Content Marketing - Keep it Simple by Leveraging Your Marketing Agency

Over the past couple of years, we've all heard the buzz about content marketing - basically, how adding new content to your website is a benefit, because it:

1. Keeps visitors interested and engaged longer and even improves conversion rates. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, "73% of consumers prefer to get information from a company in the form of a collection of articles over an advertisement and 61% feel better about a company that delivers custom content AND are in turn more likely to buy from that company."
2. Increases the number of keyword entrances into your site.
3. Improves your brand's overall visibility.
4. Encourages search engines like Google to crawl your site more frequently and thoroughly.

It's easy to understand why adding content to your website regularly benefits your marketing campaign, but actually implementing a plan can be difficult to execute.

Here are some ideas to streamline the process and get the most out of your efforts.

A web marketing agency like ArcStone can do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Who are the faces of your brand?

Think about your brand. Who are the people at your company that best exemplify your brand's services, goals and core values? Keep in mind that you might have several people that fall into this category. This is good because they offer different perspectives and they may be experts in different subject matters. Bonus -Most people prefer to hear from a person and not an anonymous brand.

Once your company has identified these key people, your marketing agency can help implement Google authorship and work on promoting the individuals as trusted subject matter experts.

Topic Research.

Now that you've identified the key people to write content, it's important to make sure they are writing on the "right" topics. Your web marketing agency can help uncover topics by conducting keyword research, monitoring social media and utilizing trends and sticky topics. A little bit of research can mean the difference between a well-written article that attracts a few readers or a huge spike in traffic and visitor engagement. If you're taking the time to write something, don't you want people to read it?

Relationships, both on and offline matter.

Who are the Key Influencers? Brainstorm a list of people who are the experts in your field. What are their digital habits? Do they use social media to amplify their voice? Do they have a well respected blog? Bonus - You might find that they're not using social media effectively at all and their online presence isn't strong. Enlist your marketing agency to identify the experts too. They will have an unbiased view and will be looking for people with good web visibility and strong social media profiles. Your lists will probably include some of the same people but there will be some differences too. Save time by having your marketing agency find contact information for these influencers. A simple spreadsheet will do. There are several ways to utilize this list. You might want to contact them to look for guest blogging opportunities, let them know about a recent blog post you've written that they might want to share or look for content ideas or promotion strategies in their content.

Optimization & Promotion.

Once you've written new content, your marketing agency can review and edit it so that it fully optimized for Google, Bing and Yahoo. This is something that is critical and often overlooked. Optimization might involve re-working a title, basic wordsmithing, adding contextual links or writing a compelling meta description. Once your content is optimized, it's ready for the world to see. Your marketing agency can do the heavy lifting by sharing the content via social media and relevant websites.

Don't be afraid to ask for help

Promoting your brand with good quality content may seem like a daunting task. Reducing your task list by leveraging your web marketing agency allows you to focus on writing valuable content that appeals to your audience. If you need help with your content marketing strategy or execution, please contact us at info@arcstone.com.