Today’s digital era is creating a new world, and more than ever, brands are prioritizing digital channels to connect with their target audience and drive bottom-line growth for their business. As a result, the demand for high-quality, creative, human talent and newfangled digital skills are increased.

For instance, every year Google fills more than 6,000 job roles. (Google receives more than 1 million applications every year but, hires less than 1% from them.)

Recently, QuestResearch Group conducted a Study at Kaplan University, and published the results in Forbes, found that:

“There is a very little number of people who believe in the work readiness of university graduates. And, just 6% of university trustees, 11% of C-level executives and 13% of U.S. adults strongly agree with statements about the work readiness of university graduates.”

Maybe traditional education methods failing to prepare our next generation for what’s really essential to succeed. That’s why self-built skills are becoming more and more important.

So, Good News? A university degree isn’t always a prerequisite to success.

In fact, big brands like Google don’t even require a degree and they’ve been open about online career certificates instead. Also, brands like Apple, IBM, Tesla, and even Hilton, Costco, Bank of America, Whole Foods are following the same and don’t require a degree.

That means you can get a great job without a university degree! But how?

You need to build real, market-ready skills.

5 Market-Ready Skills to Win a Placement in the Content Marketing Industry.

 

1. Having a Good Understanding of Brand Content Strategy

Unless you understand the mechanics of content strategy, you can’t get any content marketing job. The content strategy is barely 10 years old, but, the base foundations of its techniques go back hundreds of years.

If you’ve no idea about brand content strategy, there are six core factors that build a brand content strategy.

The Six Core Factors of Brand Content Strategy

1. Knowing how to define a content strategy and the different parts of content strategy.
2. Get to know your target audience and build a brand differentiation factor.
3. Discover a strategy to find and put together great keywords
4. Knowing the ways to build authority with a dedicated brand website
5. Knowing the tactics to consistently create well-optimized awesome content
6. Having an organized process and system to manage and maintain the content and content strategy (editorial calendar, promotional strategy, etc.).

The above six steps don’t sound light, right? Because truthfully, they aren’t.

If you’re new to content marketing but want to be taken seriously in this industry and build your skillsets, consider getting a mentor and investing in a course led by industry-best practitioners to learn how to build a content strategy. Another best way is to join an internship in a job where you can learn and practice real-time tactics to build these content marketing skills.

2. Having a Better Understanding of SEO

There are valid reasons why more marketers and brands are focusing on SEO:

• More than 90% of US traffic generates from Google – Especially through Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps.
• SEO helps to drive nearly 11X as much traffic as organic social media
• Nearly 68% of all online experience starts with a search engine.

Inbound SEO content is a win in today’s scenario because over the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020 to present), Google search traffic spike up to 6 billion searches/day from 3.6 billion searches/day. In short, the number of people using Google to search for answers to their questions has increased to a greater level.

SEO skillset revolves around things like knowing how to write and optimize content for search, maintain and update older content, monitor your content performance, and effectively using tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, SEMrush and Yoast. Basically, companies that hiring content marketers are looking for a good understanding of SEO.

So, building your knowledge and skills in SEO is essential. To enhance your SEO knowledge you can find and follow SEO experts and take an SEO course.

3. Having a Great Understanding of Online Content

Can you quickly identify great online content?

If you haven’t sharpened your content recognition skills, you can’t survive in the content marketing industry for a long time. Brands are expecting their content marketing team to produce quality content. So, sharpen your content recognition skills and get to know how to identify good content across these content formats:

• Product Descriptions
• Social Media Posts
• Blogs
• Headlines
• Web Content
• Meta Content
• Emails
• Ebooks
• Case Studies
• Lead Magnets
• Whitepapers
• Video Scripts

Regardless of the industry, all of these above content formats are used across a wide variety of content marketing campaigns. So,  if don’t have good content recognition skills, build them by joining an internship at a content marketing agency, take a lower-paying gig in exchange for building your content- skills, or investing in an online content writing course.

4. Having the Ability to Do In-Depth Research

‘Sourcing a statistic” in your content isn’t working any longer.

You should know the ways to find the original study, plus make sure you’re never linking to anything that’s outdated.  For instance, if you’re sourcing a link to a study from 2019 in your blog post, depending on your industry, it’s quite possibly outdated and won’t add authority to your blog post.

You need to research a bit more deeply than an average person to find great sources and statistics for the content you build or manage in a content marketing campaign.

Statistics and facts matter more than before because now trust is one of the most important buying factors consumers consider when purchasing a product/service from a brand.

5. Commitment & The Ability to Stick with It

This is a simple yet most important trait for a content marketer.

