taking a holistic approach, using various content platforms to complement one another, and keeping a consistent brand story throughout.

Take, for example, Demandbase. They generated $1 million in new business from a rational content package that included a white paper, infographic, webinar, live presentation, and Slideshare, rather than from loads of content. The bottom line is that most people believe marketing consists solely of doing things (ads, campaigns, and social shares, content.) Content marketing, on the other hand, yields company results. Here’s some more evidence:

 The Development of Thought Leadership (aka Blogging)

In some cases, “creating thought leadership” is just a fancy way of saying “blogging.” It’s worth noting, though, that not all blogs have to be thought leadership bits.

Allow me to demonstrate.

True thought leadership articles and blog posts educate and inform practitioners in a specific industry or role. Unfortunately, many businesses use their company blog for advertising their services while providing little to no value to their target market. It’s not thought leadership if a blog post is solely promotional; it’s a sales item.

Regular content writing is essential for business and brands. In addition to assisting your prospects in gathering the knowledge they need to make informed choices, it allows your company to update your B2B website with fresh, original content every month, a practice that will boost your rankings with search engines such as Google and Bing.

6 unique Ways to Give Your Content a New Life

Let’s look at what can be done to enhance content with that in mind. Here are three moves that marketers should be taking right now:

  1. Know your audience: Knowing who your audience is and what they want is the first step in creating engaging content. This entails sketching out customer personas and journeys before putting pen to paper.
  2. Disseminate and track: There are three questions to consider when creating any piece of content: What is the purpose of its creation? I’m curious as to where it’s being distributed. What method would be used to keep track of it? Marketers would be at a disadvantage right away if there are no straightforward responses.
  3. Match the right people with the right content: Material preferences reveal generational differences. For example, younger generations prefer video and social material, while older generations prefer email. Make sure you understand how to better communicate with your target audience.

That’s what there is to it. Now, here are some pointers to help you get started with B2B content marketing:

  1. Find your niche: Regardless of how good the content is, if you take the same approach and discuss the same subjects as anyone else in your industry, you might as well give up. Find a niche in your industry—preferably an emerging trend that will be applicable in three to five years—and start creating content around it. As a result, when your subject becomes famous, you’ll be a well-known expert.
  2. Experiment and innovate: The majority of the advice we’ve provided so far has focused on content planning. The number one enemy of content marketing is saturation. Experiment with different types of content and platforms to improve the chances of standing out.
  3. Say something unique: On that note, don’t be afraid to buck the trend now and then. Doing things the same way you’ve always done them is a surefire way to fall behind. Those who recognize a new opportunity and dare to suggest anything unique would certainly reap the greatest benefits.

It’s not going to get any easier when it comes to content marketing. The market is already crowded, and it is expected to become even more so. Quality, however, takes precedence over quantity. So, in the name of distinction, take a step back, evaluate what you’ve been doing, and make the required adjustments. Strategically built content will still win out in the end.

Conclusion:

It’s the optimistic snowball effect in motion once you get your content marketing plan up and running. Your brand’s visibility grows and becomes stronger. Since you already have a base in place – a massive content library with published, visual, and experiential content, all built to connect with your target buyers – achieving your marketing objectives with future content becomes simpler.

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Why Content Is at the Center of Modern Customer Journey in 2021

Modern Customer Journey

The COVID-19 has certainly changed the way nearly every business operates. The impact of the pandemic is tremendous on every country around the globe and every business has been touched by it in some form or the other.

The impact on marketing activity has also been noteworthy, particularly for businesses that earlier relied on face-to-face strategies like conferences, trade shows, and exhibitions. However, these businesses are now finding new ways to offer their services and products and adapting to new strong marketing strategies. The content here plays a major role and businesses that provide innovative content and engage their customers throughout their purchasing journey are the ones who will thrive through these unprecedented times. 

We all know that content is king, but why is it so vital for the modern customer journey in 2021? Let us take a look at that. However, before moving on to that let us explain the customer journey. 

What is Customer Journey?

Customer journey is the touchpoints or connections a buyer has with your business. There are 5 stages of a customer journey from awareness to buying and advocacy. It is the brands’ role to make the journey positive and enticing for their customers. 

