It is important to promote your business but you probably know that it doesn’t exactly mean spending on the ads. Having that in mind, some businesses would invest their time in creating blogs or being very active on social media. While all of these activities play a very important role in promoting your business, it will be essentially wrong if only one of those methods is used.
If you are writing a blog post for your own website thinking, “Great, I’m on the right path, I periodically do the blog posts. It’s good.” But, what you are actually doing is filling up your blog posts with promotional words, phrases, and links. If that’s the case, you need to start acting responsibly. The audience of any kind is sick of promotional content nowadays. Also, if putting all those promotional phrases and links into your blog posts is your way of making an illusion of having non-promotional type of content, you should know that it’s not working. Your audience is not stupid and they can feel the promotion from miles away.
Don’t get me wrong when I say your content should be non-promotional it doesn’t mean that you should totally eliminate promotion of any kind. The key is in keeping the balance. So, in order to promote your business, not only you have to focus on promotional but also on non-promotional content. Now, let’s go over types of content so you can decide which ones are best fitted for promoting your business.
Video content
If your aim is to have an effective content marketing strategy, including videos to it is a must. Did you know that nowadays the major part of the content on the internet are videos? This means that videos are highly engaging and keep the audience focused on whatever they want to say. Around 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day. Videos are getting 1200% more shares than text and images combined. Because everybody is so obsessed with videos it is only natural that businesses which leverage the power of videos become more successful in promoting their business. Videos are popular not only on social media and YouTube but also in places like emails. If you put a video in your email it can increase your click-through rate by 200-300%. If you use one on your landing page your conversions are going to increase by 80%. The majority of marketing professionals say videos convert better than any other medium. And those are not just words, numbers are there to prove it.
But, if you are new in the game you might be a little worried about the actual video creation process. It is completely fine if you are not a professional in video making but you still want to get professional videos without spending a lot of money. A decade ago that might have been a problem, but not now. There are many online video making tools that will help you look professional with very little or no cost.
Text content
Although videos are the most viewed and shared content on the internet it doesn’t mean that the other types should be ignored. The text is actually one of the best methods to bring more organic traffic to your website. The most common way to include this type of content in your content marketing strategy is to start a blog. It can include any topic that your audience is interested in: manuals, news, interviews, case studies, etc.
Besides, creating interesting content to engage people, text content also has another important role. Let’s say you are running a blog on your website by posting 3 pieces per week. This means that for every piece published you have a new page on your website. The more your pages the easier it will be for Google to recognize you. Websites that have their own blogs have 434% more indexed pages than those which don’t. New posts also keep your website fresh which is another signal for search engines to rank your site higher.
Infographics
Infographics are another important part of your content marketing. These can come in all different shapes and forms. When hearing the word “infographics” one automatically assumes many numbers which require extra attention and focus to understand. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Currently, there are many free tools to make your infographics look amazingly attractive. You can use both, tools for making images and videos to make your numbers look perfectly fun and engaging but at the same time very informative. Both of the free tools will take only a few minutes of your time and you will have infographics which are interesting to study.
GIFs/Memes
Having fun with your audience is as important as providing them with useful information. Jokes are always part of the fun and as a business, you don’t want to miss that out. You can joke wherever you want, be it on your blog or in your videos but currently, there are 2 mediums that are very popular for sharing jokes. Those are GIFs and Memes. People just can’t stop sharing these 2 and many of them go viral.
Social Media Posts
The last but not least is the social media. You probably have a social media account or two and you are familiar with the practice of checking the company’s business page before making a purchasing decision. Guess what? Millions of people on the internet do the same. Social media is the first go-to place to look for reviews and comments that other users have left. But when you turn to social media for reviews you also end up reading or watching the content they post. If the content is engaging you might as well stay caught up with it and forget about the reviews. If you want to be competitive your business has to have social media accounts. This is a place where you can post links to your video content on YouTube, links to the text content to your website, add infographics, checklists, gifs, memes, engage the audience with contests and votings, and many other things. In other words, Social Media gives you the opportunity to stay serious about your business and be fun at the same time.
You can choose any of these content forms to help you promote your business. You just need to be engaging and relevant in terms of the interests of your audience. You can also advertise any of these types. But the most important thing is to keep the balance between promotional and non-promotional content, so you won’t end up driving your audience away.
Author Bio: I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Renderforest, a Content Marketing Specialist and an Expert in SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Link Building who enjoys sharing the experiences gained along working as a marketer and helping other entrepreneurs succeed.
My works have been published on different blogs and mediums like Crazy Egg, Forbes, Upwork, ShareThis, etc.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/roman_daneghyan?lang=en
The post How to Create Promotional Content for Your Business? appeared first on Smashing Buzz.