In this digital era, content marketing is your best friend. Firstly, it’s about half the cost of traditional marketing strategies such as pushy popups, unrelated web banners and ‘junk’ emails. Secondly, studies show it has the potential to triple your leads. Yet, many businesses are still failing to put strategic content planning in place.

It boils down to one main reason—being time-poor.

If you don’t have a content marketing plan in place (or you do, but it’s a bit wishy-washy and you’re flying by the seat of your pants), here are some ideas you need to start using to get the positive results you've been wanting.

1. Professional images are worth a thousand words
Heard the old adage, don’t say it, show it? High-quality images are crucial. Studies have shown people only retain 10% of the information they are shown when it’s made up solely of text. The text is still super important, particularly for search engine optimisation (SEO), but having professional photos is also key. Images don’t simply have to be beautiful photos; they can be graphs, infographics or video.

2. Create shareable content
People like to share content that’s informative, funny, even a little out of the box. Whether it’s a video, image or written text, don’t be afraid to inject originality. The ice bucket challenge is simply one example of content took the world by storm. Celebrities, businesses from all across the world got on board and uploaded their content to YouTube. Motor Neurone disease couldn’t have asked for better publicity.

3. Reuse old content
You often spend so much time creating great content, it seems a shame to only use it once. This is called repurposing. The same information you used t write your blog can be used to create a webinar, video, and quizzes—just to name a few.

4. Write headlines that entice
The more compelling or shocking a headline is, the more likely you are to attract readers. Copyblogger reported 8 out of 10 people only read the headline copy, and only 2 out of 10 will bother to read the rest. To capture attention, headlines must intrigue the reader but be relevant to the content, otherwise, you will be penalised by Google for clickbait.

5. Expand your content horizons
If you tend to only blog, it’s not the only form of content marketing. To be successful you need to be using other content marketing strategies such as vlogging, guest blogging. Ebooks, webinars, FAQs, interviews, listicles (list-type articles), polls, podcasts, press releases—the list is endless.

Content marketing is key to your business’s success. However, you don’t have to go it alone. XDesigns Advertising has a dedicated team of individuals waiting to help you with your content marketing, whether it’s creating a content plan or providing content marketing for you. Contact us today to learn more about what we can do for you.