11 Rules for Good Content Marketing

Those brands that publish exclusively advertising information are not trusted by consumers. The use of content marketing helps to gain the trust of buyers and attract new customers.

For the competent implementation of this area of ​​Internet marketing, which consists in the dissemination of useful and interesting information for consumers that promotes business and helps to bring new products and services to the market, as well as create a company image or maintain expert status, a number of rules must be observed. We will talk about them in this article.

Rule #1: Create Unique Content

Copying and reworking content taken from a competitor’s site is fraught with your resource falling under search engine filters and losing a significant part of the audience.

If you’re creating content on the same topic as your competitors, use a different format. For example, instead of plain text, draw an info graphic or record a video. Always try to provide the consumer with more useful and valuable information than on other resources and present it in a form that is easy to understand.

Rule number 2. Remember the convenience of the content

Users do not read text that is inconvenient to read. Make content aesthetically appealing in terms of design. It is best if all your publications are designed in the same style.

Don’t go overboard with embellishing the text, the text should be easy to read. To achieve this, you need:

• break the text into paragraphs with a small number of sentences;
• use subheadings, highlighting important fragments and other formatting elements;
• add illustrations and, if possible, media content.

Also check for spelling and grammatical errors.

Rule number 3. Define your target audience

To understand what you should write about, you need to decide on your target audience (CA) – to understand for whom you are doing this, with whom you are going to interact.

Compose avatars for each type of key customer. This will help determine the kinds of materials that will resonate with them. If you know your target audience, it will be much easier for you to come up with topics for publications.

Rule #4: Keep Your Content Relevant

Content should match the user’s request, give people what they expect to get. Information should help the site visitor solve his problems, be interesting to him.

Create publications that correspond to the professional field and subject of your site. And don’t forget to collect feedback from readers, it can be a great source of content ideas.

Rule #5: Follow a Content Plan

Content marketing requires developing a preliminary content creation plan.

Before starting work, form a content plan with topics for one or two months in advance. Decide on content formats, the frequency of new materials publication and distribution channels.

Rule #6: Diversify content formats

Content marketing is by no means limited to one text. To reach the largest possible segment of the audience and, therefore, sell more goods and services, use different formats. These can be articles and posts, news, photos, info graphics, presentations, e-books, videos, mind maps, checklists and much more.

Rule #7: Track your stats

It is necessary to constantly monitor the activity and involvement of your audience with the help of analytics tools. This information will help you create an effective content plan. For example, if you published a post that caused an active response from the audience, continue this topic by creating a full-fledged article based on it or making a video.

Rule #8

Reaction to publications can be both positive and negative. You need to react in both cases.

Customers will be pleased if you thank those who left a positive feedback. However, it is not recommended to delete negative reviews. Handle negative feedback, help the user solve the problem they contacted you with. This way you will attract more readers and potential customers.

Answer questions asked by customers by posting articles, videos, and other types of content on the topic.

Rule #9

Before writing articles, forming their structure to understand what information should be included in the text, conduct a keyword analysis.

Be sure to include search queries that are relevant to the topic of your article in the title, body text, and other elements of the web page. This will attract organic traffic from search engines.

However, you should not abuse keywords, as the text over saturated with keywords becomes unreadable. The positions of such pages go down, and in case of strong over spam with keywords, the site may even fall under search engine filters.

Rule #10

Many readers will not even open an article that contains useful information for them if it has a boring title.

To make your headline catchy and attention-grabbing, use numbers in it. Question words look good in the title: how, why, why, what, when, etc. Well, if the title describes the action, creates intrigue.

It is important not to give false information in the title of the article. The reader will not forgive this and will immediately close the page, and a large number of bounces will inevitably reduce its position in the search results.

Rule #11

Try to add a call to further action to each article posted on your site, otherwise the user will finish the text, close the tab and go on to surf the Internet.

If you want the visitor to be able to continue interacting with you, offer him to subscribe to an email newsletter, go to the store, join a group on social networks, read other articles on the site related to this topic, etc.

Conclusion

By following the rules of content marketing listed in this article, you can create content that is useful to consumers, strengthen the credibility of the company and increase the level of trust in you, as a result of which interested users will become buyers of your products or services.