Awareness 

The awareness stage helps the potential customer realize they have a need or issue. They will start gathering information about their needs or issues. The customer will become aware of your company through a website, testimonial, social media, or blog post. This is only possible if you consistently post informative and relevant content. This is the top of the funnel, so forming a wide network is just the beginning.

Evaluate

Next, comes the evaluation stage, and your business and maybe others providing similar products/services as you have made it to this stage. In this stage, potential customers investigate the solutions. They are not ready to buy yet as they still need to understand what the best option is for them. They do more research and like to read content such as instruction manuals, specifications, FAQs, product descriptions, and product reviews to know more. So, you need to consistently keep posting informative content helping them understand you have the right solution. 

Acquisition

When customers enter the acquisition stage, they are now ready to make a purchase. For most businesses and brands, this is the goal, however, it is not. Once the customer has made their purchase, your role is to keep your business on top of their minds and continue to get them to communicate with you often. This can include as simple as a like or comment on your brand’s social media posts or pages or more involved such as repeat purchases. 

Retention

Retaining your customers is essential for ROI. Research by Adobe indicated that when you are marketing for your current online customers, they account for 40% of revenue yearly. This is a great ROI, so, in this highly competitive world, it makes sense to continue wooing your existing customers. Provide after-sale services like offering discounts, coupons, or free shipping.

Advocacy

When you have retained the customers through various add-on-services and benefits, they become brand advocates. They will be glad to share positive experiences they had with your brand’s product or service. They share the information either through word-of-mouth, write a review on your social media page, or Google My Business page for others to see. With this, you will have more customers and a study indicated 71% of buyers are more likely to buy your offerings reading reviews. 

Also, smart companies get benefits by mapping out the customer journey. The customer journey map illustrates various touch points they have with your brand during the buying journey.

Now let us look at why content is so important for the modern customer journey.

More customers are online and hungry for content

We have seen an influx of customers online than never seen before. This is because to stay safe they prefer to buy online and have more time to know about your brand. So, providing them lots of content can help you gain trust and build meaningful relations. Provide your customers the content that demonstrates your trustworthiness and knowledge, post fun and relatable content engaging your audience so that they come back for more, and keep 2-way communication open to understand their needs. This will help you get remembered for a long time and customers will come back to make more purchases. 

The online world has become competitive

One of the straight results of the coronavirus pandemic is that most of the businesses to stay afloat have shifted to online space and this has significantly made the online world more competitive. Businesses that were already online continue to perform well, but with new competitors they are facing new challenges. Individuals are consuming online content at a very high rate. An average B2B shopper consumes 5 content pieces before talking to a sales representative and about 17 content pieces throughout the customer journey. This is an extraordinary volume of content consumed in the buying decision-making process. Thus, it is important that brands produce more content. 

Content is the greatest way to convey your products are great

When it comes to selling more of your offering, content is a great way to tell your potential customers how good your products or services are. However, the utmost advantage of content comes when you deliver the right content to the right customers at the right time of their buying journey. You need to create proactive, tailored, and timely communications with your content helping your customers make a decision. Without changing content delivery, companies who push products rather than solutions appear less sensitive or helpful. In times of uncertainty, the brands who show their customers how they can benefit and support them are the ones to succeed. 

The importance of content is not novel, but the content types created and utilized throughout the customer purchase journey are changing forever. One thing you need to adapt is how customers now want to be engaged. This comes down to producing new types of content and marketing strategy that express your customers about how you can help them succeed.

Content Ideas for Customer Journey 

As your audience can vary widely based on industry and intent, you need to do persona research to get to know them better. By understanding their needs, you will be able to create effective content that best supports their journey to make a purchase.

Blog Posts 

Blogs are ideal pieces of content that target the awareness stage. You can write blogs targeting a pain, problem, or other topics your audience wants to discover and then post it to your website. With this, you are creating a brand asset that is crawlable by Google and discoverable by search engine users. You can also promote your blog across other digital channels to generate more awareness. 

Checklist

For the tasks that are complex and have a lot of moving parts, your customers need a simple way to navigate through them, and what better than a checklist. It spells out easily what they are supposed to do to achieve their end goal. For instance, buying a home is complex and if you provide the audience with a checklist specifying the steps to be taken, it makes the process a lot easier.

