Every year, marketers are making more significant investments in their content marketing strategies, and rightfully so. According to Rishi Dave, the Executive Director of Digital Marketing at Dell, consumers today are entirely self-directed in their purchasing journeys. The content businesses create help to empower these audiences to make more educated and informed decisions. The challenge that many face with content marketing, however, is that competition for readers is fierce and human attention spans are getting much shorter. When it comes to your content marketing plan, your business needs more than blog posts, videos, and infographics to take off. Here are five marketing distribution channels that tend to get ignored.
Email
Every company these days has a blog. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that your customers will be checking for updates every day. Even if they love your content, they just don’t have enough time. Email is a valuable channel for reaching and engaging with your clients. When you publish a blog post, take the time to send your customers a brief notification. You don’t need to worry about visuals or creating an over-the-top newsletter. Just make sure to prioritize the basics in the form of your content and a link back to your blog.
Video Marketing
Visual marketing will grab the attention of your audience and help your customers retain information about your brand better. The latest trend in visual marketing is video. Videos allow your company to show your products in action. How-to-videos are particularly popular among potential customers because they teach them how they can use your products and services. According to the site PointVisible, 64 percent of customers will purchase after viewing banded videos. Make sure to include keywords in the video descriptions and meta tags to help you rank higher in search engine pages.
Social Media
Social media networks are ideal forums for publishing your business content. You can post short-form videos and images, as well as links to your longer-form content on your website. Your company can use social media to engage with your customers and initiate conversations with those who like, share, and, comment on your posts. A recent study by GlobalWebIndex discovered that 98 percent of digital customers use social media, giving your business a wide audience to market your content.
Images
Posting images on Instagram can help your business establish its brand, bring in traffic to your site, help recruit talent, and work to broaden your content marketing efforts. More than 40 percent of brands are already utilizing the powers of Instagram to bring in traffic and improve their search rankings on Google. Instagram has become a favorite way for companies to introduce their brand to the market and establish your brand’s presence online.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is an effective, clean, and multi-beneficial marketing channel that is thoroughly expansive and scalable. While it takes more hard work and demands even more action when it comes to developing content, it has huge payoffs. Every guest blog that you do is added exposure, increased credibility and increased traffic to your website.
The content you create for your business can help you forge bonds, amplify relationships, and inspire engagement. You want to look for natural touchpoints to include and join in on the conversation. Content marketing is organic, and fluid and growth will arise when structure meets spontaneity.