How to Create Your Content Marketing Strategy

How to Create Your Content Marketing Strategy

A clear content marketing strategy is a must for any business trying to engage and expand its audience. But a survey by the Content Marketing Institute revealed that only 40% of B2B marketers have a clear strategy. Meanwhile, 33% had an undocumented one, 20% planned to set one up in the next year, and 7% had no such plans.

So, do you have a strategy for your content marketing?

If not, or if you’re looking to develop a fresh one, our Orange County SEO agency has a few helpful tips.

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy covers the planning, creation, and distribution of your content. It encompasses everything relevant to how your business uses content to reach customers, grow your audience, and achieve your objectives.

Building a detailed strategy will clarify how you can help readers, viewers, or listeners better than anyone else.

Creating Your Content Marketing Strategy

Confirm Your Content Marketing Goals

What do you want to achieve with your content?

Identifying your goals can be a time-consuming process, but when you know what they are, rank them in order of priority. That will make it easier to create the right content for your business (and ideally your audience) in the short and long term.

Research Your Audience

To create the most valuable content for your audience, you need to know who they are. What types of content do they enjoy? How long do they prefer blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other content to be? And what content do they want but struggle to find?

Answering questions like these will equip you with the information you need to craft high-value content. You can use the following methods to research your audience :

  • Surveys
  • Social listening tools
  • User behavior analysis
  • Focus groups

Developing a content marketing strategy without research may be a little faster, but you’re more likely to miss the mark.

Brainstorm Concepts, Topics, and Exciting Ideas

Use your marketing goals and data gathered through your research to brainstorm content ideas. You can try various techniques, such as a mind map: write a topic in the middle of a whiteboard and surround it with anything that comes to mind.

Create Personas

Personas can help you create targeted content that’s more relevant and engaging to specific audience segments. They include concise information on a fictional reader representing a group, such as 30 – 40 year-old professionals with lots of disposable income and no kids. In-depth audience research is essential for building accurate personas.

Build your Content Calendar

Setting up a content calendar will enable you to stay consistent, organized, and aware of upcoming topics. That’s ideal if you need to research a subject or book a space for filming a video. It’s also helpful for promoting content via social media and email before it’s published.

Good content is fundamental for any digital marketing strategy. And if you need help with your digital marketing, including SEP and retargeting, leave it to our Orange County SEO agency.

How can we boost your online visibility? Get in touch to find out!

 

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Create Better Content with Personas

Create Better Content with Personas

Personas are a popular tool in digital marketing. A software business, for instance, might build user personas to understand who their new product is for. That can reduce the risk of launching a new program that fails to deliver the features that the target users need most.

Similarly, creating a persona for content marketing can help you bring the right information to the right people. You’ll find it easier to build content that engages the relevant audience segments and remains consistent.

But how do you create a persona for your content? Our Orange County digital marketing agency shares some tips to help you get it right

Research Your Audience

To create a persona, you need to know as much about your audience as you can. Here are a few ideas to keep in mind:

  • Send surveys to customers asking their opinion on your current content, the content they like to read, and what they find least appealing about content in general.
  • Chat with sales and support staff about common pain points. What drives customers to contact your business? What issues do they face? These insights can help you develop accurate personas.
  • Check your leading competitors’ content. What types of blog posts published on their site achieve the highest engagement? Which formats do they use most often, and how do readers/viewers react? You might learn more about what your shared audience likes and dislikes.
  • Pay attention to social media conversations related to your industry, business, and content. Social channels give you a direct connection to different audience segments, and can be vital when building personas.

When you gather information on your audience and how they engage with content, you can start crafting your personas.

Consider Your Target Readers’ Goals and Challenges

Use the information you gathered through your research to build a brief character study of your target reader, viewer, or listener. A content marketing persona should include essential details such as:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Location
  • Occupation (mainly for B2B companies)
  • Goal (what they’re looking for when they come to your content)
  • Challenges (what’s preventing them from getting what they want)
  • Social media channels

You only need to provide basic details in each area — personas should give you and your team at-a-glance breakdowns of the target individual.