Above all, the success of a content marketing campaign depends on the commitment of the person who is spearheading the campaign.

The founder of Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi has said that it takes 12-18 months to see the success of content. Also, Pulizzi said that one of the biggest reasons for content marketing failure is that the brands don’t have patience and kills their campaign too early, even, it sounds crazy, it’s the true fact.

If you’re heading into the content marketing industry, you should be committed and build your ability to stick with it until you achieve the results. Simply, be a proponent for a brand’s content marketing success.

Conclusion

There are many other content marketing skills. But, these five are extremely important content marketing skills to master. Now you have the path to build your content marketing skills. Once you built these skills, you’re ready to hustle your dream content marketing job.

Go ahead and prosper your career!

Content marketing has been a buzzword in the digital marketing industry for recent years. Without giving a second thought, you can leverage the power of content marketing to boost your brand awareness, acquire new customers, and even generate more repeat sales. Because businesses that use the content marketing approach receive more traffic and have higher conversion rates.

✅ Today, let’s talk about eCommerce content marketing strategies that drive the maximum ROI.

1.📌 What is Content Marketing?

Generally, content marketing is a form of inbound marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing various different formats of content like written articles, infographics, and tutorial videos for targeted audiences online with the goal of attracting attention, generating more leads, expanding customer base and building your brand awareness.

Good content isn’t about good storytelling.
It’s about telling a true story well

 

2. 📌How to Stand Out with Content Marketing?

In this digital marketing era, it’s truly challenging to stand out from your competitors with your content marketing efforts. And, in today’s marketing landscape, many brands and individuals are willing to offer free value through their content.

So, how do you get your content to stand out from this crowd?

For example, take the topic “how to start a blog” While this topic has billions of search results and thousands of competitors vying for the high rank in the organic search results. Neil Patel’s blog has been able to high up the ranking on the first page of results. How? By going way above and beyond the amount of value other pieces of the content offered on this particular topic. His guide is very in-depth, also contains tutorial screenshots and results.

This example clearly defines that you’ll need to raise the quality bar of your content in order to get ahead with your own content marketing strategy.

Now, let’s discuss the fundamentals of building a content marketing strategy and how this will help you to take your marketing efforts to the next level.

 

3. 📌What Should You Write About?

Coming up with writing that inspires your target audience is a bit tough. The simple way to get started with your writing is to write about the biggest challenges that your target audience facing today.

If you offer free content to your prospects that immediately help them to solve some of their problems, you’ll give them more confidence in choosing you when they decided to invest in a paid tool, solution, or resource on the particular subject at hand.

So, how can you find out the most pressing challenges, hurdles, and questions of your target audience to provide your answers or solutions with high-quality, transformational content?

✅ Here are some effective ways to identify the biggest challenges of your target audience.

➡️  Directly Ask Your Audience – Ask your existing audience about the biggest challenges they’re facing and use their answers to create your future content. It’ll help you to prioritize your product features in the long run.

➡️  Research Competitors – Research and identity which challenges and questions of your audience that your competitors are answering with their content, and in what format they’re delivering their content. Then, identify the unique ways to provide your valuable content to your audience

➡️  Analyze Your Own Experiences – While building your business, possibly, you’ve got some unique experiences and insights that you want to share with your audience through your content, which can help your audience to replicate your success or get a result you’ve achieved.

In order to build well-defined eCommerce content marketing strategies, you need to focus on different types of content formats like videos, infographics podcasts, eBooks, written blogs and using paid ads to generate initial audiences who’ll connect and engage with your content.

Following that, you have to do the needful things to generate traffic to your website, and putting CTAs throughout your content to get leads from the audience who shows up to consume your content

For this purpose, you need to improve the domain authority of your website (a measure used by search engines to benchmark the authoritativeness of a website). However, it’ll take continuous efforts and time. You can improve your website’s domain authority by publishing fresh, relevant content, then getting that content shared and mentioned by other well-established individuals and brands in your related fields.

Whether you’re beginning from scratch or need an evaluation on your eCommerce content marketing strategies, the following step-by-step content marketing tips will get you started.

4. 📌How Should You Share Your Content?

Now, you have your content ready in your hands, so, it’s time to start sharing your content with your target audience. Begin with identifying where (which social media platform) your target audience spends most of their time. Social media marketing is just one aspect of your overall eCommerce content marketing strategies, but, it’s essential in this social media age.

 

✅ Here are the demographics of each social media platform that will help you to decide which one to focus on your social media marketing strategy.