How-to Videos

Sometimes, your customers may need more information about their problem. This is when instructional videos play an important role. With how-to videos, you can demonstrate how your product works so that they understand it better and make a buying decision. 

Product Comparison Guides

Comparison guides are helpful in the evaluation stage where the buyers are still considering solutions for their problem. A product comparison guide helps them make a decision. The comparison guides could be on the advantages and disadvantages of a certain product where disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages. 

Case Studies

Case studies are effective in both the evaluation and acquisition stages convincing the consumer that the solution offered by you works well for them. A good case study should appeal to the emotions and logic of the persona by offering comprehensive information and quantitative data on the final solution.

Coupons

Coupons are appealing to the customers as they offer fear of missing out (FOMO) mindset. By reducing the price of your offering by a certain amount, the coupon handles the price objection while convincing the potential customer that they will be saving some amount if they use the coupon. This is enough to win the customer and repeat sales. You can make coupons interactive like offering spin the wheel on your website, where visitors have the chance to get a coupon before checking your offerings. 

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Get Your Business to ‘Think Outside the Blog’ in 2021

Think Outside the Blog

Before 4 years it has been declared that the blogs are dead. Here it means that the blog page of the company is over. Here you will find the bold claim that the innovative companies are moving to the media organization approach, and they are modeling themselves as the news provider similar to the BBC.

Time has proved that many innovative companies are experimenting with the layout of the websites and pushing their content to the central position. But if you consider the scenario of B2B technology space then many organizations have not done so. They have still kept their homepage, resources, and services pages to be dynamic. This is an acceptable scenario. 

The main aim of this article is to discuss the traditional mindset of where the website’s blog page is located and can commonly filter into what sort of content a company would produce. I would like to tell the audience that the blog section is not at all dead. But if your business wants to do something big by using its content marketing strategy then you should learn to think outside of the blog. 

2021 is the year when you should focus on elevating your content:

B2B content marketing earlier used to focus only on blog writing. But the world of internet marketing has changed a lot and the mediums and formats that businesses now have at their disposal are a lot much richer and engaging for the audience in multiple ways. 

2021 is the year when you should set higher ambitions for your website and marketing content. It’s not that difficult to do so. It just requires a little bit of planning and implementation too. 

You can kick up your content using these techniques:

Monthly editorial meeting

The content which is present in the strategy of your content marketing should never be ad hoc. You need to set up the content calendar which can be considered as a good start. The next step would be setting up the monthly editorial meeting for discussing the content which you will be published in the next month.

Who should be there?

In the editorial meeting, you have to include the decision-makers who are the people from the marketing team, experts of products, representatives from sales, and other representatives from other area in the organization. This person would be having very good input about the content which needs to be produced.

It is very important to keep these points in your mind:

  • Who is it for?
  • What is the purpose of this content?
  • What reader is looking for in the content?
  • What is the form which the content will take?

All of the above questions should be considered as the main topic in your editorial meeting. This is where the thought outside the blog will happen. This does not mean that you will never write another blog again. It would be a matter of allowing yourself to think about the alternative ways of producing the content.

What form of content should you think of?

Video

The consumption of video is continuously growing at a rapid speed. It is estimated that the average person is spending at least 100 minutes watching online videos every day in 2021. This has increased about 80 minutes from the year 2019.

So, what are you waiting for? Think about the blog content as they currently produce and how some of these ideas can transform the video content? How difficult it would be to produce the videos? It would be much easier than you think.

You will need to set up the Channel on the YouTube  and then have to begin experimenting by taking advantage of the blog post which has already been written. You have to use this video as inspiration.

Webinars

In times of remote working, a webinar is a very good idea. It is a superb way for selling your expertise. It would be very interactive and will generate lots of leads. Various easy-to-use apps are available, and the fact is that a lot of people are working from home. So quickly you can produce valuable webinars which can create engagement, interest and most importantly generate leads.
Webinars similar to the video content are not difficult to set up as you might be expecting. It is very much easier to set up the webinar as compared to the video. It can be created by making use of the video conferencing tools, which can then combine with Microsoft PowerPoint which is a presentation app. Take out some ideas for the blog and then turn it into a presentation and this way, your webinar is ready for boom and driving traffic.