Understand What Each Persona Needs at Different Stages of the Customer Journey

Content is important throughout the customer journey, so bear that in mind when planning your publication schedule.

For example, a potential buyer will find certain blog posts invaluable at the start of their journey (the awareness stage), such as a concise overview of a specific product or service.

Your content marketing personas can help you understand different readers’ goals and challenges at each stage of their customer journey. Consider how your content can engage them and encourage them to become loyal buyers. Brainstorm content ideas for each stage of the customer journey across your audience segments.

Our Orange County digital marketing pros are here to boost your business’s visibility on search engines through SEO, SEP, retargeting, and more. Contact us today to get started!

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5 of the Best Ways to Repurpose Your Content

5 of the Best Ways to Repurpose Your Content

Do you struggle to create content that engages your target audience and helps you climb the SERPs?

If so, you’re not alone: 65% of marketers feel the same.

But a successful content marketing strategy isn’t just about producing new material — it’s knowing how to make the content you’ve already created go further too.

How?

Here are five ideas for repurposing your old content and making it fresh.

Collect articles, interviews, or case studies as ebooks

Gather content on a similar theme (e.g. hiring employees, sales techniques) and collect it into an ebook. You can use articles, interviews, or case studies — just make sure there’s a clear reason to bundle them together.

When you’ve made an ebook, you can offer it as gated content to generate leads.

Build a podcast from old blog posts

Around a quarter of the U.S. population listens to a podcast each week, with 16 million Americans describing themselves as “avid podcast fans”. That’s why a podcast can be such a fantastic addition to your content marketing strategy.

Whether your business has an existing podcast or you want to produce a one-off episode, your blog posts are a terrific place to source material.

But don’t just read them aloud into a microphone: look at the posts with fresh eyes and consider how you can break them down into an audible format.

And invite one or more people on to make the podcast into an engaging, insightful conversation rather than a monologue.

Expand and refresh existing content with new data or perspectives

New research may have been published on a specific subject since you wrote a blog post or article on it. Your work might appear outdated or even irrelevant to a newcomer looking for reliable information.

But you can fix that by updating old content to align with the latest insights. You won’t need to start from scratch, and you can keep inaccurate information off your site (which could harm your credibility).

Transform data into shareable infographics

Infographics convey information (such as statistics or tips) in a visual format, so they’re quicker and easier to digest than a blog post or article. And they’re highly shareable on social media, especially when they cover material your audience will value.

If you have stats or other data from research, bundle them into a colorful, eye-catching infographic. Bloggers or other businesses may use it and add a link, driving traffic back to your site.

Make a Q&A video from social interactions

Videos are a must for any content marketing strategy, and can help you improve engagement on your site.

You should find ample inspiration for videos in the questions visitors ask on social media or in comments on blog posts and videos. A brief Q&A video will provide useful information in a quick, visual, shareable way.

Want to take your content marketing to the next level?

Our Orange County SEO agency is here to help. Get in touch to find out how we’ll build the right content marketing strategy to increase your business’s visibility, reach, and engagement!

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Link Building The Do’s and Don’ts You Need to Know

Link Building: The Do’s and Don’ts You Need to Know

Link building is one of the most important parts of any effective SEO strategy, and it looks set to stay that way: more than 90% of marketers expect links still to feature in Google’s ranking algorithms in 5 years.  But getting external sites to link to yours can be tough, especially if you’re experimenting with link building for the first time. That’s why our Orange County SEO team has created the following list of 4 do’s and 4 don’ts for successful link building.

 

4 Link Building Do’s

Create High-Value Content Other Site-Owners Love

Good content is a must to generate links and boost your ranking — you need to give site-owners a reason to direct their visitors to your site.

This might be:

  • A thought leadership post that establishes you as an authority
  • A well-designed infographic featuring original research
  • A comprehensive white paper offering detailed tips or insights
  • A professional video featuring an interview with an industry leader, a tutorial, or anything else of value

 

Write Guest Posts for Relevant Sites With a Solid Audience

Creating guest posts for industry websites or blogs relevant to your business, products, or services is a simple but effective tactic.  This will introduce your brand to an established audience likely to have an interest in your brand.

