Catanich Internet Marketing

How can content marketing make me into an industry thought leader? There’s a lot of talk about the importance of becoming a thought leader – and with good reason.  Getting you known as an expert in your field is exactly what content marketing is meant to do.  It’s what creates the sense of trust in consumers, which allows them to feel comfortable making a purchase from you.  By creating unique, original content, in which you demonstrate your expertise and answer questions consumers might have, you’ll be on your way to becoming an industry thought leader in no time. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds

  How do I make my content engaging? The answer to this question depends a lot on your particular audience.  What’s engaging to teens will necessarily differ vastly from what middle-aged business professionals will find engaging.  Speak to your target audience’s pain points or interests, let them see that you understand them and want to help them – and then open up the conversation. Ask questions, and invite them to respond.  The beauty of content marketing as opposed to traditional marketing is that communication is not one-way anymore. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Carl Jenkins

How important are keywords in content marketing? Despite the constant changes to Google’s algorithm, keywords are still important in content creation.  While the standards have been somewhat relaxed, so that words and phrases that mean approximately the same thing as the exact phrase searched for can now pop up in search results, too, it’s still best to include a few mentions of the exact words and phrases you want to be found for. Just remember that your priority is always to write for humans, not search engines. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds

  Do I need an editorial calendar? Some businesses swear by them, other not so much. How important an editorial calendar is depends on your individual strategy.  However, even if you don’t maintain a full-blown, detailed editorial calendar, you should at least plan out your content a month in advance, noting any holidays or promotion dates you want to mark with special content. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds

 Is guest blogging part of a content marketing strategy?   Yes! Content creation is content creation, whether it’ll appear on your site or someone else’s.  Of course, guest blogging is also an essential part of outreach or digital PR, but the principles of content marketing still apply – you want to create valuable information that will help consumers. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds

  How important is it to share my content on social media?   It’s not important – it’s essential!!! Posting content to a blog and then sitting back and hoping that visitors will find it is an exercise in futility.  In fact, some blogging gurus maintain that only 20% of your time should be spent on content creation, and the other 80% on promoting that content via social media! It’s that vital. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds

  How often should I post fresh content on my site?   There is still a lot of debate surrounding this question – every industry and every demographic sees different content consumption patterns. But in general, fresh content should be posted no less often than twice a week.  As for an upper limit, there is none – studies seem to show that posting once a day, or even several times a day, is a very effective way to drive traffic to a website.  It’s just a matter of deciding how much time and effort you can devote to creating content. Google is known to give more prominence to websites that update their data on a frequent basis. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Paul Clemmer

  Do I need to constantly create new content? Yes and no.  Content creation does need to be ongoing, but there are ways to streamline and simplify the process. One of the easiest and most effective ways of doing so is to repurpose content.  This entails creating content in one form, and then reworking it several times in order to utilize that same information in other forms, as well.  For example, you might write an ebook about an important topic in your industry. Then, you could take the chapters of that ebook, and edit each one to make them into individual blog posts.  Next, you could create an infographic illustrating the statistics mentioned in the ebook. And finally, you could give a webinar discussing the content in that ebook.  Not only does this approach lighten the content creation load, but it also allows the same content to be consumed by people with different tastes in content. For more information, check out our content marketing page. ---...

  What are the steps to developing a content marketing strategy?   First, determine who your target audience is. Develop a customer persona to whom your content should speak.  Then, based on that persona and your company’s brand image, decide on your company’s voice, and the type of content you will be creating.  Your content needs to be informative and valuable, as well as interesting and engaging, to your target demographic.  And once you start producing content, constant tweaking of your strategy is in order, based on how successful each post is. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds

  How should I get started with content marketing?   Though it can be tempting to jump right in and start writing a blog without much forethought, the only way to ensure that your content marketing will be effective is to take the time to create a strategy first.  Without a clear plan in place, all the time you put into developing content is wasted. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds

