8 Must Have Steps to Unleash the Power of Content Marketing for your Brand

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Today, content marketing is a key weapon in any marketers arsenal. There are so many ways to use content to better market your products and services, to better connect to your target audiences, and engage consumers. Here are eight crucial points to remember to get your content marketing to work its magic for your brand...

1. Make your content Useful

Content has to be useful for your target audience. No matter how well its written, if it doesn't solve a problem or provide an answer, it's meaningless. Every piece of content you create should be useful. That's how you get good following and people look forward to your content.

READ THIS LATER: Winning Content Strategy: Always share something valuable and useful

2. Fine tune your content for your target audience

Providing value, providing resolution to a need is what good content is all about. You can't do that without knowing your audience. Then you need to focus your content aimed at the audience you want to reach and engage. You really need to figure you what they want and deliver on that. Make it useful for them. Not you.  READ THIS LATER: Start with the right consumer insights.

3. Don't sell. Educate. Entertain.

Selling is secondary. Good content marketing focuses on sharing information, on educating, on entertaining, on engaging. Your goal is to educate your audience on how to solve a problem and who to reach out to for help. If readers or viewers want to know how to remove a carpet stain, they should know how to do so by the end of the article or video.

4. Be an Expert. Make content must-have.

You really need to come off as the go-to source for information that will add value to the audience. You need to be the expert they turn to. You can't do that without being the authority on what you write about. Get experts to create content if you or your content teams can't do it right. Remember that you can't be an expert on everything, so select your topics carefully. Your topics should always show how much you know, and that the content really is the best they can find.

5. Make content evergreen.

Your content is great when it has lasting value. Evergreen content is anything that provides a basic overview of a topic or provides information that is just as true years from now as it is today. Remember content has a long tail, it is going to be around, and people will find it via Search down the road, if you've done your homework – and they'll find it useful whenever. Content, which is about a current topic or trend does have its purpose, but it disappears from the value chain if it is specific to only a band of time.

6. Have a goal.

What does your content want to achieve? Are you building a brand? Selling a product. Every piece of content should have a goal – a result you want – an action that you want your audience to take, or something that the reader will remember.

7. Optimize your content for social

The power of content marketing sees it working full force when it resonates with the contexts of social media. remember that you may have a very useful blog, but people usually discover your content via social media. Make sure you distribute your content (provide links, mentions, posts) across the various social media channels that are appropriate for your audience.

Know how to tailor content distribution for Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites. Doing so could increase the odds of readers finding out about you or what you have to sell by finding your social media pages as well.

8. Use SEO to boost your content marketing

SEO is what will help drive traffic and help you better acquire a following. SEO is more than just using keywords or phrases. Use key words and phrases consistently throughout your page, which includes using them in title tags and in paragraph headings.

Overall, make sure your content is great content. Not just anything that your audience can stumble across just about anywhere else. Be consistent in style. Check for typos and grammar. If in video, make sure the quality is the best around. Go HD. And remember to provide usefulness and meaning each and every time.


That's something fundamental to content. The value. The usefulness. And that's the basics. That's Digital Marketing Strategies 101.

Please share this with your colleagues and friends. This is an important list to keep handy.

More useful reading on Content Marketing

Content Marketing Strategy: What kind of content should you create?

6 ways to get Content Marketing done right

11 Amazingly Easy Ways to Skyrocket your Content Marketing Results