 

Source Links from Satisfied Clients

If you run a B2B business, ask satisfied clients to link to you: for example, they may mention that your web design agency built their site or that you supplied IT hardware for a key project.  A reputable company endorsing your services helps build trust and credibility.

 

Focus on Quality First

Prioritize building links from respectable sites that have good reason to connect to yours — even if this means a slow-and-steady approach. Set a realistic target for building good links and stick to it.

 

4 Link Building Don’ts

Don’t Write Content for Irrelevant Sites

Remember when we recommended writing guest posts for relevant sites?  That’s crucial to reach prospects likely to visit your site, but don’t write for sites with no relation to your products or services just to place a link.  If your business specializes in men’s shoes and you publish a post for a blog covering French cuisine, readers won’t be fooled. You may waste your time and energy on a task that leads nowhere.

 

Don’t Experiment With Black Hat Tactics

 Engaging in black hat schemes to build links and climb the SERPs is always a bad idea. Avoid paid links, cloaking, injecting links, and anything else that could put you in Google’s bad books.

 

Don’t Give Up Before You See Results

Link building for SEO takes time, commitment, and patience. You can’t expect your ranking to improve instantly.  Stick with it and be willing to adjust your strategy as new opportunities arise.

 

Don’t Spam Blog Posts or Forums with Links

 Never write comments on blogs or forums just to leave a link. Users and search engines will see right through it. You could damage your reputation and face penalization.

 

Follow these 8 tips to hone your link building strategy and achieve better results. Want to know more? Have no idea how to build a better linking plan?  Our Orange County SEO specialists are here to help — get in touch now!

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4 Simple SEO Tips to Optimize Your Site

A solid SEO strategy can increase your busines’s visibility and drive traffic to your site. But actually putting one together can be tough if you’re new to search engine optimization.

In this post, our Orange County SEO experts explore four simple SEO tips to help you optimize your site and reach a bigger audience.

Take Advantage of Video

Video is a key element of most successful marketing campaigns today, and you can utilize it to boost your SEO. It’s estimated that 80 percent of all online traffic will be video by 2021, and it’s an easy way to increase a page’s ability to engage visitors.

Try to create how-to videos, product demonstrations, roundtable discussions with industry experts — content that offers real value. Just make sure you keep the quality high.

Optimize your video content by creating keyword-rich meta titles and descriptions. And don’t just upload them to your site: share them on social media and create a YouTube channel too.

Keep your content well-organized and easy to read

One of the most important parts of any effective SEO campaign is getting your content’s structure right.

Keep your content easy to read and scan. Users don’t want to wade through blocks of dense text, and they’ll click away if they can’t find the information they’re looking for.

Use plenty of whitespace and make paragraphs short, usually just four of five sentences each. Headers (H1, H2, H3) create a clear hierarchy and enable search engines to understand your content better.

To return to our first point, include videos to elaborate on text content in a more dynamic way (e.g. showcasing a product you’ve described).

Optimize Your Content for Voice Search

Voice search is increasingly important as more and more people use their mobile devices to find products or services. It’s actually the second-most popular way to conduct searches on a mobile device.

These are often phrased as questions, such as “where is the nearest Mexican restaurant?”. So, implement questions and answers into your content to increase your visibility.

If you run a local business, include geo-targeted terms to target prospects who might be looking for the exact products or services you offer. They could be around the corner from your company with big money to spend!

Target Mobile Users

Google’s mobile-first indexing means websites optimized for smartphones and tablets are more likely to rank higher than those that aren’t.

That’s no surprise: think how often you use your own mobile device to shop, find information, etc. Make sure you use a responsive web design to provide visitors with a positive user experience on any device, and run regular speed tests to understand how long users need to wait before pages load.

Follow these four simple SEO tips to optimize your website and boost your visibility. Want to work with Orange County SEO experts and discover the benefits of a tailored search engine optimization campaign?

Contact our team today to learn more!

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How can Your Business Build Brand Awareness with Content Marketing?

