What is content marketing strategy – “Content is the king” is an overused phrase when it comes to Digital Marketing? It can not be overemphasized as it decides who will appear top in the search rankings. Content writing is also known as copywriting is much in demand with the digital world getting competitive. One of the best improvisations of content can be seen in the movie “V for Vendetta” where the protagonist goes on a humorous verbose imploring only V based words.

“This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.” — V for Vendetta.

This sets the whole movie in motion with the importance of the alphabet “V”.

In this article, we will be considering only the textual part of the content and all other kinds will not be taken into account.

WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY

Google crawler indexes your website as a part of its work. It stores these data in its servers and classifies them in different categories. Whenever a user searches by entering texts, which are called as “keywords”. Based on an algorithm search engine ranks the websites which answer his query best and presents the result. To appear on top of query searched related to your category, you need to have content on the website. It helps search engines to decide that your website provides the best result. This is why content becomes very important.

Create good content, wait for the customer to search for the product online and let the search engine show their website on top.

All customers are different and hence the content needs to be customized accordingly. The same individual behaves differently at different times of the day or calendar. Providing the same information day and night to the same guy will again not work. That is where “Context” comes in picture.

WHO IS “CONTEXT” THE QUEEN?

Context basically plays around the mood and preferences of the customer and decides what kind of content to show and at what time. In other words- what to show, whom to show and when to show.

You might want to show a low-cost high-end printer for the office which can be connected to all the computers and prints at a fast rate. In the evening you would like to show a printer for the home which delivers high-resolution prints for your child’s projects. The message or the content of the printer changes with the person (Office executive or family man) and time of the day (morning or evening). This is what is content marketing and becomes important because of the customization of the message.

HOW TO GO ABOUT CONTEXT MARKETING?

The bottom line of content marketing is a strong understanding of your customer base. It is the connection with the user that sets the whole thing in motion. The connection decides the CTA (Call to Action) which can include ordering the product or simply filling the form to enter your sales funnel.

Try working on these questions:

1. Who are your customers?
2. What need of theirs do you exactly satisfy?
3. How do they connect with you?
4. What CTA you want to convert them in sales?

Once you get the clarity, your focus will shift to context from content.

HOW IS CONTENT MARRIED TO CONTEXT?

Once you know your customers and their connection with your business you can start targeting by creating content around it. Preparing the content that is presented to the target user base at the right time. Let’s look at a live example we follow:

For example, Yo Creativ which is a digital marketing and web Development Company based out of Gurgaon wants to target startups and entrepreneurs. It recognizes that co-founder like to build their knowledge gap. They read blogs on technology particularly content writing for SEO of their website. We set up a form or an information-based sticker that says “YoCreativ is the best SEO marketing company in Gurgaon”. We use it in articles meant for SEO marketing along with some good rates. This is called a marriage of content to context and increases the chances of customer acquisition.

HOW DO I WRITE GOOD CONTENT?

The steps of writing good content are very simple and you need flair with the language and a good understanding of the topic. If you do not know the topic well no need to fret, the internet will be full of it. Let’s look a few steps you might want to follow:

WHAT IS THE NEED?

You should ask yourself, what need of users are you addressing? Always keep the user interest in the center and not yours. You may want to share some information about a particular topic, how does a user benefit from it? This will also give clarity on the user base you have and their needs.

From the writer’s perspective, what is the message of the whole article? In other words what message, does the article convey? Remember, one article will always convey only one message. If the article conveys more than one message, you are not clear on what to write. Work on the clarity either by clubbing the messages together or writing a different article for different messages.

WHAT IS THE TOPIC?

Select your topic to address the need. Although we should not judge a book by its cover, we still make a good mind about the book seeing the cover. Your title is the cover of your blog and needs to be treated well. Keep it specific and meaningful as to what the reader will get from it or how they can benefit from it.

Don’t be too finicky about your title. If you are not able to make your mind, wait until your article is complete. By the end of it, the picture shall be clear. Still, it is better to decide the title before starting as it decodes the content article should cover or leave.

DRAFT

Make a rough draft of how you will proceed in the whole article covering all points and their logical flow and relation to each other. You can improvise on the draft as you proceed but keep it tight and do not try to include everything in it.