  What qualifies as content?   When most people think of content marketing, they think of a blog. And blogs are certainly one of the easiest and most effective means of content marketing available.  But they aren’t the only forms of content that can be employed in a content marketing strategy.  Any valuable information, conveyed via any medium, can be considered content. Videos, infographics, slideshares, PDFs, blogs, articles, podcasts, white papers, ebooks, webinars – the list goes on and on. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds

  What is content marketing exactly?   Content marketing turns traditional marketing on its head. Instead of focusing on a company and its products or services, it focuses on the consumer’s needs first.  The goal of a properly planned content marketing campaign or strategy is to provide valuable, genuinely helpful information to consumers for free, in order to create a relationship with them based on trust, which eventually leads them to make a purchase. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds

Should I use AMP technology? I have a B2B business would it be wise to roll AMP on my solution pages?  Should I just implement AMP on my content heavy pages like the resource pages?   You need to first understand how your customers visit your site.  AMP is almost a certainty, UNLESS you have a very low percentage of mobile visitors. It’s unusual, but some verticals work out that way. RFP-heavy businesses or government contract businesses work out this way. Google Analytics is a great tool to learn this. Once you know these numbers (if you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business), you can put the work into AMP. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Paul Clemmer

  Is Content Marketing the Same as Social Media Marketing? These two branches of marketing aren’t the same, but many businesses integrate their content marketing and social media marketing strategies.  This synthesis helps brands ensure that they’re optimizing their marketing efforts. While content marketing encompasses written, graphic, and video material that can live on your company’s website or any number of other places online, social media marketing takes place strictly on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.  Many social media marketers build their editorial calendars around sharing links to content that their brands have created, as this practice can drive views and value. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds

  What’s the Most Common Content Marketing Mistake? For most businesses, the biggest content marketing mistake is jumping in without a coherent strategy. Like any type of marketing, you need a plan to get the results you want from content marketing.  Launching a blog and producing posts regularly may never help you achieve your objectives if you don’t know what you want to accomplish or how to get there. To develop an effective content marketing strategy, you’ll need to understand who your target audience is, what kinds of content they want, and how your brand can offer the greatest value to your audience.  Many businesses opt to create buyer personas so they can get to know their target audience and design content that’s sure to resonate. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Carl Jones

  Can Content Marketing Generate Leads for My Business? With the right strategy in place, you can use content marketing to generate a steady stream of new leads for your business.  While most brands offer content like blog posts, articles, and videos free of charge, they also create high-level content, such as white papers, case studies, and eBooks to serve as lead magnets. Then they require readers to opt in to a mailing list before gaining access to the high-level content. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds

  What Types of Businesses Can Content Marketing Help? Small and large businesses in virtually every industry use content marketing to their advantage. From major consumer brands and retail stores to tech companies and service-oriented businesses, content marketing can help you reach out to your target audience. Both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies have developed successful content marketing strategies. The techniques and goals vary between B2B and B2C companies, but that doesn’t make content marketing any less effective. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Sharon Jenkins

Why won’t people come to our content? The short answer is that people in charge lacked a basic understanding of SEO.  A slightly longer answer is they didn’t do link building and outreach, or perhaps they didn’t produce content that was “link worthy” in the first place. Imagine a restaurant would open in the middle of the desert. Would you go? Even if you knew it existed, you would probably not go – unless that restaurant had unique food (value) to offer you.  If you want people to come to your content, you need to: Create unique content that they can’t get anywhere else. If you’re just getting started, make sure you start with a WOW factor – for example, invite an influencer to write a guest post or interview a key figure in your industry. That will help you get initial traction. Invite them to come – Make sure you target the right audience that needs/wants your content and let them know the content is there, be it through social media, newsletters, SEM, or any other re...

    How do we manage all the different audiences? For example, instead of producing three original versions of an email, include the same offers and calls to action in all, but change the openings to address each audience’s unique pain points. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Paul Clemmer

  How many buyer personas do we need? Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20.  But if you’re new to personas, start small! You can always develop more personas later if needed. For more information, check out our content marketing page. --- Answered by: Beth Simonds