If you think content marketing is all about promoting your products in a subtle way in order to improve sales, then you need to put the brakes on. You’re not optimizing your content for sales. If that’s your goal then stop now before you waste time and money. You’re optimizing your content marketing campaign with targeted keywords because you want visibility. You’re leveraging that visibility to lead people to your content for the express purpose of giving something before getting something.
Content marketing is customer centric. That means you need to go beyond just focusing on creating information draw in prospects. You need to educate them on products on services, the benefits, and more through topics of interest that are relevant to their situation.
Great content marketing is designed to educate and inform a prospective buyer, effectively answering their concerns – often before they even realize it’s a concern. It provides them with everything they need to know in order to help them make a logical purchase decision, but it does it without selling them on the product directly.
The role of keywords should come in second, as your optimization takes place after you’ve already produced the content with the reader in mind. Once you have the core concept of your content in place you need to start thinking about what they’re searching for, and what they’re talking about online that would lead them to you.
Keywords in content marketing manifests as knowledge in what customers are interested in and their specific pain points.
Here’s an example: A company is focusing their content marketing on “Floating widgets”.
- Their customers care about floating widgets that are environmentally friendly.
- Their customers search for “floating widgets”, “affordable widgets”, “purple widgets”, “environmentally friendly widgets”.
- Their customers socially discuss “save money on widgets, “environmental impact of widgets”.
The content plan to engage these customers outlines several topics supporting those search terms and social topics. To execute that content marketing strategy, the company develops blogging, video tips, Facebook pages, articles on widget environmental tips, a newsletter with email tips, guest blogs from widget professionals and experts, and regular content sharing on widget cost saving tips.
The Greater Benefit of Keywords in Content Marketing
Keywords don’t just guide the optimization of your content marketing for the purposes of SEO. Yes, you improve your findability within the search engines for topics the customer cares about but they’re also fantastic guides for developing topics. In the end, you’re not only expanding on relevant and valuable content that is non-promotional, you’re also expanding your reach to include more of your target audience.
Avoiding the Keyword Pitfall in Content Marketing
You may think you understand the need for keywords in order to appear relevant within the search engines, but one of the most common mistakes made by business owners is leading with keywords (vs. customer needs). Thinking that optimizing your content marketing for popular key phrases is enough to maximize customer reach is a grave mistake. Just because content ranks well in search results doesn’t mean it will resonate with your audience or be shared.
With content marketing, on a local or a global scale, you need to achieve a fine balance. The key to success is in identifying the need for keywords, creating content to fulfill customer need, and then optimizing that content marketing resource to maximize visibility.
What does your content marketing strategy look like? Have you written promotional content laced with keywords or does your content provide something more? Let us know at Tulsa Internet Marketing Services by commenting below.
