Content Marketing

20 Jun

How to use your Website for Content Marketing?

Content marketing includes the use of content, social media and SEO to market a business through steps like - Create, Optimise, Publish, promote and measure.

In the last few years, the marketing landscape in the country has changed significantly. While in the earlier times, you could just put out an advertisement and get your product promoted, audiences today have become smarter. The brands whose content adds value in some way or the other to people’s lives are the ones that are more prone to success in the long run. Likewise, you can use your website for content marketing in a cost effective way.

It is no doubt then, that a large number of companies, no matter how large or small, are investing heavily on putting out content that not just promotes their own business but also creates significant value to their customers’ lives. Marketers, individually or as part of a marketing communication agency, are now placing their bets on creating content relevant to their industry, leading to the emergence of content hubs as a potential marketing tool.

So, what exactly is a content hub? To simplify, content hubs are a repository of pages, containing your best content, focused around the area your company operates in, which is also intrinsically relevant to the company’s audience. It serves 4 major purposes:

1. Positioning – positioning involves highlighting the utility or day-to-day happenings of a particular company through content. It might include stories of employees, business partners or how a particular offering from the company helped a customer and created awareness about their brand in people’s minds.

2. Engagement – This kind of content talks mostly about the company’s culture and brand ethos. It is mostly aimed towards converting the prospective users into the consumers of the product.

3. Expertise – Taking the example of Hubspot, such kind of content tries to educate the people with domain specific content or give solutions to their day-to-day problems, in terms of personal or professional growth. Hubspot, a popular marketing software company, regularly publishes content focused around how customers and marketers can use its tools and services to accelerate the growth of their business or learn a new skill set.

4. Influence – one of the hottest trends in the world of marketing and digital is the emergence of influencer marketing. Companies create content around the utility derived by influencers or thought leaders from using their products.

A pertinent question that companies often are confused about is if they should create a standalone content hub to put out content or should they integrate it inside their corporate portal itself?
To answer this, a few considerations always play an important role, which are as follows:

Does your website enjoy search engine visibility?

If your company’s corporate website has a higher visibility and ranking on the search engines, you can integrate the content hub well within itself, since any web page that is associated with a high ranked website can easily gain traffic and visits without having to create an entire funnel again to drive engagement with your content. In such a scenario, creating another domain to serve as your content hub is debatable.

Do you want to be seen as an authority in the industry you operate in?

Most often, companies that create a standalone content hub want to be seen as an authoritative figure in the industry without having any biases towards its own products or services. For example, international brand LÓREAL debuted a website called ‘Fab Beauty’ a few years ago that took into perspective, the entire beauty industry without any hard selling or bias towards its own products.

If your company is planning to not be 100% unbiased in approach and doesn’t have multiple products or services to offer, it’s preferable to move your content to your own corporate website rather than investing in a separate online entity.

Is your website an idle website?

More often than not, corporate or enterprise websites do not change much with time. As we wrote about it some time back, an idle website creates a negative impression of the company in the customer or business partner’s mind and also brings the credibility of your business in question.

An idle website also creates a competitive disadvantage for the company, since your competitor’s fresh and regularly updated website not only creates a good impression on prospective customers but also leads to increase in traffic and visibility of the organisation on the web.

Putting out fresh and relevant content is hence, a prerogative to success in today’s content marketing landscape.

Lead generation written on a pic of a city's skyline. Lead generation from website can help a lot

Do you want to generate leads with your content?

Content marketing, especially the subscription and email newsletters, can provide analytical, real-time data for your company to generate newer leads. Having a content hub gives you the power to use data and target new prospects.
That is why, it is vital to analyse if your corporate website is good enough to generate subscriptions on its own.

What is your brand’s positioning?

A market leading brand, which enjoys certain popularity among the masses can invest in driving its thought leadership over to a new domain. Since it has been around for a long time, a well-positioned brand enjoys the trust of the customer.

If you are a new brand that wants to invest in creating a standalone content hub, it will require patience and constant trial-and-error to finally be able to see significant results and engagement for your content.

Get in touch with Ascezen Consulting today to know how we can create and run a content intensive website for your business.

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07 Apr

Content Marketing Strategy: An Unbeatable Practice

illustration of a hand holding a tool. Words "Strategy" and "Info" are printed to indicate the importance of content marketing strategy.

Content Marketing has become the heart of marketing strategies and rightly so. Why is Content Marketing Strategy: An Unbeatable Practice? It is because not only does it help a business to grow but also nurtures relationships with customers – an aspect that distinguishes it from traditional marketing. The idea is to inform and educate your customers about your business and services. Today, consumers have become less likely to respond to traditional tactics and would rather make decisions based on their judgement. They don’t like to be just sold things- a behaviour that holds true for both B2C and B2B customers.

This is where content marketing comes into the picture. Unlike traditional marketing, it relies on building a trustworthy rapport with the prospective customers and instead of creating a new demand, content marketing focuses on anticipating and meeting an existing need for information.