Podcasts

Podcasts are again a new innovative medium for content. Maybe your mother has already started one. You can take inspiration and learning from your mother and then you can also start your podcast. If you are a charismatic speaker and thinker in your organization then you need to get on the call using good video conferencing software. You need to hit the recording and your podcast will start. It is not that hard to start the podcast. It just needs proper planning. If you are good at little management also then also you would be able to start your podcast. If all of your things are properly organized, then there is a very high chance of the lead conversions from your podcasts.  

If you are thinking of starting the podcast, then you need to choose the host for introducing the episode. You should have to be consistent with the content. You have to outline your topic and have to make sure that whoever is on the podcast will know in advance what they need to talk about. They should be aware of the structure of the chat. This will help in saving a lot of time when it will come to edit the episode in the flawless conversation. You can use various free software like Audacity for editing the recording. There are also other platforms like Anchor which is also free and can be used for publishing podcasts. 

Audio versions of blogs

If you are thinking about reducing the volume of the content of the blog, then it doesn’t mean that you will not be able to do a little more with the content. When you are adding the audio version of the blog then it is considered as an extra way for which the people will consume. It will be more accessible and will also enable the differently-abled person to consume your content easily.

When you are starting the podcast that it also means that you are investing in decent editing software and a microphone. Let’s put it to use in the further recording in your latest blog and put it out in the piece of audio.

eBooks/Guides/Long Form

This kind of written content is similar to the industry reports, eBook guides, and technical whitepapers and they are still relevant as several years ago. When these are done well then these will be excellent lead generators. When specific and researched information then the reader will not go anywhere else. This is a great way for showing expertise.

Now, this is the time when you can turn this long piece of content into an interactive webinar. By this, you would be able to send invites to your mailing lists. Then you can push all this on social media. This will generate a crowd from the people who would be interested in this. This will probably turn into new leads.

Create experience at a distance

The extraordinary business will always stand out because of the user experience which they are creating. That does not mean that they would have moved online. Organizations of all sizes and industries of all kinds have transitioned themselves into semi-virtual services where they are offering online services without losing what is making them special.

Whether you can serve your customers online or not, you have to consider the virtual experience for them. Just having a website for managing online transactions will not add any personal touch to the customers. If you want your customer to value your organization then you have to give the best user experience to your website.

If you offer them a small gift in-person then do that thing replace and replicate the online gifts? If you are offering a free coffee in the lobby then you should include a 5$ gift card with the purchase of a certain amount.

Various opportunities for personalizing the user experience

The more you can tailor the approach, by making use of the customer’s names in the prebuilt forms and recommending them the services and products based on their past purchases, the more your customer will be feeling cared for and comforted.

Similar to the videos, experience is also having the capability of making money from it. You would be able to present the live training session or the virtual webinar. You can also hold the mini-conference for which you will not be charged for admission.

Download

It did not need to be directly related to the mainline of business. If you are confident about culinary skills, then you can offer the online cooking class. You can also pull the NPR and start tasting wine for your business. You can also donate some of your proceeds for a good cause so that goodwill and your participation could be maximized.

Few more Ideas:

  • Q&A session with virtual happy hours
  • Fundraisers online
  • Website accounts/profiles for the customers, with personalized landing pages
  • Spotify playlist for the public featuring the music in the rotation in the office
  • Freebies like teabags. Branded pins, candy, and stickers, etc. need to be added in orders
  • Handwritten thank-you notes and a 30-second video for thank you

Reward to most loyal customers

Your customers are always deserving recognition especially those who are local to your business. You have to reward them with a free product or service or a discount code. You can also ask them to join your premium list of mailing so that they will receive special updates and newsletters which are featuring bonus content, exclusive offers, sneak peeks, and so on. As they will become preferred customers now, they will enjoy receiving the latest services and products from the company. They would be notified before the general customers about the new offerings from the company.

