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In This Episode
Content is KING.
That’s probably one of the most tired truisms in the world of marketing. But there’s a reason why it gets thrown around so often.
Content is the bedrock of digital marketing.
The problem, however, is that creating great content has become so much harder these days. You’re now competing with brands that have entire marketing departments producing magazine-style content and YouTube videos with high production value.
It’s a far cry from the early days of digital marketing — when just about any site with a blog could improve its search engine rankings. It didn’t matter that the blog had nothing but company updates and thin articles.
But there’s still a way to beat the competition.
By taking a more surgical approach to content marketing, you can create KILLER content that beats your competitors. Our Head Ninja Tim breaks down three steps of a basic content marketing strategy.
- Research
- Production
- Promotion
Research
Let’s say you’re a company that provides car insurance. If you put yourself in your target customer’s shoes, you would probably Google a high-level phrase like “car insurance.”
This is a super competitive search term that takes a tonne of resources to rank for — hence why it’s dominated by the largest car insurance providers. Your challenge is to look at the sites that rank on the top of the organic search results and do a quick content audit. For example, if you go to GoCompare (the top site for “car insurance) you’ll see this section.
Image Source: GoCompare
This gives you an idea of what types of keywords and content assets these top-performing sites are using. This is a good starting point for content ideation.
You have two options here:
Go head-to-head with these sites and churn out content targeting the keyword “car insurance” — very difficult and resource-intensive.
Look for smaller keywords or smaller branch topics like “best car insurance for young drivers” and produce longer, better and more informative content about them.
The second strategy is how we improve our clients’ rankings with content.
If you have a small marketing budget, the most practical strategy is to pick a narrower niche and focus all your efforts there. Even if these keywords/topics have a lower search volume, you’ll see faster results without maxing out your budget.
Production
As you do your research, you’ll notice your competitors doing things that are working well for them.
For example, you might have spotted a video or article of theirs that got plenty of social media shares (we use Buzzsumo for this purpose) or views on YouTube.
Don’t be afraid to draw inspiration from that piece of well-performing content. Pay attention to its:
- Structure (e.g., heading structure, featured snippets)
- Linking strategy (i.e., pages and sites its links to)
- Keywords
- Images
If you do these things, it’s safe to say that Google will also like your content.
Promotion
Last but not least, you need to get your content out there.
When most marketers think of content promotion, the first thing that comes to mind is social media sharing and link building (getting external publications to link to your content. Both are important tactics, but you may be overlooking a very simple step: internal linking.
Content promotion can be as simple as linking a high-performing page or article on your site to your new content asset. This will tell Google to crawl your new content and link it to your existing content’s authority and rankings.
This can be all it takes to get a new blog post or page ranking.
Check Out the Full Episode
Watch or listen to this week’s episode to dive into our full guide to content marketing!
Take Advantage of This Exclusive Offer
We also have an exclusive ContentKing offer for our YouTube followers and podcast listeners! Go to www.ContentKingApp.com/ExposureNinja/ and get a FREE 28-day extended trial of ContentKing.
Timestamps
00:00 — Introduction
06:07 — Research
26:50 — Production
29:27 — Promotion