Building brand awareness can be tough for small businesses, but an effective content marketing strategy makes it a little easier.

And in this post, we explore four great options that any company can try.

 

Write Guest Posts

Guest posts can introduce your brand to an existing audience, help your business earn more credibility, and demonstrate thought leadership.

But your guest posts have to be valuable and relevant to the site’s audience to be effective. Apparently, 79 percent of editors feel content written by guests is “too promotional”, and if yours falls into that category, it might not be published at all.

Take the time to find blogs related to your industry, products, or services, and look at the level of social shares their posts achieve. Sites accepting guest posts tend to offer detailed submission requirements and guidelines, so read these carefully before pitching.

 

Launch a Podcast

Podcasts are everywhere. More than half of the United States’ population has listened to at least one, and there are more than 550,000 active shows out there. And people who listen to podcasts are more likely to follow businesses on social media, too, which means you could gain another valuable touchpoint.

So, why not create your own show?

This gives you a chance to become a thought leader and present your business’s human side. Find out if any of your competitors run a podcast and make sure your ideas don’t overlap with theirs. Try to recognize what makes your favorite shows work, too.

Perhaps record a few practice episodes before releasing your first. This lets your host(s) get used to the process, establish a voice, and build a format without feeling under pressure to be entertaining from the start.

 

Take Advantage of Email Marketing and Newsletters

Email marketing is around 40 times more effective at helping companies acquire new customers than Twitter and Facebook.

You can capture visitors’ email addresses by offering gated content on your website, such as an ebook, whitepaper, or maybe even a podcast. The content has to offer real value to prospects, though. They’re pretty unlikely to submit their email address for information or advice they could find somewhere else.

Marketing emails and newsletters should be tailored to subscribers, with content that’s relevant to their interests or buying history. Personalize subject lines to include recipient names, as this can take open rates from 15 percent to more than 18 percent.

 

Share Content Across Social Media (Even if it’s Not Your Own)

Every piece of content your business generates should be shared across all of your social channels, not just Facebook. Encourage followers to comment with their opinions, suggest ideas for future content, and share posts with friends who might find them interesting.

Interact with followers who comment and show that you value their insights. And don’t be afraid to share content from high-authority blogs or sites, as long as it’s not written by a competitor.

 

An effective content marketing strategy will help build brand awareness and bring your business to a wider audience. Follow these tips to start making an impact.

Want help from a professional digital marketing team? Our Orange County Marketing experts can help you increase your company’s visibility and engagement with a tailored strategy. Get in touch for your free marketing analysis today.

 

 

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Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses – The Right Way to Reach Your Audience

A well-planned content marketing strategy is a crucial asset for any small business, though it’s not easy. You might find yourself sweating at the prospect of having to write blog posts three times a week or putting together a comprehensive whitepaper. but the truth is, all the hard work can really pay off.

Just ask those small businesses posting blogs on a regular basis and earning 126 percent more lead growth than those that don’t have a blog.

So, to help you get more out of your content marketing, we’ve put together the following tips.

 

Know Who You’re Writing For

One of the most important steps in building a good content marketing strategy is understanding your audience. If you try to write for everyone, the results could be vague and, most likely, interesting to no one.

But when you focus your aim and write for a specific segment, you can inject more truth and power into your content.

Think about your current customer base, your competition, and the pain points your business addresses. This helps clarify your ideal reader and the action you want them to take.

 

A Content Calendar is Key to Success

It might be tempting to create content as and when the mood takes you. Especially when your small business is operated by a skeleton crew with little spare time to flex their creative muscles.

But implementing a content calendar establishes a tighter focus and boosts relevance. For example, generating ideas for Christmas-themed content weeks in advance gives you the time to think carefully about the sort of answers your audience will be looking to solve in the run up to the season.

Planning themes and topics early reduces time wasted scrabbling for ideas on the day a blog post is due, too.

 

Use Long-form Content to Achieve Better Results

Research shows long-form content brings stronger results, with articles of more than 2000 words performing well for around 56 percent of creators.

That’s not to say you should never publish short posts, such as news updates, insights into forthcoming products, or simple articles offering a quick read.

