Putting out fresh and relevant content is a vital step for business success, helping you to engage customers, boost your search engine ranking, and enhance your overall branding. But given the competition in this space, getting it right and managing the content publication process is key.
We cater to appointment-based service providers in various verticals such as health, beauty, and professional services. Marketing technology solutions to SMBs is a challenge. To address this challenge, we started looking for trending issues facing our target market. For example, a massage therapy clinic or a hair salon wants help with acquiring new clients and doesn’t know how to get started with social marketing. So we started using vertical specific content marketing as a powerful way to attract the attention of our very own target market by being a subject matter expert. This technique greatly allowed us to attract our targeted audience and grow our company and our rankings.
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “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.” So why is a good content marketing strategy important for your business?
It Builds Your Reputation and Attracts New Customers
Providing that your content is well-written and valuable, customers are more likely to visit your site again or even link to your content on their own websites. The more people that find your site useful and unique, the more people you can attract to your site over time.
Increased visibility means more people will remember your brand. It increases your reputation among those individuals. Quality content delivered on a regular basis makes your brand an authority on your subject, in turn building trust, which is usually the main factor driving customers to make purchasing decisions.
Increased Customer Loyalty
When a customer finds themselves on your site, having well-written and high-quality content can help to secure his or her confidence in your brand. In order to retain customers and keep them happy and interested, provide them with valued content for following you, such as access to giveaways or special discounts. If you reward people for following you, they are more likely to check in with your brand on a regular basis to see if you are posting content.
Improves Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Although some people think that content marketing eliminates the need for SEO, that’s incorrect. SEO and content marketing go together like PB&J. SEO is all about content marketing and vice versa. In other words, there is no such thing as SEO without content. Keywords, for example, are a fundamental component of SEO. Use your keywords strategically throughout your content.
Why You Need an Editorial Calendar
Once you’ve produced a range of high-quality content, you need to decide when is the best time to publish it. Without adequate planning, holidays, sales and other important dates can sneak up on you, leading you to wonder why you didn’t write a post about a specific topic. By mapping out your schedule, you can plan ahead and look at the bigger picture, keeping you organized and ensuring your customers get the content they want.
By publishing highly relevant content on a regular basis, your audience becomes accustomed to the voice of your brand and makes them feel involved as they can easily identify with the content you post. Having a dedicated series of content posts makes it easier for content marketers to build an audience and keeps readers interested by avoiding exceptionally long posts.
Having an editorial calendar also allows you to plan out things other than blog posts, such as email marketing campaigns and social media posts. By including all types of content on your editorial calendar, you can ensure different forms overlap to increase customer awareness on a certain topic.
6 Things To Include In Your Editorial Calendar
Blog Posts
Blog posts are at the core of the content strategy for many businesses and are a great way to publish content consistently. Bear in mind the seasonality of content when writing blog posts. It’s a great way to boost your on-trend branding and capture customer attention.
Social Media Posts
Although you may be sharing your content on social media, you may not have a plan to use it to its best advantage. With CoSchedule, you can create your social media messages while you blog, including scheduled posts once your content goes live.
Email Marketing Campaigns
You can use your editorial calendar to plan out a full year’s worth of email marketing. It lets you coordinate all the different elements of your marketing, for example, by sending emails to announce a product launch, webinar, or new blog post.
E-books
You can also use your editorial calendar to decide how many larger pieces of content you’ll produce each month or year, like e-books, which are usually created as comprehensive guides on a particular subject. A lot of businesses create an e-book landing page describing what the e-book contains before asking for an email address in order to access it. This gives you the additional benefit of putting visitors in your email marketing stream.
Webinars.
Although ‘editorial’ generally refers to written content for publication, your editorial calendar is equally fit for assets like webinars. As well as being a great way to build your email list and keep your subscribers interested, running webinars can show a little personality behind your brand.
Infographics
As with webinars, your editorial calendar can be for more than just blog posts and written content. Infographics are great for presenting data in a visual way and tend to take a dry or complex topic and turn it into something colorful and engaging, while drawing on facts and statistics.
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