How Content Marketing Makes Every Other Marketing Channel More Effective

Sponsored by MOJO Small Business Partner: Scripted

It’s a digital world and today’s marketing professionals know that if you don’t make an impact online, you don’t exist. Staying relevant is more difficult than ever. The search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that worked last year are obsolete. Social media strategies that once brought in the crowds now barely register a blip. Search engine marketing is getting more expensive and less efficient as more competitors learn how to use it well.

Fortunately, there are still great tools to dramatically improve the effectiveness of your marketing. Content marketing is one of those force multipliers that unleashes the potential of the rest of your marketing operation, making it cheaper and more effective – if you do it right.

Good Content Naturally Improves Organic Traffic

The key word here is “good”. If you are still filling your site with bold, underlined keywords that are completely out of context, you can be sure your site’s rankings are negatively impacted. Today’s search engine robots can spot keyword stuffing at a glance.

Adding useless links to your page is another antiquated digital marketing method. You will no longer get credit for quantity over quality. Search engines are interested in your ability to add value for web users, which means your links must guide visitors to relevant, useful information.

When you do it right – by creating useful and interesting content – those pages will rank well on search engines for relevant keywords, which is the best way to create reliable organic traffic. As you collect pages that rank well, you’ll also see better SEO performance for your website’s main pages. Congrats! You’re collecting “Domain Authority”, which means that Google and similar services see you as an authority in your field and are more likely to rank any page on your site higher.

Higher Domain Authority Equals Cheaper SEM

Improving your domain authority is great for bringing in organic traffic, but it also has other fantastic benefits. One of the biggest benefits is cheaper SEM.

Google uses a wide range of factors to decide whose ads will appear for certain keywords, and whoseads will appear at the top. These factors are summed up in the quality score of your ad, and one of the most important contributors to your quality score is domain authority.

Think of it this way: Even if I purchase ads for a quick blog post on Medium about the latest events in Iraq, Google doesn’t want my little blog post to outrank a recent article on the same subject from the New York Times.

When you use content to establish higher domain authority for keywords that you’re targeting in ads, your quality score will go up, which means that you’ll pay less for higher placement and more clicks. More traffic, less cost – what’s not to love!

Good Content Makes Great Social Media Marketing Collateral

You put out your content and everyone loved it. After a few days of praise, your great post settles in for a long life of bringing in a continuous trickle of leads through organic traffic. It’s a good retirement.

Except that’s not the end of the story, or at least it shouldn’t be. Once you create a piece of content that people respond to, it’s time to find ways to repurpose it.

Whether it’s a blog post, video, infographic, or even just a nice image, good social media strategists know that if it’s worth posting once, it’s worth posting again. They’ll also tell you that posting to social media isn’t just about courting existing followers. Good content can be converted into ads and promoted posts that will attract new visitors to your profile and website.

Turning social media into an effective marketing channel requires good collateral anyway so you’ll hit two birds with one stone by investing in good content

Strengthening Your Brand Through Content Marketing

Content that people love doesn’t just drive traffic to your website, it inspires the people who enjoy it to share with their friends and colleagues. Innovative content marketers know that the likelihood of social media shares increases dramatically with the quality and variety of content. For example, a useful video, a funny image or a well-written blog post is far more likely to gain traction than an amateur attempt at content creation.

There are some striking statistics that SEM experts are incorporating into new content creation:

• When a colorful visual aid accompanies text, the likelihood of users reading the text increases 80 percent.
• Content published with accompanying images typically gets 94 percent more views that text-only content.
• According to 51.9 percent of digital marketing experts, video content enjoys the best return on investment.

The vast majority of those people won’t turn into customers right away. In fact, you might not see even a blip in sales the day after a post gets 10,000 unique views.

But now there are 10,000 people who know the name of your company who didn’t before, and they associate you with an expert piece in a relevant industry. That’s brand strengthening in action.

Large companies pay millions of dollars for television and billboard ads to do the same thing that you just did with a blog post. You’ve seeded those 10,000 people so that, when they see your next post or ad, they’ll already trust in your brand and be more likely to click.

Investing in content marketing isn’t just about making a cool blog, it’s an essential tool in the modern digital marketer’s arsenal for increasing efficiency across a range of marketing channels. And remember, the sooner you get started, the quicker you’ll see an effect. So what’s stopping you?

First off, you need there is no wrong or right way to do a content calendar. If you want to do one for editorial content on the blog and mimic that on your social media content calendar, then by all means do it. As long as you are doing something to figure out what may work for you and your goals and what doesn’t, then you are taking many great strides in the right direction.

Schedule

Something to consider is how far ahead you want to plan. I would say take baby steps. Remember if this is something that is new to you so you are going to want to figure out what works best FOR YOU! Lets say you are planning just a month ahead for right now.

We need to get a schedule in place:

When you are working on your own it is a bit more work but should be fairly organized and easy to figure out what you want posted on your blog or social and on what day. When you have a team that is larger than one then it may get a bit messy you can divvy out the days if you need but make sure everyone is on the same page.

Building your calendar

What will your format be? It can be as simple as a paper calendar with post it notes. Or you can geek out on spreadsheets. Just make sure it is something that can be changed later on. Anyone online knows that trends likes and dislikes can change often. You are going to see that you are changing your calendar often especially when you are learning. So never go at it with the thought of making anything permanent.

Content 

So, what is going to go on your Calendar?

To make things easy lets start with Holidays. I like to include major holidays along with the silly “national” holidays. Here are a list of the federal holidays to include.

Federal Holidays:

• New Year’s Day
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
• George Washington’s Birthday
• Memorial Day
• Independence Day
• Labor Day
• Columbus Day
• Veterans Day
• Thanksgiving Day
• Christmas Day

Check out this site and see what fun holidays you want to include in your calendar!

Why? This stuff makes for the easiest base for content on both your blog and social and with minimal effort.

For instance: It was Groundhog Day. So, on social media we used this as one of our posts for the day:

Not only did it play off of the holiday but it also got people to our site with the purpose of building their own.

Or for instance this one on Thank A Mailman Day

Doing this should not only help you get some easy content on your calendar but it could also help you brainstorm some additional posts.

Personal Holidays

Now consider those holidays specific to your business. Such as, your companies anniversary, any annual events you have, etc.

Our anniversary is in April and we always say thank you to our customers by offering a killer bundle. You can see the blog about our anniversary bundle here. That fills up a good amount of time on our calendar.

Trending Days

What about those days on social that are trending.

Such as:

• Motivational Mondays
• Transformation Tuesdays
• Hump Day
• Throwback Thursday
• Flashback Friday

You can use these as well!

PROTIP: Dont go too crazy and use all of those days in one week. While they are all enjoyable there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

TIME TO BUILD THAT CALENDAR!!

Got questions or feedback? Sound off in the comments section below!