Many people always love to earn these kinds of benefits. They are also willing to pay for them. That also means that the bottom line has been a booster that can allow the customers to pay for their rewards. It is the same business model which credit card companies, airlines, and many other recent patron accounts and Kickstarter campaigns are using for driving customer loyalty, interest, and retention.

Other ideas to consider:

  • Different reward program for tiers
  • Rewards or discounts for referrals
  • Secret page on the website which can be accessible only to the people who are having the right code or the people who know where to look

Live Chat Sessions

Live chat is the most effective and fastest way for connecting to online customers. It will help the visitors on the website to find the information which they required. They can also gather useful information for the business and then they will initiate the sales service and customer conversations.

Live chat sessions are the most essential part of doing business online. In this virtual world, it is no longer a nice but necessary component is the online experience. It is very equivalent to the capable friendly front desk receptionist who is greeting people when they walk to the physical location of the business.

Live chat uses

  • Clear up queries regarding features and product
  • Clear explanation of the pricing and incentives
  • Connecting visitors to the right departments and specialists
  • Inviting visitors to take advantage of the exclusive deals
  • Answer FAQs
  • Offering real-time support to the various issues of the website
  • Seamless online transactions
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Why Content Writing Matters for Brands and Businesses in 2021

Why Content Writing Matters

Businesses are compelled to go online owing to changing scenarios. New tools and techniques for promoting businesses are also emerging and evolving. Nowadays, businesses are looking forward to promoting their brands digitally through digital marketing. Ultimately, the term content writing is gaining popularity and significance in every type of industry. So naturally, there are many questions which occur in the minds of people as to why content writing matters for brands and business. 

Role in digital marketing:

Those who are not aware of digital marketing,  Here is a simple definition to provide conceptual clarity” promoting brands, products and marketable things on various internet channels”. In other words, digital marketing refers to all the activities done on the internet and electric channels with a view to reduce or remove the gaps between buyers and sellers.

The scope of digital marketing is very wide and involves many techniques for brand promotion. Following are the techniques deployed in digital marketing.

• SEO: Search engine optimization:-

A technique to get top ranking on search engine result pages with an objective to increase traffic and visitor to a particular website

• Social media marketing: using social media sites and platforms to get connected with your audience. It includes Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram.

• E-mail marketing: reaching out to people directly to convert them into clients using mailing techniques 

• Social media optimization: making your website and its pages ready to work in harmony with social media platforms.

• Content Marketing: an approach to create and distribute relevant, engaging, and interesting content suiting the requirements of people who can be converted into loyal buyers.

Content and its types

Content plays an indispensable part in a successful digital marketing strategy. No matter what strategy you adopt SEO, E-mail, Social media, or other, effectively and beautifully written content can work wonderfully for achieving organizational objectives. To convey your ideas without chances of ambiguity, it is necessary to understand what constitutes content :

• Images and graphics: Images and digital graphics are continuously becoming prerequisites for every advertisement campaign. Developing and choosing captivating pictures and graphics requires creativity.

• Video: moving pictures are more able to capture attention. As a result, videos are trying to replace text and graphics at a tremendous pace. Videos can display the sentimental sphere of promotion easily and help in linking customers emotionally.

• Text: although the text has been the oldest form of communication in selling and promotion. It is still playing an effective part in the communication of brand and organizational messages. Anything written on the pretext of marketing is text content, however, writing result-oriented content demands patience and hard work

• Audio and podcast: this is probably the newest form of context which is gaining popularity amongst people. These audio records with short durations are targeting a specific topic or recorded around a theme/background. The reasons underlying its admiration are flexibility and topic-orientation.

Content writing

Content writing includes planning about what to write, how to write or edit, and when to write content regarding products or services in order to market them over digital platforms. There are various factors that determine the style, choice of words, and even grammar for content. Some of the factors which determine the final structure of written content are mentioned below:

• Nature of product or service

• Objective of content

• Target population for which content is written

Types of content writing

As a content writer one may have to write different sorts of content each varied in style, vocabulary, persuasion, etc. although the list of a variety of content writing is very long. Here are some of the major content writing techniques which are commonly

• Blogs: it is a great way to communicate with people. In blogs, regular information is updated about a particular topic. Many big companies having their own websites maintain their blog pages where they interact with their visitors. Moreover, such a brand informs about new products and service offerings.

