WritingThoughts

©iStock.com/Difydave

Content marketing is one of the latest catch phrases–as well it should be. Content is vitally important if you do business online.

As a result of the new interest in content marketing, there are many folks out there doing content marketing. Unfortunately, many of those new content marketers are also doing it wrong.

In this post, I’ll identify three vital elements of content marketing–elements that many people miss.

The Elements of Effective Content Marketing

After years of mediocre content, content quality has suddenly become more important than ever. Those hastily thrown together articles based on tired old content are no longer going to help your business (if they ever really did).

There are many different aspects to content marketing. A lot of information has been generated to explain various aspects of content marketing. And while much of that information is good, much of it leaves out the basics.

The failure to focus on the basic elements of content marketing is why so many content marketing strategies fail.

You can’t have an effective content marketing strategy without the following vital, but basic, elements:

1. Quality Web Content. Web content is more than just articles. It includes a whole spectrum of materials that you publish online including images, infographics, podcasts, videos, and more. But it’s not enough to simply publish content. That content has to be good, really good. Without quality, your content marketing strategy will fail.
2. Social Media Engagement. Another important factor in any content marketing strategy is social media engagement. This is what will drive prospects to your website. It’s not enough to publish high quality content and simply sit back and wait for your audience to find you. That may never happen. Instead, bring your audience to your content through social media.
3. Audience Relevance. Even with high quality content and social media engagement, your content marketing strategy can’t succeed unless you target the right audience. Publishing high quality content that is of no value to your target audience is no way to conduct a successful content marketing campaign. You may get a little traffic, but you won’t get customers.

For a content marketing strategy to work, all three vital elements must be there. Leave out one of these elements, and your strategy will fail.

Picture, if you can, trying to balance a milking stool on two of its three legs. It simply won’t work. Something vital is missing.

Likewise if you leave one of these elements out your content marketing strategy, it simply won’t work.

What are your content marketing tips? Share them in the comments.