Your Content Marketing Strategy must aim to:

  • Provide credible information to consumers
  • Generate and attract attention
  • Build a relationship with consumers
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Improve online sales
  • Increase the customer base
  • Encourage brand loyalty

 

Given how effective content marketing has proven to be in converting leads into sales, it is no surprise that everyone is trying to churn out more and more information. However, not all of this information is credible or useful.  The result of which is a cluttered digital environment where consumers are swamped with mediocre content; a situation which is not favourable either for the businesses or the consumers.

Depending on the organisational goals, every business needs a different approach to stand out among the rest. Content marketing is a process that needs to be constantly updated to recognise and predict the information requirements of a specific audience, making it vital to strategize accordingly.

At Ascezen Consulting, we take the time to thoroughly understand the requirements of our clients before suggesting the following solutions for an appropriate strategy:

Blogs

Because they are so accessible, blogs are the perfect platform to build relationships with potential customers. People enjoy reading them and if regularly updated with well-written and informative articles, they can prove to be an efficient way of converting leads into sales.

Videos

Videos are more engaging and are likely to leave a more lasting impact on people in comparison to textual content. They can be shared on the organisation’s website, blog posts or social media posts.

Social Media

Social media gives you the freedom to decide how and what you want to communicate to the people. Its ability to let organisations interact with its target audience definitely makes it the most powerful channel for content marketing.

Infographics

Infographics is one of the most effective methods to bundle lot of information in a way that is clear, visually appealing and yet can be easily retained by the audience. A simple and clean design will go a long way in spreading the message without overwhelming the audience.

Images

Adding relevant images to social media and blog posts or simply using them on their own can greatly enhance the utility of the message being put across. Humans are visual learners and as cliché as it may sound, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.

Brochures & White Papers

Brochures and white papers are useful tools to disseminate complex information.  They can include images and graphs.  They are quite useful when it comes to showcasing areas of expertise and persuading potential consumers.

Apps

Mobile apps help businesses to reach out to a wider audience by distributing product information. They have also proven to be helpful in building customer loyalty as it makes consumers feel more engaged with an organisation.

The right content marketing strategy can take you ahead of your competitors and help you reach your goals. Get in touch with us to know how we can help you build an effective content marketing strategy that will benefit you and your business.

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02 Dec

Why does your Business need Content Marketing?

Why do you need Content Marketing?

an illustration depicting the elements of content marketing: target, analysis, research, content creation, platfroms and channels, feedback.

The marketing world in its entirety believes in the immense potential of Content Marketing. It is quite contextual in nature and this makes it very hard to provide a specific definition of the term. How a content marketing strategy is implemented depends from person to person or rather from organization to organization. Although a single, all-inclusive definition of this concept may not be present, various experts have tried their hand at defining it from time to time.

Gartner defines content marketing as “the process and practice of creating, curating and cultivating text, video, images, graphics, e-books, white papers and other content assets that are distributed through paid, owned and earned media. These assets are used to tell stories that help brands build and nurture relationships with customers, prospects and other audiences to drive awareness, generate demand, influence preference and build loyalty.”

According to Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience–with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

To put it simply, content marketing is about marketing of an organization or a brand through sharing insightful, educational or entertaining information using channels such as blogs, pictures, e-books, audio-video, social media posts, infographics and so on. The purpose is to influence the user, stimulate interest in a product/service or influence a purchase decision.

Depending upon content strategy, here are a few channels for content marketing:

  • Blog posts

  • Emails

  • Videos

  • Social media posts

  • Infographics

  • Assessments

  • Images

  • Apps

  • Podcasts

Content marketing can help your organization in a number of ways. Here are a few reasons why you should focus on it:

  1. To Improve your search engine result rankings

Content can help you earn a better rank in the search engine results. Regularly posting relevant content will increase your chances to be found. It can help enhance the effect of your SEO efforts. Quality content will attract more traffic to your website, thus improving its authority and relevance.

If your content is created strategically and meets the expectations of your audience, you can have a better place in the search engine rankings.

  1. To grow your web traffic

There are a number of ways content can help you in generating more traffic. Some of them are:

  • Efficient distribution and sharing of content
  • Blog posts offering useful information
  • Connecting with users through social media posts

  1. For better lead generation and conversion rates

Content provides you a way to connect with your target audience/customers. It offers a number of insights for identifying prospective customers and converting them. Appropriate and engaging content will make your users spend more time on the website and increase your chances of influencing their decision.  High quality, informative content will help you build trust between you and your target audience and increase the conversion rate. Here are a few ways you can generate lead through content marketing:

  • Create engaging, high-quality content
  • Offer your audience an incentive
  • Pay attention to inbound marketing
  • Address your audience through a webinar
  • Use testimonials and case studies

  1. To ensure users give your website more time

If you keep posting relevant and informative content regularly, the users will spend more time going through your website. This will improve your chances of influencing them and convincing them to use your service or product.

  1. To increase brand awareness

Offering great content will help you produce brand awareness.  If you think your content is much more than self- promotion, endorse it through social networking sites. This way you can stand out among your competitors as most of them would focus only on content related to sales promotion.  This is a great way to earn recognition in the market.

Providing valuable content on regular basis will also help you strengthen your relationship with your customers. They may also become your brand advocate and promote and share your content, thus generating more traffic.