• Articles: while blogs are of promotional nature, articles are written with the objective to provide detailed and valuable information on a particular topic. Contrary to blogs articles are longer and backed by authentic records

• Web content: website can convey a lot of information and all the written information posted on a website falls under this category. In web content writing, writers try to attract a potential customer.

• E-books: everyone is familiar with books. However, when paper books are converted into electronic books they require a content writer. Here writer aims to convert physical material into virtual type.

• Copywriting: it means deployment of text for marketing or advertising purposes. In copywriting, vocabulary and creativity play an important role. The goal is to get the attention of the prospectus to make them start their conversion journey.

Why content writing is important:

• Tells about your brand:

No business can be a success unless it has a brand community. there are a lot of prospects for a business. However, it is quite possible that they don’t know what a business house does. As a result, they are a little away from being your customer.

Content writing plays a vital role in building trust between a business and its customer. By providing the proper information regarding your product or service, its features, functionality at websites, lots of doubts can be eliminated at an early stage.

Such content talks about the specialization of a company Information over your website helps customers take action as per their needs.

• For search engine result pages:

Search engine result pages are always the center point of attraction for companies. Brands always aim to rank higher in the Google search ranking to get more traffic on their websites. Getting more traffic on the website creates more chances of macro conversions.

All such ranking techniques are part of on-page search engine optimization which is itself based on the relevancy of content and keywords. SEO is the art and science of ranking at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).

With the right choice of keywords and interesting content, digital marketers can rank business websites higher and ensure dense traffic. All this can act as a competitive strategy to grow your brand digitally to new heights.

• Link generation and sharing.

If your content is instructive and can provide valuable insights it becomes worth sharing. Such content can generate enough links. Having more links is considered favorable for websites because link aids in acquiring more visitors. This is because websites with enough links are always indexed higher by Google as a priority.

• To convert traffic into Conversion:

 as traditional marketing is getting off the trail to success and digital marketing is replacing it rapidly. Every business entity is working to get more and more customers.  With compelling and persuasive content writing this goal can be achieved easily.

 The entire journey of buying a product includes many steps and if your content skills can cater to the informational needs of visitors they can end up being new clients. All you need is interesting, reliable sentences with call action words at suitable timing.

• To retain customer base:

It is very difficult for brands to excel if they don’t have a brand community. Brand community refers to people who are loyal and emotionally attached to a brand and they go for all of the branded items offered by a particular company. 

Content writing plays an integral part in ensuring resilient and long term relations with existing customers. An organization should inform its current customer base about the development of its products and services. This is done by regular posting over social media, blog posts, and solving doubts in chat boxes.

• For advertisement:

The promotional efforts on the part of a company are always determined as per the nature of the audiences which are being targeted.  Having expertise in content is very important from this perspective. If you are able to create an advertisement with limited content that provides a lot of information with the clarity of meaning. You are all set to become successful in acquiring customers.

 It is also necessary to have knowledge of keywords to make advertisements surrounding these keywords so that digital stage such as Google adverts can show it on SERP. Make it a priority to analyze customer segments, current trends, and requirements to design the creative copy-write text.

• Information about product and services:

Almost every brand launches a new or upgraded product at intervals. Informing about these events can be a great contributor to organization survival. This can help in two ways. Firstly, existing consumers aspiring something new get to know about  product developments and functions.

 Secondly, keeping in touch with your brand community helps you to identify shortcomings or modification requirements for product improvement. Companies that rely on working over the feedback reap benefits in the long run.

To summarize,

The significance of content writing is clear for the contributions it offers while preparing successful campaigns for promotional efforts. Although, nature, style, and elements of content keep changing on the basis of the objective of your promotional strategies or the platform you are about to use.

However, content writing becomes an inalienable piece in digital marketing whether you are writing for brand awareness, conversion, or informational purposes. During the entire process of purchase decisions of a buyer, content can exert a strong influence. By giving a clear picture of the product to conversions of loyal customers into part of the brand community, the Right content skills can add revenue to your business model.

