One can bet that ‘content is king’ is one of the most popular sayings related to digital marketing that ever existed. Today, all businesses know how important it is to have a voice online through creating content. What we suffer from in the scene now is not the lack of content, but the lack of content that matters. Differentiating your content, producing relevant content, content that has substance is the real challenge. Because the digital world moves so fast, it’s sometimes hard to keep up and that’s why many small and medium sized businesses fall behind.
We love to empower our local business community with knowledge to be able to manage their own content strategy, or at least, know enough to discuss it comfortably with a third party. In this article, we tackle what content marketing means and some types of content that suit different businesses and industries.
Are You Looking for ‘Content Marketing Ballymena’?
ProfileTree – Expert Content Marketers and Video Producers with a Local Flavour Serving Businesses in Ballymena, County Antrim, Northern Ireland
We are a self-made, family run agency based in Belfast and Monaghan. We’ve established ourselves in the Northern Irish market since 2010. We’ve grown the team, collected content marketing awards, and helped local and international businesses with building top-notch websites. We’ve also helped hundreds of small and medium sized businesses with free content marketing training through programmes funded by Northern Ireland’s Councils over the course of three years. Investing in building a content marketing strategy for your business in Ballymena means making sure your new partnership is built on proven methods. Our multi-talented experts can deliver on all aspects of content marketing from blogs to social media content to video production and webinars.
Content Marketing Ballymena: Creating Valuable Content
Valuable, or differentiated content is content that you spend time and effort developing it. That’s why we always advise businesses to focus on quality rather than quantity. If you can produce high quality content daily, then sure enough, go for it. However, what we often see is that businesses focus on sending out more and more content, without focusing on substance. Not only should you spend time writing or designing the content, but you also need to dedicate time to researching and studying your target audience and other competitors. Many companies create content that is ‘out of context’. It is not low quality, and it is not poorly written – but it relates neither to the audience nor to the market.
Content Marketing Ballymena: Types of Content
Content comes in so many shapes and sizes. By now, it has been established that some formats are more suitable for specific industries, and it varies according to the industry standards and the online behaviour of your audience. Let’s get to know some of those formats and how you can make the best out of them. We’ve tackled some content formats in two previous articles. One of them tackled blogging, video content, and podcasting. The other one explained infographics and email marketing.
Content Marketing Ballymena Type #6: Social Media Content
Content Marketing Ballymena: Local Businesses on Social Media Platforms
Social media content is perhaps the most popular form of content. It is true that social media platforms have given brands and businesses enormous potential by providing them with the tools to establish a voice and have instantaneous two way conversations with the customer. That potential was increased when most social media platforms announced that they will give more visibility to local businesses. Local businesses are more likely to convert, that’s why they’re promoted by the platforms.
Content Marketing Ballymena: Social Media User Behaviour
That being said, it is tricky to create content for social media. The nature of social media is quite different than say, search engines, websites, or email marketing. That’s because the content that brands publish on social media channels is interruptive, whether it is organic or paid posts. People are not on social media platforms to essentially buy something. They may buy something they stumble upon, but you don’t scroll your homepage looking to purchase something. You’re most likely scrolling to see posts or memes that your friends share, watch your favorite bloggers, or get inspired for your next trip.
Content Marketing Ballymena: Strategic Social Media Content
To achieve a remarkable presence on social media, you need to build conversations. Conversations are not built through ‘salesy’ or ‘pushy’ content. Straight up sales posts might get you sales. But they will be one-off sales. You haven’t invested into building a relationship with your audience, so don’t expect that they will go beyond that. We’ve seen cases where customers would make a purchase from Facebook pages, but they wouldn’t even care enough to follow them. These companies would come to us saying that they struggle to acquire new customers. Meanwhile, the real treasure is not in acquiring new ones, but rather building a relationship with those that do business with you.
Content Marketing Ballymena: Creating Content for Social Media Channels
Your content on social media should entertain, inspire, and engage. You wouldn’t eliminate sales posts altogether, but they shouldn’t make up more than 10 to 20 percent of your social content. Here are some ideas for social media posts that you can incorporate into your content and tweak accordingly:
- Ask questions. Fill in the blank questions or polls, it doesn’t matter. Questions are engaging
- Quotes
- Contests
- Share an achievement
- Share blog posts from your website
- Funny posts
- Team updates
- Interesting industry Statistics and insights
- Product videos
- Share customer reviews
- Infographics
- Tips and Tricks
- Post challenges and encourage users to produce their own content
- Share an offer
- Answer an FAQ question
- Post a case study
Content Marketing Ballymena Type #7: Webinars
Content Marketing Ballymena: Webinars Explained
A webinar is a presentation, lecture, workshop or seminar that is transmitted through the web using some type of video conferencing software. A key feature of a webinar is its interactive elements, as it possesses the ability to give, receive and analyse information in real time. Through the webinar software, participants can share audio, documents and applications with attendees, this being very useful when the webinar host is holding a conference or an information session. Webinars are powerful content marketing tools because they are interactive, and people register to them with the willingness to listen, learn, and interact. This is a content marketer’s holy grail.
