Content Marketing Archives » McWilliams Ink

Content marketing is the targeted creation and strategic distribution of advertising materials online, such as blog posts, social media posts, and email newsletters. When deftly employed, it works very well, as it allows your target audience to learn from you, engage with you, and build loyalty to you. Additionally, it allows you to increase sales and return on advertising dollars invested.

Valuable & Relevant

The primary objective of content marketing is to provide value to your target audience. What’s value? Well, it depends on your audience. You can show how your product or service solves a problem or gives a benefit that your audience wants. Essentially, it’s taking information that you possess and repackaging it to teach your customers. Teaching them makes them think you’re the expert, which gives you authority. Becoming an authority means that the next time they have a curiosity or question about that thing, they’ll come back to you for answers and recommendations.

Creating value for your customers means that your content must be high quality. You can’t throw things together and expect everyone to instantly fall in love with you. It’s imperative that you carefully think through who your audience is, what they need and want, and how to present your information in a way that makes sense and cultivates their sense of loyalty.

Value is what makes your content relevant. If your customers start seeing information from you that is irrelevant, they’ll get confused and eventually stop following you (or worse: hurt your email stats by deleting them without reading them—ouch). Relevance means that your information is timely, targeted, and engaging. In some cases, your content can be re-used from season to season, increasing its usefulness to you without spending more.

Shareable

We’ve all heard the Jim Rohn saying that we’re each the average of the five people we spend the most time with. What does that mean in the context of content marketing? It means that if your content is attractive, fun, and easily understood, it’s more likely that your customers will share it with their friends or followers. This act of sharing increases your reach to others also likely in or near your target demographic. While there’s no exact formula for what makes content shareable, it should touch on two or more of these standards:

Attractive
Easily Understood
Entertaining
Fun
Inspiring
Useful

Sharing increases your campaign’s strength and reach, which increases your return on investment. It also shows that you’re in tune with your target market.

When planning out your next content marketing campaign, remember to keep it relevant, valuable, shareable. We’re here to help!

A knowledge base is a collection of data that is useful to your customers. It can include things like: a glossary of terms, walkthroughs, instructional manuals, brochures, a community forum, and much more. It specifically aims to educate people on why what you’re selling is superior to your competitor’s.

Who Needs a Knowledge Base

Whether your site needs a knowledge library depends on what your site is meant to do for your audience. If you are frequently using industry-specific vernacular (commonly known as “lingo” or “jargon”), a glossary or dictionary on your site could prove useful to your customers. Chances are that they are not going to be familiar with the terms your industry uses. In addition to providing basic information, you present your company as a subject matter expert.

For example, I once heard Matt ask a customer who called him about a car project: “Do you know what your AFRs are?” The customer stuttered, and then said, “Uhm. What’s an AFR?”

If you don’t define terms for your audience, it’s likely you’ll lose them. Why? Because most people are uncomfortable being expected to know terminology they’ve never used and aren’t familiar with. Having a glossary available to them makes your company approachable, your website friendly, builds authority, demonstrates expertise, and helps your customer save face.

Can’t I Just Blog Instead?

Not really. A knowledge base is a separate portion of your website. Your blog is a type of knowledge base, because you’re presenting information to your audience that is (hopefully) useful to them. A separate library of information however, is a curated collection that is more like a manual or reference guide, primarily because it does not appear in chronological order.

What Will a Knowledge Base Do to my Website’s SEO?

When done correctly, a knowledge base will increase your SEO by leaps and bounds. First, it will increase the number of pages present on your website. Content is king when it comes to SEO—and quality matters. What else can a knowledge base do for your SEO?

It gives you the opportunity to increase the internal links on your website. In some cases, it may also allow you to create some external links.
It builds brand authority, which turns into trust and loyalty from your customers, making them more likely to buy from you.
It gives you more searchable content, making your audience want to stay longer and engage more.
It puts keywords together in ways that make search engines recognize their relevance in searches.

In brief, we recommend that our clients include a knowledge base if they frequently rely on industry-specific language or abbreviations. As always, if you have questions or would like to discuss creating a information database for your site, we’d love to chat with you about it!

See more information about knowledge base statistics here: 15 Knowledge base statistics for 2020