Posted on by Rahul Sharma

A lot has been said about content marketing and how effective it could be. Ranking on the first page of Google is the dream every business owner has.

But here’s the catch: with the growing number of website owners trying to get to the first page of Google, content marketing has become extremely difficult. Ranking for some essential keywords has never been more difficult and attracting people’s attention has never been more excruciating.

In this situation, what you need to know is that although fighting to get your Google ranking better is necessary, it’s not all you should do. Part of what you need to do is making your audience loyal to you by forming a connection with them. Here’s the three tips you need to bear in mind just to do that.

1 – Planning and ideation is more about knowing your product and market

Maybe one of the biggest mistakes people make planning their content marketing strategy is relying too much on guess work rather than actual understanding of the product and market.

Some of the most successful ads in the history of marketing and advertising came from a very good understanding of the product and market, and plain every-day English. Here’s one example by David Ogilvy himself:

You give up things when you buy the Mercedes-Benz 230S. Things like rattles, rust, and shabby workmanship.

A pox on the status symbol that’s all glitter and no guts. At $4,754, the Mercedes-Benz 230S is an efficient machine, built to endure [original underline]. Its body is welded 10,000 times — and painted with 7 enamel coats. A 24-pound layer of undercoating stifles rust. Read on why the Mercedes-Benz 230S is a shrewd investment indeed.

To write this ad, Ogilvy sent a team to the Daimler-Benz headquarters in Stuttgart. They spent three weeks doing interviews with the engineers. These efforts resulted in a campaign that increased Mercedes sales from 10,000 cars to 40,000 cars a year in the US.

What Ogilvy did was simply tap into some of the greatest of the product’s features that people found interesting and handy.

Have a clear understanding of your potential customers’ fears and hopes. Use a social monitoring tool such as Mention to have a good understanding of your audience.

2- Using different formats would make your content more desirable:

As BloggingWizard explains starting a blog is easier than one can imagine. But having a blog doesn’t mean that you should only stick with bland blog posts and forget other content formats. If you’re wondering how many content formats are available now, take a look at this list:

  1. Blog posts, original research, and case studies
  2. Ebooks and whitepapers
  3. Videos
  4. Podcasts
  5. Webinars and presentations
  6. Email newsletters and promotions
  7. Infographics and images
  8. Social messaging

Any of these content formats would be a good choice for you if you take into account the interest of your audience. For B2B companies, original research is especially effective. BuzzSumo analyzed 1 million blog posts on the web and found out that 75% of them had no external backlinks, and 50% of them had two or fewer Facebook interactions (likes, comments, shares). Yet one type of content that got a lot of links and shares was “well-researched and evidence-based” blog posts.  

Videos are not well explored by companies. Over the past years people have grown more interested in video content, so much that in 2016 one Facebook executive predicted that the platform “will be probably all video” in five years. Results of a survey show that people pay “full attention” to video content and want to see more videos in the future. Plus, YouTube as the second biggest search engine deserves special attention from businesses.

Among the many tools for making videos, RenderForest makes online video making a breeze. This online an online video making platform helps everyone to get high quality videos in minutes and is a cost effective tool to have for your video marketing strategy.

3- SEO is more human than you think

According to GoodFirms’s SEO trends and tactics research  increasing organic traffic on the websites from search engines along with content creation has been the top priorities for SEO professionals globally.

But believe it or not none of your digital marketing tactics will work unless you can build trust with your audience first. SEO for example works best if you manage to answer the searchers’ query the best way possible. Considering the numerous other websites that searchers can visit, only the one that makes a high level of trust with them is the winner, not necessarily the one that ranks first.

To incorporate this kind of trust in your SEO, you need to identify your searcher’s’ intent first. Does the keyword they’re searching for indicate that they’re interested in buying from you, or are they only doing some research to find out more about your product category? This is important because you should be able to fulfil the searchers’ intent once they’ve clicked on your page.

To find the right keywords, you can use a free tool such as Ubersuggest. The tool allows you to identify related keywords to your root keyword and it shows the search volume, CPC or cost per click for using the keywords in Adwords, and the level of competition.

For a more comprehensive keyword researching, you can use WebCEO’s premium keyword research tool.  Apart from suggesting more keywords, this tool allows you to do a competitor keyword analysis, find keywords for local SEO, find keywords from your search console, etc.

Finally:

You should never forget the universal facts about having a strong online presence: choose a reliable web hosting company, have a good web design company take care of your website, and focus on producing content that would attract customers and increase sales.  

The problem is standing out amongst the numerous competitors that basically promote the same message is hard work. This is where trust plays an important role. Getting to know your customers and their problems better, and helping them solve their problems in the most humane way is the key to having a successful content plan. Keep the three facts above in mind and you’ll beat your competition in the content game.