Introduction
Content marketing is a means for attracting, engaging, and retaining an audience that involves developing and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media.
This strategy creates competence, increases brand awareness, and keeps your company top of mind when it's time to buy what you sell.
Creating high-quality content allows you to create a long-term relationship with your audience.
Building this trust can help your business establish a positive brand reputation, which will keep your audience engaged and interested in what your brand has to offer now and in the future.
Table of Contents
1. Why you need Content Marketing in your Marketing Strategy
The numbers speak for themselves, almost everyone is using content marketing and SEO nowadays.
To stand out from your competition, you should provide your customers with more than just educational content as part of your marketing strategy.
Content marketing specialists are increasing the number of tactics used to attract their target audience through their content marketing and SEO efforts.
In this article, we will explain the main content marketing strategies that content marketing specialists use to create a deeper connection with the target audience through content marketing and SEO.
The advantage of leaving a lasting impression on the target is that it will increase the chances of becoming the first option when the need for your services becomes known to your potential clients.
The correct implementation of these tactics will improve your overall content marketing strategy and increase the likelihood of success.
2. Tailor your Content Marketing Strategy to your Target Audience
No matter which means you use to reach your customers, it is essential to know who your target audience is, to provide them with the content they need.
Researching your target audience should revolve around finding out the answers to their biggest questions.
By addressing their needs, you will become a trustworthy source for your customers, and as a result, it will increase their loyalty to you.
An important step is to find out other important aspects of your target audience to have a better idea of their marketing situation.
For example, in B2C transactions, find out what their hobbies are, in which stages of life they are in right now, and in which interests/needs they have.
Addressing their needs with your bespoke content marketing and SEO (instead of a generic message) will make them feel that you understand their needs.
This is the best way to make your customers remember you.
This will lead them to become more susceptible to your messages and other marketing activities.
Another important point is avoiding using specific jargon, which the average person doesn’t understand.
Always remember to design your communications in the easiest and clearest possible way including a language that everyone could understand.
Before continuing check out our starter guide: 8 Steps to Create a Succesful Content Marketing Plan.
3. Audience Segmentation & Buyer Personas
Oftentimes, it's beneficial to categorize your audience into smaller segments with unique traits.
Dividing them can make it easier to create tailored content for different groups of people.
This way you will be able to specifically target each group which will increase the likelihood of success from your content marketing and SEO campaigns.
After you have researched your target audience and divided them into smaller, more distinguishable groups, you can create buyer personas out of them.
A buyer persona is a popular content marketing strategy that combines all the relevant information of our target segment into a complete profile of a fictional person.
Putting all these traits into one person will make it easier to visualize who your customers are.
The buyer persona visualizes the average person from your target audience or segment.
This profile should include the following information:
Age
Gender
Financial situation
Location
Pain points
Behaviors
Background
Career
Family
The benefit of creating a buyer persona is that it lays out what your target audience’s common needs are at this point in their lives.
This information is crucial in understanding your customers, as this directly relates to how you can produce content marketing and SEO to address their needs and wants.
When you find out what to write about, the next step is to focus on making engaging content for your customers.
4. Customer Engagement
Creating engaging content marketing and SEO is the first step to providing value and building a connection with your customers.
An excellent method content marketing specialists use to make your content marketing strategy more engaging is to include multiple content marketing channels to reach out to your audience.
This way your customers will interact more often with your brand, which will increase your brand awareness.
Identify the most relevant content marketing channels in your industry. For instance, not every brand needs an expensive PR campaign or affiliate marketing in its content marketing strategy.
5. Including Emotions in your Stories
Another way to build a good connection with your target audience is to make emotions a big part of your content marketing and SEO.
According to research, emotions help us to better recall memorable experiences in which we feel strong feelings.
This is where emotional marketing comes into play.
This marketing technique is used by content marketing specialists because it focuses primarily on using emotions to make your target audience remember your message.
It is also used to promote actions like sharing your blog or buying your product.
The key to success here is to use strong emotions because they have been proven to increase engagement rates as well as the ability to recall things.
It has been shown that top-performing content was three times more likely to be emotionally focused.
The ability to emotionally connect with your target audience is a powerful force that will make your brand stand out from the competition.
Before incorporating emotional content marketing and SEO into your content marketing strategy campaigns, you should look at which emotions you can include to best fit in your campaign.
The emotional spectrum can be divided into 2 categories in which all emotions can be categorized: valence and arousal.
Valence is the direction of the emotion, which means if it is a positive or negative emotion.
Arousal gives those directions more dimension by saying how strong these positive or negative emotions are.
In emotional content marketing and SEO, the focus lies exclusively on emotions with a strong arousal level.
That makes the content marketing efforts stick most likely to people’s minds.
6. Make it as Visual as Possible
The next step to make your content more appealing to your customers is to include pictures, videos, and infographics.
Give people something to imagine while explaining to them your concepts.
Videos are one of the easiest forms of media to remember. 20% of people will read the text on a page, but 80% of people will watch a video.
Breaking up the content not only in paragraphs but also with pictures, videos, and infographics can help to make your content more digestible.
It is important for the customer to feel engaged while reading your blog.
7. Tools can help improve your Content Marketing
This makes blogs one of the most effective tools to create valuable content for your customers.
Your articles should aim to answer a specific question your target audience has in mind.
Write about topics that matter to them to attract their attention.
This will drive continuous traffic to your website as people will come to you to search for answers to their questions.
Blog posts should create a connection between the topic you are writing about and your company. It is the perfect tool for your audience to become familiar with your brand.
To have a complete content marketing strategy, however, it is important to include multiple content marketing and SEO tools to reach your audience.
The following tools could provide beneficial support for your blog posts:
Infographics
Email
Social Media
Video
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Public relations
Influencers
White papers
Testimonials
After having built a diverse portfolio of content marketing and SEO tools, we are going to look step-by-step at how you can get the most out of them.
8. Important Things to Consider
There are a few things to consider before using an emotional content marketing strategy in your campaigns.
Understanding cultural differences is one of them. It is important to avoid misinterpretations between the expected emotional responses and the actual responses of people in different regions of the world.
In certain cultures, not all emotions are expressed the same way as it is in the Western world.
For instance, Japanese society is in general perceived as less emotionally expressive than people from Latin America.
Therefore, you have to look closely at the context and place in which you plan to launch your content marketing and SEO campaign as it can startle a different reaction than initially expected.
Another point to discuss is that depending on your company, you can use either positive or negative emotions for your content marketing strategy campaigns.
You can use emotions to inspire people. For instance, people with a strong moral justice system will likely be inspired by articles talking about negative news.
A charity can write an article about how you can help children in poor countries survive by donating to them.
This is why you need to know your audience and what moves them.
When you know what your audience is striving for and what passions they have, then you can use that to your advantage.
The buyer persona will help you, in knowing what content your customers might be more likely to read.
Conclusion
Now you know the tools to develop a content marketing strategy to reach your target audience and effectively increase your brand awareness.
First, it is key to get a solid understanding of who your customers are.
This will make it easier for you to address their needs and create tailored content for them.
Embedding strong emotions in your stories is crucial to connect with your consumers on a deeper level.
This will make you stand out from your competitors.
Furthermore, matching people’s expectations with your brand promise will establish your company as a trustworthy and reliable brand.
In the end, this strong connection will lead to strong brand advocacy.