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Last Updated on June 25, 2017 by Work In My Pajamas
Even though content marketing is one of the most important marketing strategies for businesses of all sizes in the modern digital environment, it can be fairly costly. Large amounts of fresh, unique and high-quality content must be generated on an ongoing basis for a successful content strategy. This means that businesses pursuing large-scale content marketing must retain content creators to ensure a steady stream of new articles, videos and social media posts. Here are five of the best ways for your business to make this investment as effective and worthwhile as possible.
In This Post:
Begin With a Strategy
One of the most important components of success with content marketing is to start out with at least a rudimentary strategy. Too many business owners hear about content marketing, start a blog or a YouTube channel and begin creating content without thinking about it in terms of a long-term strategy for generating traffic and sales. Begin your marketing efforts by figuring out what platforms you’re going to use to market your business, how often you’ll post and how each channel will be used to most effectively generate leads or sales.
Use Paid Advertising to Start
Though it may seem counterintuitive when talking about making an investment more efficient, paying more money to promote yourself on the various channels you choose to use can be very worthwhile. This will cut down the amount of time it would take for you to get noticed and build and audience on those platforms drastically. This is especially effective on YouTube, where you can use Google’s Adwords tool to drive as many views to your videos as you can afford.
Think Outside the Box
If you want to see the best results with content marketing, you should try to think beyond the major platforms. Almost any website that lets users publish content of some kind on it can be used for marketing platforms. Xyngular, for example, uses an Issuu account to promote its brand. Issuu is a platform used for small magazine publication, and one that few mainstream content marketers would think of. For optimal success, try to get creative and find new places to post your content that your competition isn’t already working.
Focus on Long-Term Traffic
One of the amazing powers of content marketing is the fact that it can be used to generate traffic months or even years after a piece of content has been published. For this to happen, however, you need to approach it the right way. You should try to produce mostly evergreen content, or content that remains relevant more or less indefinitely. You should also make sure that all of the content you publish on searchable platforms is optimized for the algorithms of that platform and of Google. Good SEO combined with evergreen content will make for a steady stream of traffic from each piece of content that you won’t want to do anything else to maintain.
Bring Down Your Investment Cost
Another way to make your investment in content marketing more effective is to keep your investment costs down. The best way to do this is to order content in bulk from the creators you’re paying to make it. Bulk ordering will be more expensive up front, but most content creators will be willing to give you a lower price per piece for larger orders. If you have the necessary skills, you can also create some of your content yourself. This, however, is less easy to scale than having a content creation team at your disposal.
Investing in content creation is one of the best ways to grow your business and sell more products. If you follow these five tips, you should be able to make your content marketing investment yield a good return for your business.