Just make sure to publish long-form content that demonstrates thought leadership and gives readers something they can sink their teeth into regularly.

 

Experiment with Visual Content

Images help users process information and grasp the core topics or themes of a piece of content before they even start reading. Posts including images generate 650 percent higher engagement and earn three times as many links as text-only ones.

Try publishing infographics and videos on a regular basis, but spend time and money getting them to a professional standard first. When using images in your content, use original photos or graphics as often as you can. Only rely on stock visuals when you have no other option.

These content marketing tips can help small businesses build more effective campaigns and reach the right people. But it can be difficult to implement a strict plan when you have a company to run and a team to manage.

Want to work with a professional Orange County SEO agency committed to achieve real results instead? Just get in touch for a free marketing analysis now.

 

 

 

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How to use Featured Snippets

How can You Use Featured Snippets in Your SEO Campaign?

 

We’ve all seen featured snippets by now, even if you don’t know them by name.

They’ve quickly become a common fixture on SERPs (search engine results page), helping users to find fast answers from an authority source just by clicking on one of the snippets at the top of the page.

Each featured snippet includes a link to the site, unlike answer boxes, which makes them a valuable addition to your SEO campaign. But how can you make the most of them?

 

Focus on Answering Questions

Featured snippets commonly answer questions, such as ‘what is a backlink?’ or ‘how do you bake a cake step by step?’.

How to use Featured Snippets
How you can Use Featured Snippets

Dedicate a full page to a question, with images, videos, strong keywords, and an in-depth answer that offers real value to searchers. Focus on giving the reader all the information they need in a well-structured format, incorporating keyword-rich header tags (H2, H3).

 

Embrace Lists

Lists are another type of featured snippet. They may appear in response to searches for ‘where should I stay in San Francisco?’ or ‘the best CRM tools’ (see below).

Featured Snippets List
Embrace Lists in Featured Snippets

A glance at the list gives users a fast answer, but still leaves enough missing to encourage a click through to the site. Lists’ accessibility can help to boost user engagement and aid scannability.

You may not be able to work lists into every piece of content you create, but try to include them when constructing pages dedicated to answering questions.

 

Build Authority to Gain Google’s Recognition

Google draws on authority sites for featured snippets, to ensure maximum value and expertise. So, if you want to increase your site’s chances of being picked, you need to build authority.

How can you do this?

  • Pay attention to your title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt tags
  • Make sure all content is high-quality and formatted in an engaging way
  • Work on achieving backlinks from other authority sites, to build your own credibility
  • Optimize your website for mobile devices

Building authority takes time and patience, but it’ll pay off when Google starts to notice you.

 

Add High-quality Pictures and Videos to Boost Value

Pictures and videos can increase your content’s value. Visual media has the power to convey meaning and present examples to users, answering questions in a more engaging way than text alone. Humans are more likely to remember visuals than words, and content with visuals tends to earn 94 percent more views than text-only content.

These are especially valuable for how-to pieces or resolving complex issues. One good way to increase videos’ impact is to create a transcript, so Google gains a clearer insight into its content.

Take advantage of these ideas to help your site rank for featured snippets. If you manage this, you’ll gain valuable real estate on SERPs and secure more traffic.

Want to learn more about increasing your visibility and ranking? Get in touch with our Orange County SEO experts now, and we’ll give you a FREE pro-marketing analysis.

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Essential SEO Trends for 2020 Every Business Has to Know

Essential SEO Trends for 2020 Every Business Has to Know

SEO trends come. SEO trends go.

Staying on top of the latest ones can help you strategize, make well-informed decisions, and adjust your work processes to accommodate industry changes. But what are the most important SEO trends worth your attention in 2020?

 

The Ongoing Rise of Featured Snippets

Featured snippets have become a regular fixture on SERPs (search engine results pages), and that’s set to become par for the course.

Featured snippets are a summarized version of answers to users’ search queries, pulled from multiple pieces of content. They also typically appear at the top of a page, taking prime position ahead of the highest-ranking organic results.

Businesses can take advantage of featured snippets by structuring content to include questions and answers.

