I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again content is king, no doubt this is not the first time you’ve heard this saying. I do believe it is true. Content marketing is not about the hard sell, lets face it who likes the hard sell? Not me that’s for sure.

Content marketing is more about the brand story and engaging with your target audience. You may want to sell a product but someone talking about their experience of the product can be more compelling. We are living in a digital age, where we can seek out the content of interest to us and ignore the rest, with that in mind you want to peak interest.

Here are my top five tips for content marketing:

Plan ahead

The saying, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail springs to mind. To be effective and really reap results you need to plan your content and be consistent with it. It may be unrealistic for you to produce thought-provoking content on a daily basis, but if you plan to produce weekly or bi-weekly content for your business make sure that you issue it via social media channels and email consistently. If you issue your content on a Tuesday at 10am each week stick to it.

Focus

With everyone going on about the need for content, it can be easy to lose focus in the rush to just get stuff out. But before you do this you should be thinking about the reason you are producing the content, and remember who you are writing it for. Putting yourself in the shoes of the audience you want to connect with is always helpful.

Visual benefits

Now when you scroll through your twitter timeline what catches your eyes or sparks interest? Images and videos are usually the top answer and they go a long way in helping to tell a story. Marketers use video, images and info-graphics to help tell stories about brands regularly. The main reason for this is because over 90 percent of content with visuals images get more views than ones without….so get busy incorporating visuals into your content!

Recycle your content

Don’t be afraid to reuse your content.  It does take time to produce quality content so you should find ways to re use it. An example of this is, if you have recently written a blog about a new product or service, you could tweet out  key points from said blog over the course of a week.

Share you content more than once

Be sure to use all the social media platforms at your disposal and share it more than once. I do this myself, it’s helpful in building web traffic and helpful to those in different time zones across the world. I often make small changes to the text so I’m not repeating myself and to appeal to different audiences. I also like to use hash tags (click here to see my blog on social media and use of hash tags).

Feel free to comment below and share any tips you have!