Developing a Content Marketing Strategy – 3 Ways to Increase Your Reach With Less Effort
You’ve built a great website for your business. Now what?
Updating your site frequently with unique, relevant content is crucial to keeping your audience engaged. However, running a successful business doesn’t leave much time for content creation, so it’s important to be strategic about creating and sharing your material.
To get the most mileage out of your content, we suggest that you create locally and share globally. Write your content once and give it a home on your website, then share it far and wide across various platforms online.
When developing a content marketing strategy, it is easy to get overwhelmed with all the things. Hone in and focus on a few things at a time and before you know it, you will start seeing fruit from your labor.
3 Ways To Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
Not sure where to begin? Here are three ways to get more eyes on your content with less effort.
1. Engage in Social Media.
Get social to grow your reach by engaging more consistently on a social media platform. Social media is the easiest way to find people where they already are, with nearly 4 billion users worldwide. That’s a lot of eyes.
Your content, whether a blog or how-to video, should be adapted to fit the tone and audience of your chosen social media sites. You can optimize one piece of content across multiple platforms by adjusting the length of your post, adding hashtags, or changing the image.
Adding a link back to your website encourages users to view the original post, where they will hopefully stick around to learn more about your business.
For example, if you wrote a blog about your company’s recent volunteer work at a food bank, the post would look different on LinkedIn versus Instagram. Your LinkedIn post might include a short blurb about your ongoing partnership with the food bank, while the Instagram post could be more personal, focusing on why volunteer work is important to you. Both posts would include an image and a link to the full blog on your website.
Don’t forget to make it shareable to maximize your reach. People are more likely to share content from an existing social media post than they are from your website.
2. Develop Trust with Email Marketing.
Email marketing is another great way to promote your business and drive traffic to your site, all while building trust with potential and current clients. Where social media allows you to connect with thousands of potential clients at once, email lets you communicate with readers on a more intimate level – right in their inbox.
This can be done a few different ways, all concluding with a direct link to your website.
- Summarize your content in 2-3 sentences. If you are sharing a blog post, you could choose a couple of sentences from your article to get the reader’s attention.
- Ask them a question only your content can answer.
- Post the first couple of paragraphs, such as the first of three points, to entice the customer to read more.
Remember to make your subject line concise and interesting, so the reader wants to open your email. It is all about gaining trust with your clients (or potential clients!) that propels them to open that email!
3. Start Networking.
Get creative with your online presence by networking with others in similar industries. Consider where you get your news and information, and explore those arenas for online opportunities.
- Online Trade Publication – Get published in an online trade publication specific to your industry. These websites allow professionals within an industry to share information and discuss trends with their peers and potential clients. Find out when they are accepting submissions, and repurpose content from your website for online publication, always linking back to your website.
- Guest Contribution – Consider being a guest contributor on another website or blog. If you have a favorite website or blog you follow, contact the site host to see if they are interested in a blog swap – you share content on their site, and they share content on yours. This allows your brand to tap into other audiences you might not reach otherwise.
- Podcast Guest – Do you listen to industry specific podcasts? Podcasts are the perfect opportunity to reach your online audience when they aren’t actually online, like in the car, at work, or at home doing chores or projects. Pitch your content to a podcast creator and repurpose it into a conversation, using your original post as talking points.
Get a Content Marketing Plan in Place.
Having a solid content marketing strategy in place is an important piece of digital marketing and increasing your visibility online. By applying some of these simple concepts, you can easily increase your reach by repurposing your content on a more consistent basis.
There’s no point in making great content if no one knows you have it.
Make the most of your online content, and time, by creating locally and sharing globally. With strategic sharing across multiple platforms, all created from the same original content on your website, you can reach more clients with minimal effort, and still have time to run your business.
The internet is vast. Don’t let your website, and content, get lost in the crowd. At Open Sky, we love helping our clients increase their online visibility that will convert to more leads and more customers.
From email marketing, social media advertising, content marketing and so much more, we offer a variety of digital marketing services that will increase your reach. Contact us today to learn more about our customized plans!