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Best Content Writing Techniques to Follow in 2021

Content Writing Techniques

Usually, you may have heard that “content is the king” which is why we need to always create unique and effective content. If your content technique is the best and easy to read then your blog, SEO and your website will always rank high. Content is impotent as your design and establishes your search result. Put inside the best creativity and the technique that helps you to make the best in your concept. We have some techniques for improving your content writing and make your content always unique.

Always Create Strong Headlines

The headline is an important component of the content as it determines whether the audience will read it or not. If the headline does not spark interest and make the reader want to learn more about the topic, you will not achieve the intended results with your content. That’s why it is essential to create a strong headline of your content and give proper details to enable the visitor to read your entire piece. The reader is looking for correct information and simplicity.
Headline and meta description are what show up in the search result, so make them interesting to increase the click rate. A good headline arouses interest and invites people in.

Optimize Your Content

The audience needs some effective and interesting content that is systematic. This means it should be easier to understand both for the audience and the search engines. The best content is the one that has short paragraphs, short sentences, active voice, and bulleted list. You can also include images with alt text to further accentuate your content and increase traffic to your website. Additionally, the content should also be optimized for search using SEO content strategies and best practices.

Align the Tone as Per Target Audience

Your audience is your power, understanding the tone and voice of your content will give you an edge over the competition. Many content strategists ignore this element as they are more focused on SEO content. Also, the tone needs to align with your target audience or they will click on the title and leave. Use simple words and phrases that are easy to understand, do not try to show how knowledgeable and clever you are. The purpose of your content is to provide information on the product or services you are offering or what benefit the user gets purchasing your offerings. So write in a tone that is attractive, authoritative, yet simple. welcome your audience with entertaining and fresh content.

Get To The Point

Content writing is not an easy task but you need to do your best and get your message across to the audience. When the user gets the point you want to convey, it boosts your content writing and improves your confidence enabling the user to visit your content next time.
The user needs solutions to their issues immediately, so avoid long descriptions and stressing facts. Make your content always visual and useful for explaining the same things with the straight point with short and simple sentences and paragraphs.

Improve Readability of the Content

Readability has a direct effect on user engagement metric. Also, this is the most important area that Google looks into to rank web pages. To improve the readability of your content, there are certain things you can do. This includes, format the content for skin readers, use short sentences, break long paragraphs, highlight interesting parts of the content, use transition words. Also, ensure to check the spelling and grammatical mistakes. You can use tools like Grammarly and Microsoft’s spelling check to make your content foolproof.

Think always unique and smart.

Go straight to your point. Use headlines with the tone length and smarter to the other that is the main success point of your content. Look at the competitors and analyze their strategy and improve your content writing to the best. Quality is more important than quantity; quality gives the simplest solution to the readers and gets the effect on their point of view. That’s why you should try to be smart and always write unique copies. This is also essential as Google can spam the duplicate content and in turn hurt your website’s rankings.

Integrate user feedback into your content.

User feedback is important for you because the user always gives you the right feedback whether it is positive or negative. The feedback helps you rectify your mistakes and enable you to improve your content. If the user knows your weakness and the power, it always gives you have a big boost and make the bond between the user and you. Don’t hide your weakness, work on them and improve further.

Make your content effective

The best content gives sense to your user on how to apply the information. The best content is also the one that provides the right and complete information to their user. But you need tom assure that and they feel they get the best material. Many times, you write the blog post and you talk only about the topic and didn’t give them proper knowledge for their requirement You need to write effective content and write the type of blog that is impressive and reader- friendly.

Include keywords

Use relevant keywords and long tail keywords in headlines as well as throughout your content to let both your readers and the search engines know what your content is all about.
But be aware, not to include too many keywords. This will not only turn off your readers but can result in search engine penalties for keyword stuffing. Use keywords thoughtfully and naturally. In addition to using keywords throughout the body of your post, take advantage of blog tags by tagging a few relevant keywords for each post; most general blogs have tagging capabilities already built in. The keywords are a big ranking factor as well.

Conclusion

Great content is not hard to create. You just need to be consistent and use best practices when writing. The more you learn, the more you discover and adopt, and it will polish your writing skills. The exercise takes a bit of time, but when you start doing it regularly, you will soon have a treasure of information to share with others.