 

Voice Search Dictates Content and Keywords

Our smartphones keep us connected to a world of information at all times. But, even better, we can use voice search to find immediate answers to questions without typing a single word.

This convenience is driving the proliferation of voice search so much it accounts for 20 percent of searches performed within the Google App.

As with featured snippets, your business can increase the chances of ranking higher by structuring content in a way that answers clear questions. Long-tail keywords are a key part of optimizing for voice search, too.

 

Mobile Optimization Continues to Influence Rankings

Google has switched to mobile-first indexing, giving ranking priority to websites optimized for mobile rather than just desktop. There’s no excuse for any business to inflict its desktop site on mobile users, especially if it’s already designed poorly.

In 2020, more companies and organizations must embrace mobile optimization to compete. Aim to keep the user experience as smooth, fluid, and convenient as possible.

 

Videos are a Must for Engagement

One of the biggest SEO trends for 2020 is the inclusion of video. Obviously, YouTube is a marketing behemoth now, but video has become increasingly vital on social networks too. With videos, companies can convey messages and communicate with their target audience in less time than with text-based content.

Videos also lend themselves to social sharing and can utilize other elements (music, sound effects, language, facial expressions) to inspire an emotional response. It can be much harder to move people with words alone.

92 percent of marketers using video claim it’s a key element of their marketing strategy, an increase of 17 percent on 2018’s figure. Implementing video into your marketing campaign demands careful planning, investment in the proper equipment, and (potentially) a professional production crew.

However, there’s real potential to generate leads and achieve good ROI if you can get your video marketing right.

These SEO trends are set to make a big impact on the industry in 2020. That’s why it’s worth paying attention to each, and watching out for others emerging over the next 12 months.

Otherwise, you run the risk of falling behind — and losing customers to your more SEO-savvy competitors.

 

Want help from an Orange County SEO team of experts to help you grow your business in 2020? Just get in touch today for a FREE marketing analysis!

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How-can-You-Boost-Engagement-on-Your-Website

How can You Boost Engagement on Your Website?

How engaging is your website?

If you can’t answer this question, it’s time to give it some thought.

And in this post on boosting engagement, our Orange County SEO experts give you plenty to think about. Let’s start with user experience.

 

The Power of Good UX

User experience (UX) is a key part of building and maintaining an engaging site, especially now that mobile search is so important to the digital marketing landscape.

Every business has to make sure its site gives visitors exactly what they’re looking for in the fastest time. The layout, presentation and content should all be designed for a smooth browsing experience.

Research by Google backs this up:

  • 61 percent of users will jump to a different site if they can’t find what they’re looking for on yours quickly
  • 50 percent will visit a business’s website less often if it’s not mobile-optimised, even if they like its products and services

So, the main factors to focus on:

  • Speed (fast load times, logical progression from page to page}
  • Convenience (value visitors’ time: show them what they’re looking for fast)
  • Mobile Optimization (make sure your site can be browsed on smartphones easily)

 

Keep Content Clear and Readable

It’s tempting to show off and pack your content with sophisticated language or technical jargon. But if you do this, you increase the odds of visitors clicking away out of boredom or frustration.

Here are some key points to keep in mind:

  • Content should be tailored to your target audience: speak their language and address their pain points.
  • Keep the layout clean and tidy with plenty of white space.
  • Use images and videos to break text up.
  • Make content valuable and ensure it serves a purpose.

 

Encourage Interaction

Invite visitors to communicate with your business and reach out to your customer support team to find out more about products or services. This can increase engagement and show users you value their input.

One effective way to do this is implementing live chat and / or chatbots. This lets visitors speak with an agent quickly and easily right on the website. There’s no need to login to an email account and draft a message or leave the browser to dial a number.

Live chat should be easy to access on every page. Don’t make users go searching high and low for it or they could click away to a business that makes things a little simpler.

 

Working with Experts

Working with a seasoned SEO team is a great way to boost your website’s engagement. Our Orange County SEO agency has helped many businesses give customers a better, smoother browsing and buying experience.

Want to know more? Get in touch with us today.

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