➡️  Facebook –Even though Facebook is an older social media platform, it still counts because Facebook continuously evolving and innovating itself according to users’ current needs. Probably, you’ll have a loyal fanbase on Facebook that help you to get real-time feedback. If you want to teach your audience, Facebook live is one of the best choices for you.

➡️  Instagram –Instagram is a visually attractive photogenic social media platform. So, If you have products that have lots of attractive images then this may a place to showcase your products.

➡️  Twitter –If you have informational and text-driven products, Twitter is the best choice for you. As it’ll allow you to give a short description of what you just wrote about on your content, blog, or website and point users towards it. It’s one of the effective ways of letting your users know there is new content without sending out an email every time.

➡️  LinkedIn –If you want to target business-minded professionals, LinkedIn is the absolute choice for you.

➡️  YouTube –Videos are engaging and generally have higher conversion rates, thus YouTube is a great way to share your video content and reach your audience.

By sharing your content on these above social media platforms, you’ll build your own communities on these platforms. For this purpose, you need to post frequently on the platforms and keep your audience up-to-date.

5. 📌How to Get More Backlinks for Your Content?

Guest posting is one of the best ways to gain backlinks for your content. You can guest post on blogs or similar websites in your niche. Once you find blogs or websites with similar content as yours, you can ask if they accept guest posts, if they do so, you can write a great article on their website and get a link back to your website in return. Just make sure you have quality content to submit before you try the guest posting method.

6. 📌How Should You Advertise Your Content?

For eCommerce particularly you can use PPC ads to get immediate traffic, but, just ensure you have a proper plan for your PPC ad campaign. Determine the goal for your PPC campaign, whether want to get sales, build your email list or build your brand awareness in the marketplace and customize your PPC campaign based on your goal.

According to your PPC campaign results, you can determine what content to target and which keyword phrases to target for the long term. That’ll help you to build a comprehensive content marketing strategy for your eCommerce site.

7. 📌How Should You Drive Constant Traffic to Your Content?

Let’s check out the ways to drive sustained traffic to your content.

 

• ➡️  Answer questions on Quora – Sign up for a free account on quora and start to answer the questions related to your business.
• ➡️  Respond to Reddit subcategories –again sign up or a free account on Reddit and start to answer the questions related to your business.
• ➡️  Comment on relevant blog posts and videos –Leave a comment on a blog post or YouTube video that is relevant to your niche.
• ➡️  Create valuable assets for others –Offer value through your content by creating infographics, case studies, and tutorial teaching series videos.
• ➡️  Reach out to relevant podcasts –Seek out the related podcasts and give interviews to get more reach for your content

🔔 Conclusion

Now, we have gone through the ways to create eCommerce content marketing strategies that drive the maximum ROI. Using these content marketing strategies you can build brand loyalty and trust among your audience that’ll help you to convert your website visitors into sales.

In nutshell, these eCommerce content marketing strategies help you to increase your conversion rate through brand awareness.

📢 Got any questions or thoughts about these eCommerce content marketing strategies? Let me know them in the comments below!

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Content marketing can take the marketing game to a whole new level.”

But can you tell, why?

Let’s start from the beginning..

As you can see, content marketing is there since ages.. It’s of no surprise – Content has been there to help marketers let their messages reach their audience.

Content is the base of any marketing strategy that brands not only imply to drive leads, but also to increase their overall bottom line by building credibility amongst the audience.

While it’s true that brands and their content has to flow in the same direction but, most of the marketers don’t know why. Before we get into this, let’s take a look at what content marketing really is, now, since it has come a long way from the start.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy of producing and allocating valuable, relevant and reliable content to attract and acquire a potential audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer deeds.

It’s about developing and leveraging relationships with people of influence within a particular industry to help spread your brand message or to help build on the same foundation as content marketing. It’s no wonder content marketing is seen a truly effective form of marketing.

Let me break it down for you!

Content Marketing Growth In The Industry

Without a doubt, content marketing, once done properly, can produce striking results for your business.

“51% of B2B buyers depend more on content to research and make B2B buying decisions than they did a year ago.” – says DemandGen Report.

Content builds trust among the buyers by helping them understand your brand’s psychology and ethics before making a purchase decision.

According to research done by DemandGen, “47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative.”

As they say, use your words wisely and carefully to get noticed. Those 3-5 pieces of content should have enough convincing power to make the customers understand the value your brand can bring to the table.

Here’s what our Industry Experts have to say about content in 2017.

Synopsis of the Video – “In this video, Content Marketing Gurus are sharing some insights on how it is going to take a turn in 2017.”

According to a report by Curata – “75% of marketers are increasing investment in content marketing.”

Still need more reasons to focus on Content in 2017?

Keep Reading.. 

