Understanding Content Marketing: How to Craft an Effective Strategy

Many Toronto-based entrepreneurs face challenges when marketing their businesses, especially when trying to implement effective content marketing strategies. With all the advertising noise out there, it can be difficult to get people’s attention.

What is Content Marketing?

If you want your message to be heard, you need something captivating and interactive. This is where SEO content marketing comes in. This is the practice of creating and publishing videos, blogs, podcasts, posts, stories, and live streams. Creating content that is interesting to your specific audience can raise awareness of your business and unlock new opportunities.

Benefits of a Content Marketing Strategy

In general, content marketing strategies are a great way to engage potential customers, address their concerns, and demonstrate value. In other words, content can do a lot of sales and marketing work for you.

Types of Content Marketing

Each type has its own benefits; this blog post will outline some of these examples to help you refine your content marketing strategy.

Video Marketing

The first type of content marketing that I want to talk about here also happens to be my favorite type of marketing, and that's video. Videos are an essential part of any marketing plan, and they can effectively engage your audience. Making videos allows people to put a face to your business, it shows that there is an actual real person behind the brand.

Another thing to consider is that it’s a lot easier for people to watch videos than to read blog posts, so people are a lot more likely to interact with your work if you have videos.

When it comes to platforms for video, you have YouTube, you have Facebook, but you can also upload to LinkedIn or Instagram’s IGTV if your video is less than 10 minutes long.

For industries like real estate, video marketing is a powerful way to connect with audiences, showcasing listings in a way that resonates.

Blog Content

Next, I want to talk about blogs because blogs are probably the most important content that you need to create if you want customers to be able to find you easily online. Essentially, the more quality blog posts you have, the better your chances are of someone searching for similar topics and discovering your website on Google, which greatly improves your search engine visibility.

In your blog posts, you can provide useful links and advice, which will help build trust in your business. Blogs also work well as part of your social media strategy. You can use snippets or excerpts from your blog posts and share them on various platforms to drive traffic back to your website.

Podcasts

Up next is podcasts. These are usually uploaded weekly and tend to be long-form content. Most podcasts are between thirty minutes and an hour and a half long and often feature guests, which is a great way to grow your network and get your message out to people outside your circle.

Another advantage of podcasts is that listeners can experience your content while doing another activity like exercising or washing the dishes. In today’s world, time and attention spans are limited, and podcasts fit well into your people’s busy lives.

Social Media Posts

Let’s talk about Instagram and Facebook posts, which are probably the easiest type of content to make as you can usually base them on a blog post or video. Posts can be a great way to keep your customers updated with your latest offers. If you develop a consistent style for your posts, it can really help with brand recognition.

Stories

Next, I want to talk about stories. Stories allow you to give daily updates to your customers on Instagram and Facebook, and because they appear at the top of the page, that’s going to help you stay top of mind. Stories give your customers a good idea of what you do day in and day out, and that can be a really important part of your social media content strategy.

Live Streams

It’s time to get into the fifth and final type of content I want to talk about here: live streams. These are a valuable tool for any marketer, and they can significantly improve your strategy. Live streams are the most interactive form of content because you can take your viewer’s questions right away.

They also give your customers a chance to see the real you, unedited and unscripted. Another thing to note is that many platforms like Instagram and Facebook really promote live streams as part of their social media marketing efforts. So, if you do a stream instead of just uploading a normal video, you're actually likely to get a lot more views. And that's live streams.

Conclusion

Now that you know all about the importance of good content from our mini marketing guide, you’re ready to promote your Toronto business. Get out there and make some content, so you can start experiencing the benefits, too!

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