Content marketing is one of the popular ways of promoting products and services on the Internet. It is about creating and sharing content in various forms or formats, from articles to images and videos, to raise awareness about a brand, product, service, or company. Your new business idea or innovation may be a potentially ground-breaking one, but without clear and concise messaging and communication, your brand new business idea may not be able to take off, or be seen as the next cool business idea. Unfortunately, not everyone succeeds in using content marketing for their product or brand promotion efforts.
If you are one of those who still find it difficult to achieve great results with your content marketing endeavors, consider the following suggestions:
- Be seriously mindful of content quality.
You have to make sure that the content you use for content marketing is of great quality. Many of your readers could be using content curation tools to filter out content that is not worth reading or viewing. Be mindful of the grammar, spelling, punctuation use, and especially the accuracy of the facts you are presenting. See to it that every piece of content you release is something that will help you build an excellent reputation in the field of content marketing. Be sure to consider how your content will be perceived on content networks like FrontPageit.
FrontPageit focuses on quality content that makes the good stand out from the millions of less desirable ones. If you stick with the generic and mediocre, you will end up losing the chance to reach your intended audience. As FrontPageit tries to beat information overload and filter out clickbaits and articles with sales agenda, you have to make sure that the content you promote passes through the strict rules. Only quality content gets shared – so make sure you only publish top quality content. Also, aim to become an expert and trusted curator to gain the reputation of being a good source of quality content.
2. Set Clear Goals and Guidelines
Not having a clear idea of what your goals are will most likely result in failure. You have to set expectations. For example, evaluate the current state of your blogs or social media accounts and decide how many followers, visits, clicks, likes, views, or other statistics you want to achieve over a specific period of time. Create guidelines on how you are to achieve your goals. Set parameters regarding the content you are to create and the ways by which it is to be spread. The people who will be responsible for the content need guidelines to ensure quality and consistency.
3. Strict Scheduling
In content marketing, it’s a must to stick to a schedule. Consistency is very important to audiences. They want to know when they can expect the next article, video, or whatever other content you are using. Aside from following the schedule you set in launching your content marketing campaign, you also need to have a regular schedule for the content you are releasing. A schedule is important not just in launching a content marketing campaign; It should also be observed to sustain audience interest. Use a social sharing tool like MavSocial to push images, videos, SlideShares and infographics to the major social networks.
4. Avoiding Overpromotion
There’s such a thing as overpromotion in content marketing. Excessive mentions or overly aggressive promotion of products or brands through shared content can be detrimental. That’s why it’s important to plan your promotion methodology. Be cautious of pitching for a sale too often. Consider alternating content designed to inform and subtly introduce your product and content meant to generate sales. Consider how the intended audience would feel after receiving successive sales pitches in content that is supposed to be worth sharing.
5. Wisely Using Interesting Images in Articles
It’s common knowledge that people are more likely to read articles if they come with images. However, this is not everything there is about the use of images. You have to know how to use images correctly. The following points, based on an actual study about the use of graphics in articles, should be useful.
- Thoughtfully position the image. Generally, it is recommended to place the image on top of the article, but it should not be too big that it covers the entirety of the screen. A considerable portion of the article’s text should be readily readable.
- The optimum size for Twitter that also works well on other social media is for the first image in your content to be twice as wide as it is tall. Taller images like infographics work best on Pinterest, and they are best positioned further down in the content.
- Use deep captions or long and insightful texts for the images being used. Captions tend to be read more often than the actual body of the article. They should be used to entice the reader to read further.
- Avoid breaking the left margin. The left margin serves as an anchor when reading online articles. Putting an image on the left side can be distractive. Most blogs today use a full width image at the top of their content rather than wrapping text around an image on the left side.
- Make sure that the images you use are relevant to the article. Irrelevant images will only irk readers, especially if they take up a lot of space. There’s nothing wrong with using images for the sake of aesthetics. However, you have to make sure that doing so will not leave the impression that your content is of poor quality, something written by cheap outsourced writers who add the images only for the sake of adding them.
6. Making use of Pinterest
Pinterest may not be as big as Twitter or Facebook, but it is one content promotion avenue worth exploiting. The good thing about making content aimed at Pinterest-based promotion is that Pinterest is not yet as crowded as the more popular social media platforms. Hence, there are greater chances for your content to be found. More importantly, Pinterest comes with a search function that makes it possible for the image pinned from a long time ago to be re-pinned and recirculated. Many online marketers attest to the great amount of traffic boosts obtained not just from new pins but also from old ones. Of course, by mentioning Pinterest, the assumption is that you will also be using other social media platforms for content promotion. Pinterest is just being highlighted since not many tend to use it. By curating the hottest pins on Pinterest yourself using Ahalogy, you can grow your followers and attract views on what you pin.