Content Marketing Demand In The Industry

“94% of the marketing professionals surveyed said it is critical that content marketing be part of a company’s business strategy.” – says PR Newswire.

Content marketing can be time taking process for B2B marketers but, it’s an enduring approach to get remarkable results and to refine your brand’s discernibly online. It also helps you cherish a longer relationship with your clients.

According to a report by Pagefair, “Approx. 200 million internet users have installed ad-blocking software globally.”

So, if you are among one of those Ad-savvies, probably thinking of getting quick returns on paid advertisements, sorry to say this but you won’t be able to survive for too long, especially when the marketing techniques are taking twists and turns in 2017.

Period.

To thrive your business in future in all aspects, you have to stick to content marketing to the core, and there is no way around it. Because today’s people are looking for information before they can rely on your services.

If they leave your website having a feeling that this company understands me, you can be assured that you are on the right track of Content Marketing. Make your content consistent that can engage with the audience. You’ll definitely succeed if will be able to achieve this milestone.

5 Brands That Made it Big With Content Marketing

Content marketing is getting a bigger picture because you don’t sell anything directly. People who are coming to your website don’t experience that irritating selling tone rather than that; they leave your site with the exact information what they have been looking for.

ADP

ADP is a leading solution provider of human resource management to businesses. The company leveraged their expertise to create white papers, which have proven to be highly valuable to their customers. They provide whitepapers on human capital management to their customers.

Key takeaway: If you’re thinking, White papers don’t have any impact on marketing, then you are wrong my friend.  It might be overlooked in the industry, but not dead. If your customers prefer more whitepapers then, you won’t mind creating a huge number of this resource for your customers.

Cisco

Cisco is an IT solution provider that sells networking hardware and high-technology telecommunication equipment. The company came to know the power of content marketing when they launched a new product on social media and promoted it.

Key takeaway: With the evolving world, Social media has become a center of attraction of billion people, and it is obvious to draw attention from this platform, once done properly. Promote your products through social media with right strategies for a successful campaign.

DemandBase

DemandBase is an account based marketing technology provider that leverages the expertise in serving B2B brands by using white papers, SlideShare, infographics, and webinars for new leads for their campaigns. And, it generated over $1million through content marketing.

Key takeaway: To get the remarkable results in ROI, you need to develop a content strategy for your audience over a period.

Cox Media Group

Cox Media Group is one of the largest integrated publishing, broadcasting and digital media companies in the world. Though having maximum exposure on television, Cox Media Group has generated new technique of “Success Kit” online that provides a solution to SMBs through eBooks and videos and got more than 2000 leads through 5000 downloads.

Key Takeaway: You’ll surely get more leads by creating an informational content for your audience. This might take some time to get started, but it will be worth it for a longer run.

Toshiba

Toshiba is a Japanese conglomerate corporation that provides products and services including IT and communication equipment.

In 2011, Toshiba created a “Smart Community” endorse awareness of its renewable energy solutions. They invested in a massive SEO campaign to boost their rankings. Their campaign generated over 160,000 followers on LinkedIn worldwide.

Key takeaway: Investing in SEO to push your services on top of SERRPs is a great strategy for content marketing to get maximum traction.

 What worked for them may or may not work for your business, but they are surefire inspirations to get you started with your Content Marketing efforts in the coming year.

Mistakes To Avoid In Content Marketing

If you are doing it wrong, then better not do it at all.

1. Your Content Sucks

Still writing for the search engines? Merely stuffing keywords and writing for the bots is not going to cut it anymore. You need to have content that is well received by your audience. At the end of the day, poor content doesn’t achieve anything.

2. Your Content is Useless

Now, you might be saying that your content is really high quality, but consider again. If your content doesn’t help solve a problem or answer a question, then it will not get any recognition from your audience.

3. Your Content is Promotional

No one ever came to your blog or gallery to read 2 pages worth of features about your product and how you are the “Best + ________ + Company in + Area.”  The focus of your content should be to educate your readers and give them information. In most cases, you should never even mention about your product or service until the end of the content.  There is nothing better than being able to teach your reader to solve a problem.

4. You Are Not an Authority on Your Subject

Well, there is no point in trying to be someone who you are not. If you are not good at something, it is always a good idea to have an expert do the task for you. If you do not have complete knowledge about your field, then your audience is going to apprehend you. And once they know that you are not a guru, they are going to stop coming back. One of the biggest mistake businesses make is it have rookie bloggers or cheap artists create their content. This is actually worse than not making an effort at all.