  1. For building a strong relationship with customers

Engaging content will help you in building and maintaining a strong relationship with your customers. As mentioned earlier, content which focuses on things beyond sales and promotion will definitely intrigue the users. Provide valuable tips and information through your content so that your audience may find it of great value.

It will not be wrong to say that content is still the king, even after all these years. In order to make the most out of it, you need to keep up with the ever changing trends in the world of content marketing. Being clear about your goals and knowing your target audience are a few prerequisites of framing an effective content marketing strategy.

If done right, content marketing can help you reach your organizational goals and stand out among your competitors.

At Ascezen Consulting Pvt Ltd, we produce engaging, usable and enriching content that attracts the target audience and helps in building a relationship of trust. This is what makes our content writing services rank among the best content writing companies in India. Get in touch with us to know how we can help you gain attention and build rapport with your customers.

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18 Nov

On-page SEO vs. Off-page SEO: What do you really need?

An illustrations with text: on-page seo vs off page seoOn-page SEO vs. Off-page SEO: What do you really need?

Having an efficient online marketing strategy is vital if you want to thrive in today’s business world. Making a functional, user-friendly website is just the first step! You need to use SEO to impress the search engine bots so that they give you a good ranking. And as it goes, if you cannot be found in the first two pages of Google search results, you probably don’t exist. Luckily there are ample tools out there that can help you win this battle!
The job of a search engine is to find what is most relevant to what a user is searching for. It has certain criteria to determine this relevancy such as:

• Content
• User Experience
• Website performance
• Authority

Now that you know what search engines want, here are a few things which they definitely don’t want:

• Poor User Experience
• Purchased links
• Keyword stuffing

Solution:

You need a website with content that can make a good impact on search engines. The process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) .
SEO focuses on optimizing a website so that it has relevant content of high quality for searchers as well as the search engines. It is also about promoting the website externally, i.e. through various methods like blogging, social sharing, social bookmarking and more.

So why do you need SEO?

If you are still asking this question, you really need to up your game! Over 67 per cent of searches are converted in a click for one of the results on the first page of the search engine result. That is exactly where you should be if you are willing to be found! SEO helps you attract more traffic to your page and increase market access. It can also effectively boost the effect of other marketing strategies such as pay per click (PPC) and retargeting.
Search Engine Optimization can be divided into two categories: On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.

On-Page SEO

The name is self-explanatory! On–page SEO focuses on the pages of your website in terms of content as well as the backend of the website. It involves improving the web pages on your site in order to secure a better rank in the search engine results. Here you are in-charge of a number of factors which affect the rankings. The main on-page SEO factors are:

• Keywords and phrases
• Meta description
• Title tags
• Robots.txt
• XML sitemap
• Website performance
• Internal linking and anchor text
• Heading tags
• Search engine friendly (SEF) URL

Off-page SEO

If on-page SEO is all about your website, off-page is all about the measures taken outside your website in order to improve your rankings. It includes link-building through leaving comments on blogs, participating in forums, guest blogging, outreach and more. Reviews, brand mentions and social amplifications also hold importance in off-page optimization.

“The number and the quality of links leading to your website is taken into consideration by Google when ranking a website.”

For Google, backlinks are like a vote; it is a sign that someone outside your website trusts your content and recommends you. The main techniques used in off-page optimization are:
• Social sharing
• Guest blogging
• Brand mentions
• Manual link-building
• Self-created links

On-Page vs. Off-page…What will work best for you?

To be honest, On-page and Off-page SEO are two different processes with identical objectives. Although you need both for best results, experts are of the view that you should tackle On-page optimization before you move to Off-page SEO. The idea here is simple—make sure your content is worth promoting before you go out there are promote it!

Why should you begin with On-page SEO?

Search engines are network applications that understand a specific language. SEO especially on-page optimization involves focusing on the language search engines will understand so that they know what your website is all about. Giving them more relevant signals will increase your chances of getting a better rank.
It is only when you have taken care of everything which comes under on-page optimization you should move to off-page.
For those of you who run a small business and target local customers, On-page optimization is all you may require. If you want to reach limited users through your website, using relevant content, tags, keywords, meta-description etc. are enough to do the job.
On-page optimization, when done right, leads to enhanced user experience. A website that offers relevant information, easy navigation and a user friendly interface is what the searchers are looking for. Make sure your content is engaging and utilizes all the targeted keywords appropriately. Not only this, you also need to concentrate on the usability of your website. On-page is what you need to ensure your target users or customers find your website useful!

And remember…

Done and Dusted? Not really!

Search engine optimization isn’t a one-time thing. You need to tweak and update your website regularly in order to keep up with the ever-changing digital trends. When changes are made in a website, its SEO parameters become outdated. This is why both on-page as well as off-page optimization require constant attention.

Content is still the King!

Any search engine optimization can’t help you if your website does not provide unique, engaging and relevant content. Also, if your website offers really good content, other websites will readily offer backlinks to you. Before you set out on your journey to the first page of search engines results, make sure what you are offering is worth the time your users will spend on it!

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