Content writing has existed for a very long time but now we can see a clear shift in prioritization of content over anything else when it comes to digital marketing. The growth of content marketing has been thriving because good content of your business helps you build trust, generate leads, and gain customer loyalty. 

If you have good content, it directly reflects on your Google rankings. It is really easy to get lost in Google’s search results, so to stand out you need to work using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools. SEO includes both on-page and off-page optimization. You need to make sure that crawlers from the search engines are getting what they prioritize in your content. 

Study shows, about 58% of marketers of the world today are spending more money on the creation of content in the year 2018. WordPress, the popular CMS system and blog platform choice of the masses, saw on average 83.1 million new posts per month on their platform alone. This was an increase of more than 67% in 2016’s 49.6 million posts on average. 

It is a well-known fact that having good content marketing can create magic in your business. So, what is content marketing? 

Content marketing means the creation and sharing of videos, blogs, articles, and social media posts to attract and get a clearly defined audience with the objective of earning profit. Mostly content marketing does more than just filling up your web pages, it builds confidence amongst your current & soon-to-be clients too.

Content marketing works great for all sizes of businesses. It creates brand awareness and gives traffic to your webpage where your products or services are updated. It gives an easy way to promote your business online.

So, yes content marketing plays a vital role in boosting all sizes of business.

Moving forward, we cannot forget to mention digital marketing which is booming like anything. Everything is online! As we talk about digital marketing, we cannot miss the core fact that it is all made of content, the more attractive your content is, the more you are benefited from this. So you have started to look for ways to improve their quality by adding good content to your website. 

How to plan content?

One more excellent way to boost your business with content is to have a Content Curation Plan. Content curation involves creating original content and sharing and re-sharing of links from external websites in topics that may fall under the interest of your audiences.

Sharing/ creating content from other websites is one of the best ways to show that you value a variety of perspectives beyond your own; it works as a bridge to those topics and your audience’s interest. This is especially true for social media platforms.

Hence, coming up with original content to share on social media/webpage regularly requires creativity, money, and a good amount of time. And at the same time, you have to be very careful about the audience’s engagement. To keep your audience engaged without spending all your resources, it’s extremely helpful to learn how to curate content like a pro.

For a well-planned content curation plan, when it comes to content marketing, it is suggested to use 55% original content, 35% curated content, and 10% syndicated content.

Though sharing original content is promoted, using the other two is also important as it helps you to categorize the audiences, their interest, and their engagement. It also keeps your feed fresh. It is a good idea to make a content calendar to manage, track and post your content regularly.

Types of content one can use

When we use the term content creation it’s not limited to text but also an image or a video. Social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, and many more platforms use all of them to promote a product or a service. 

The first quality that your content should have is originality. There is a lot of content up in the millions of websites, so it is as crucial to have original content as it is to have your SEO-optimized websites. 

For original content you can work on first collecting keywords, you can do this from Google AdWords, Keyword Planner, AdWord & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator, and many more. And based on the preferred search results, curate content to entice your audience.

Speaking of your audience, you must engage them correctly. So do not forget to use photos, videos, infographics, gifs or memes, or other graphical materials that are interactive and keep your audience engaged. But do not forget to add a description in all of your posts, you can add information or even include direct or indirect messages to make it more engaging.

You can take the human approach and share stories; when you integrate emotions, people can easily relate to them; in return giving you more engagement. This is a big part of content marketing.

To get more traffic in your webpage/ blog/article you can use words and information that induce CTA or Call To Action. CTA is characteristically very simple, short, and attractive that makes users click on it including ads on websites and buttons like ‘Click here’, ‘Subscribe’, ‘Buy now’, ‘Signup for free’. CTAs tell the audience what it should be doing next, which increases engagement, conversion rates and boosts sales. This can be through words too, so the words you choose will also matter.

Now that you got the content, it is important to know where to post it:

Choosing the right network for promoting your business is very important. Consider social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok etc. that can help you reach and create awareness among a mass of people.

As each platform attracts different types of audiences, content marketing is about posting your content in a way that promotes organic engagement.  Like on Facebook, your post can have a very informative and descriptive post with lots of pictures.

But on Twitter you should have limited words with few pictures, it’s moreover getting in point with no explanations. On Instagram, you can have informal posts with limited paragraphs and pictures. Whereas in LinkedIn, the posts here are very formal and involve most business-related talks and discussions. 

For instance, if you want to post a vacancy for a job, the best platform would be LinkedIn or Facebook. And if you want to post a dance video where you act as an influencer, the best platform would be Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok or Youtube. This shows it is important to design and create your content based on the platform you choose for your work.

Before posting your content, there are a few things that you should consider while developing content for your business. The content you use should be rich, informative, and compelling while talking about your products and services. Here, you also need to insert keywords to your web content.

For more efficiency and better results, you can also consider optimization according to how Google Snippets features. Nowadays, Google has started focusing on snippets that focus on the exact answers to the questions being asked, so it is a good idea to focus on information in your content to help users.

This in return also helps crawlers and users alike to recognize how relevant your website is. Consequently, resulting in higher rankings and more click-throughs on your page. Therefore, you also try featured Snippet to have a strong engagement with your customer.

But if you are a small business, you may be wondering, if content marketing works for you?

Studies have suggested that 70% of customers come to know about the products after reading about them. And in this scenario where 45% of the total population are online and 91% of them use the internet and social media platforms through their mobile phones, it is very important to list your business online, either small or big, and optimize your content for mobile phones. 

Content marketing is best for small size businesses owners also because it is so affordable, and indeed excellent for long-term results. The other core benefit of content marketing is that it gives brand awareness to the audience looking out for similar products. When you have good content that talks about your products or services, it will increase your media visibility, eventually giving you higher visibility than that of your competitors.

Rich, well-curated content on your websites, pages, and posts enables your customers to get the information they seek. If your content is appropriate, your website will be authentic and people will easily trust your sources. And such content helps you rank higher in Google, even above your competitors.

Selling your products has become more difficult than before because you have so many competitors setting a high benchmark already. No matter what size of business you own, if you play smart in advertising your products or services through the right content, you may be the king of the online market.