5. You Are Not Mixing Your Content Marketing Efforts With SEO

Far too many businesses, see SEO as an avoidable expense for their business. But, they are totally wrong. Enterprise Grade SEO is and should be the foundation of your online marketing efforts. One, because it helps reduce the overall cost of consumer acquisition in the long run, and Two, because SEO helps spread your business in a completely new market, the Search Engines. I am a content marketer and an SEO consultant, so I know how these two fields are equally dependent on each other to be most effective.

Best Places To Find Content Creators

Content development can be a very resource-intensive task unless money is no bar, hiring designers, writers, coders, developers, animators, etc. in-house can seem to be a massive burden on small businesses and startups. If you are starting out, it’s always better to hire freelancers on a contract basis to get your work done for you. There is no dearth of freelancers on the internet. Here is a list of places where you can get artists and content developers at exceptionally affordable rates:

• Fiverr
• FiverUp
• GigBucks
• Zeerk
• SEOClerks
• Roundshelf

These are some of my goto places for exceptionally good content at exclusive rates. Disclaimer: Use these services at your own risk, because not all sellers on these platforms are delivering good work. So be sure to check out reviews, a number of sales, reply time, orders in progress, etc., before you try any of the services listed on these platforms.

What’s Going to Work and What’s Not Going to Work in 2017

Coming onto our takeaway from this post. Many things come to our mind when we think of consumable content, be it whitepapers, blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics and more. But there are two factors that can impact your bottom line when you start out content marketing:

1. What used to work a year back, may not be a great option today. Maybe you have better alternatives.
2. What works for someone else, may not necessarily work for you: A brand might be leveraging Pinterest, by creating more infographics and images for their consumers, but what if your consumers are on YouTube? So, it would be a wise decision to create videos for your brand, instead of Infographics. You get the idea, right??!?

So, keeping these two factors in mind, let’s look at the best practices for 2017:

• Live Streaming Increasing in Popularity:

Recorded videos will never go out of fashion, but the recent trends in 2015-2016 show that live streaming is now the most easily consumable content available to viewers. The rise of applications like YouTube Live, Facebook Live and Snapchat, make it all the easier to host live product tours, launch events, tutorials, briefing and another form of content.

• Virtual Reality Will Set the Stage:

With companies like The Outdoor Clothing Company and The North Face embracing VR Technology to showcase their clothes and athletes, we know that VR is already being accepted. Though this feature will not be available to small and mid-sized businesses anytime soon, due to the cost, we are sure to see all big companies taking advantage of it. You too should keep this in mind, if you can afford this technology.

• Native Advertising to replace Push Advertising:

AD Blockers and the genuine hate for banner advertisements is making it difficult for companies to take advantage of Pop-ups, Pop-under, Banner and Exit Intent advertisements. This does not mean that banner ads are dead, but consumers are evolving and so is advertising.

• Storytelling Will Be the Most Important Form of Marketing:

Consumers are tired of reading advertisement copies and bland content. They want more. Good Storytelling is and will continue to be the source of prime brand inspiration for consumers. Storytelling doesn’t only refer to case studies, but a lot more. Brand’s need to think outside the box to promote themselves in a manner which is better accepted. So simply blogging for the sake of blogging or updating social networks is not going to cut it, you need to find better ways to engage with your audience.

• Email Newsletters Are Not Dead:

Nor will they be, anytime We have been discussing the death of email for the past few years, but with the rise of open-rates in 2016, it feels that we are having been making a premature decision. Again, sending out emails for the sake of sending them is not going to work, needless to say, it never did. You need to write your emails in a way that each one connects with a previous, letting your audience keep waiting for more.

How You Can Make the Most of What’s Going to Work!

Now since you know how top brands are leveraging content marketing, mistakes beginners tend to make and places where you can get affordable content developers and also what is working in 2017, you have all the right ingredients for the recipe.

Remember, the food can only be as good as the cook, so you need to make the most of these pointers that I have mentioned in the post. Give it a try. When doing business, there are bound to be cliffhangers and risks, so don’t be afraid to take an attempt and fail. After all, with failure comes perfection.

I believe that 2017 should be a real fruitful year for businesses that are thinking of stepping into the online marketing scene because a lot of evolving technology is setting the stage. And with this evolving technology, there is an advantage of starting out early and being head to head with the big fishes.

If you want to take advantage of the Online Marketing Scene in 2017, you should be planning ahead to spend in Search Engine Optimization, Email Marketing, Story Telling via Blog and Newsletters, and of course Virtual Reality showcasing, if it fits your brand strategy.

With that said, I will close this overly long post because I am sure you are left with more than one idea tingling in your head. Moving to you: If you were to bet your money on that one marketing strategy in 2017. What would it be?