When in doubt, visit the title of the article.

RESEARCH

Even if you know the topic like the back of your hand, do a bit of research and you will be surprised to see how it makes an article beautiful. Get a lot of data behind you before you start writing especially statistics and figures, quotes, definitions, news etc.

WRITE, DON’T WAIT

The key to writing lies in writing and nothing else. Just when you have finalized the topic and browsed through a few sites, start writing. Just sump in and wait for nothing.
If you wait to get a complete knowledge or devise a full-blown strategy for the article you will never be able to finish the article.

Every time you get stuck while writing, go back to research and draft and once thoughts get cleared, come back to writing. This motion will bring clarity to subtopics, fill it with words and again go back to tile, research or draft or clarity till you come up with new words to write.

CHECK, RECHECK AND REFER

Once you are done with the article, take a short break and come back to revise the article. Work on the errors you might have done or things that are not presented clearly. You can also get someone to go through the article and work on his inputs.
The article has to be interesting with either way of writing or information for the reader to give a wow moment.

VOICE SEARCH: THE NEW WAVE IN SEARCHING?

The reason why voice search has gained so much importance is that of low speech recognition error rate (As low as 8%) and mobile in every hand. As per Google, it is getting more than 20% of searched via voice and 50% and the figures are getting higher every day.

This will soon make them do mobile-first indexing instead of desktop-based which means how clearly your website answers to questions. Although this topic comes under SEO and we will still explore it in detail in some other article, let us see what we should with content to appear in voice searches.

WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH CONTENT (ONLY) TO MAKE SURE I APPEAR ON VOICE SEARCHES?

INFORMATION TO CONVERSATION

That’s right. The style of content will change from providing information to engaging users in conversation. Imagine the kind of questions the users may ask you and your content should cover all the questions in detail.

Days of providing information based content with keywords sprinkled on top are numbered. Google crawlers would want to know is how specific and clearly do you answer the questions of users.

FAQS?

The way voice searches take place is very different from the text search. Invoice search, we are very specific and our requirement is very clear, unlike text. Assuming you are a budding entrepreneur and looking for a content writing company to create website content. In text-based search, you will probably enter, website content writer in Gurgaon. But the same query in voice search will be, who is the best content writer in Gurgaon and what are their rates? The text-based query will return short keywords based websites and voice searches will give long keywords based websites.

To cover all this you should have a detailed FAQ based page that shows your rates, methodology of work and how you are the best.

SNIPPETS

Google provides results in the form of small snippets and users do not even have to go to the website for details. And if they choose to go, consider yourself lucky and hug your content writer for that. Snippets answer very clearly to a question which the user might have asked for.

Change all the content to get featured in snippets and you’ll be happy to see the results when the voice searched hit the roof.

The snippet gives a brief answer to a question and users do not have to go to the page to access it. Other related queries are also provided below the answer and the list goes on.

KEYWORDS

keywords selection will slowly shift towards long tail keywords. Just like the search will be for “the best content writer company in Gurgaon” and not “content writer, Gurgaon”.

YOAST SEO

It is a plugin in WordPress and helps in improving the reach and performance of the blog. It’s a very good plugin to manage content and ensure that your articles look good to both the users and the search engines. Simply connect the plugin to your blog and go down to the bottom f the article where you will see something like this:

You get to choose the keyword you will like to focus your content on. Click on edit snippet and you can change you on page content from here only. You can choose the URL slug which should be kept small and relevant. On page SEO features like title, the description can be edited easily with the focus keyword in mind. Yoast also gives Google preview of the blog on both desktop and mobile phones which you can edit accordingly.

If you scroll down below, you will see some Interesting analysis of the blog. All these help you in making the blog SEO friendly and you should aim to follow most of it.

The readability tab shows how readable the blog is. Remember, writing for print and online is different. Yoast helps you to follow the guidelines for online content writing.

You can also upgrade to the premium version of Yoast which provides 5 focus keywords to be pushed along with some other benefits.

I hope the whole article has not confused you and if it has, simply remember “The King Content married to the queen context” and that will solve all your problems for content. Create content king like and keep the queen context happy, rest everything will fall in line.

THE KING CONTENT MARRIED TO THE QUEEN CONTEXT