Content Marketing Strategies That Work for all Industries

Content marketing is a valuable strategy that any company or industry can use to expand their digital reach and establish themselves as an industry expert. Strategies executed well will also build trust with potential and current customers. Companies can stand out in a crowd amongst their competitors by creating excellent written content that highlights their best features and educates customers while also integrating eye-catching images and video.

An excellent content marketing agency won’t use a cookie-cutter approach when producing your content. They will work with your company to develop unique pieces that feature your company’s brand, voice, mission, personality, values, product, and services. They will also ensure that all the content developed speaks to your target audience at different stages of their buyer’s journey.

The key to consistently creating unique content for clients in different industries is to develop a detailed content strategy. By focusing on each clients buyer persona, and including time in your plan to conduct industry keyword research regularly, you will ensure that your content is relevant to your customer’s current pain points.

Here are the Content Strategies that Work for All Industries

Understand Your Audience

Content marketing strategies are as varied as the industries that utilize them. When it comes to tried and true methods that work for all industries there are many options you can implement; however, it’s best to consider the preferences of your buyer persona. Prioritize content production and distribution based on your ideal customer’s preferences.

For example, let’s say you have built a strong following on YouTube. This doesn’t mean that your audience will only want to consume video content, but it should continue to have a prominent role as you expand your strategy. You may want to also vary to types of video content you produce.

In addition to developing a buyer persona, there are many other ways that you can continue to learn about your customers. The more you know about your audience the better.

Stay up to date by:

• Doing keyword research ~ this will help you understand which industry terms are trending as well as how potential and current customers are searching to solve pain points.
• Having a social listening strategy ~ this will allow you to stay on top of what people say about your company and industry on social media.
• Sending customer feedback requests ~ asking for input from your customers is the best way to know exactly what they are thinking.

Track Your Analytics

How do you know if your content is connecting with your ideal customer? Which pieces are preferred? What days do readers open your email?  If you have your analytics set up correctly these questions are easy to answer and will help inform your future content decisions.

If you have primarily published blog content on your website, you may want to expand your efforts to include additional mediums such as videos, slide decks, and infographics and monitor the analytics to see which pieces are most popular.

If you are trying to decide on an offer to provide value to your customers, it’s helpful to know what subjects are most popular on your website and which long-tail keywords are most searched. That way you can begin to create helpful content that will solve problems within the context of what is already searched. Additionally, if your buyers mostly consume blog articles you may attract more attention with a free eBook rather than a webinar.

Watch Your Competition

It’s likely your competitors will have opinions that differ from yours regarding industry philosophies. Knowing what your competition is saying and then responding through a blog article that references your competition’s ideas is a great way to keep conversations going and help consumers understand your differences.

You also want to watch your competition to see how consumers are responding to them. If you see a poorly produced webinar, eBook, or blog article take time to create your own version, add additional value and show what sets your company apart.

Plan Ahead

One of the best content strategies that work across all industries is using a content calendar to plan out what you are going to create well in advance of publication dates. This is an important part of executing a great strategy because high-quality content requires a lot of time and attention to detail.

Planning ahead allows you to stay on schedule and publish content regularly so your readers will know when to expect information from you. This is another small way to establish trust with potential and current customers. An active website also shows Google your website is current and helps earn authority.

When developing content, steps like research, storyboards, writing, editing, proofreading, and creating graphics all take time. When you rush this process, you increase the chance of spelling and grammatical errors as well as formatting issues and even inaccurate information.

Another benefit of planning ahead is that you can plan the order of publication and control the flow of information. This is great if you want to write a series featuring a specific product and is helpful as you consider holidays and sales cycles.

Create Excellent Content

Implementing SEO best practices and industry relevant keywords in every produced piece is another important content marketing strategy that works for all industries. If your digital marketers create great content that isn’t optimized it’s next to useless.

There are millions of websites publishing content every week. You must help Google understand the context of your content. The best way to do this is with consistency in formatting and set up.

SEO Best Practices Include:

•         Including H1, H2 and H3 headers
•         Using ALT Text on images
•         Incorporating internal and external hyperlinks
•         Writing a descriptive title and meta description
•         Incorporating long-tail keywords into the text of the content

Are you ready to work with a marketing agency that understands the importance of executing an excellent content marketing strategy? At SMA Marketing, our team of in-house writers and Inbound Strategists work together to create high-quality content for each client. Contact us to learn more.