Content Marketing Ballymena: Who Can Use Webinars
Webinars are suitable for B2B businesses and services that require a lot of explanation and training so that users can fully utilise them. That’s why software service products particularly find webinars beneficial. But that doesn’t mean that other businesses can’t make use of them. Educational businesses can offer a lot of value through webinars. As a digital marketing agency, we have employed webinars multiple times to talk about digital marketing and educate businesses on the best practices. Entrepreneurs use webinars to raise awareness about new product innovations. In fact, if you want to interact with your community about their topics of interest, regardless of what it is, webinars are great tools to build a community.
Content Marketing Ballymena: How to Get Your Audience Interested in a Webinar
There’re many ways through which you can promote for a webinar. Since webinars are personal and interactive, it is recommended that you invite people personally. However, you can still announce it on your social media channels or reach out to the audience through an email. An underestimated tool is to mention it to any customer who enquires about your product or service. For instance, someone asking an FAQ about your product, you may reply to them sufficiently and then send them a link to a webinar so they can listen to the in-depth details to find the best answer to their questions.
Content Marketing Ballymena Type #8: Presentations
Content Marketing Ballymena: Presentations Explained
Not those long business presentations with seventy-five slides. That would have to be an e-book, and that’s a different story. What we’re discussing now is those mini, bite-size presentations with five to seven slides maximum and a strong Call To Action at the end. Although you’d need a designer to create presentable presentations, it doesn’t take much time to produce those presentations. So, even if you don’t have an in-house designer, you can hire a project based freelancer – it doesn’t cost much as you will pay them per hour. Alternatively, you can use Canva to create a presentation with a design that stands out.
Multi-purpose Content
What’s unique about those slides is that they’re multi-purpose. You can put them into a PDF and upload them to your website. You can use a slide or two for a social media post. You can send out the presentation through an email. It’s a unique way to deliver information, in slightly more detail – but not the sort of detail that would require your readers to spend an hour reading. A presentation shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes tops to go through.
Who Should Use Presentations
Although it’s usually B2B businesses that take advantage of mini presentations, B2C businesses shouldn’t be scared to try them. A presentation for a B2B or a product based company is essentially a product catalogue where you get to tell a story about your products. Catalogues are not out of fashion, trust us. Just think how IKEA’s catalogue is still a huge success and a trademark. Catalogues still deliver, but you need to make them worthy, engaging, and visually pleasing
Content Marketing Ballymena: How to Approach Your Content Marketing Strategy
For content marketing in Ballymena, we’re proud to do things our own way. That’s because we not only use knowledge we’ve built up and tested over many years in our own business, but we also apply expertise in SEO, web development, video marketing, social media marketing, and much more. All in effort to produce a tailored, results-driven strategy for your digital business.
Northern Irish companies often ask us to step in to take their digital or content marketing to a ‘professional’ level. When they’ve outgrown their initial digital efforts because the business has grown, and their digital presence needs to reflect this. Since, like us, you’re a local small or medium sized business, you’ll know that every investment needs a good reason, a clear view of the right outcomes needed and the right strategy to make it worthwhile. Unfortunately, some of these factors are often ignored. That’s why, instead of jumping off straight to solutions, we’ll press ‘pause’ and take a little time to make sure your content is on a firmer footing.
Content Marketing Ballymena: Questions A Business Should Ask Before Starting on a Content Project
Content Marketing Ballymena: Find Out ‘The Why’
A small word but a big question. Why is the content being created? Why should the audience react (e.g., click through from Google search)? Why should they react to your ‘Call To Action’ on your website page? Why should they continue to keep in touch through your email marketing or social channels?
A critical look at your content process puts you in the customer’s shoes. From the initial audience research to their first discovery and their initial reaction, to their steps on a customer journey – all are integrated, all part of the user experience. A business should constantly ask ‘why’ the customer would react in the way it is hoped and, most of all, examine if the customer is being responsive in the way THEY would want to behave or in the way the business would want the customer to behave. If your customers are accommodating to you, it’s only a matter of time before they replace you with another company.
One of the keys to success lies in that subtle difference.
Content Marketing Ballymena: Find Out ‘The How’
Again, simple but very powerful. How does the customer convert from your landing page? How do they convert if they aren’t ready to buy…yet? How do they promote your business to others? Examining the customer journey and asking ‘how’ the customer moves from stage to stage, bearing in mind different customers will behave in different ways and should have options, can make sure potential buyers have the things they need when they need them.
Content Marketing Ballymena: What Does Success Look Like?
It can be tempting to see success as people reached, reactions, or other similar metrics. But ultimately, measuring the number of customers who have moved along the path you need to support your business and marketing goals forms the ideal measurement of your investment. You may want to promote more test drives, you may want to invite prospects to an information evening, or you may want to boost the numbers of an online community. Whatever the case may be, starting with your businesses needs and shaping your goals will mean a clear focus on how you want content marketing to work for you and how you’ll measure which elements have worked best and which to adapt.
Content Marketing Ballymena: The Right Reasons
If you’ll run a business, you’ll know that ‘being seen’ doesn’t fill any cash registers in its own right. However, reaching the right people and using useful content to draw them towards your business does. Knowing how you want your audience to react, and how you’ll turn this into a sales process, is key. After all, time and effort spent online can be a wasted opportunity without the right content delivered in the right way for the right reasons. We’ll show you how.
Content Marketing Ballymena: The Right Channels
Talking to your audience in the most appropriate places might seem a basic tip, but businesses will often invest time and money in their ‘comfort zone’ platforms. Instead of attempting to make your potential customers change their habits, go where they want to be found and start having real conversations. ProfileTree can help shape your online presence around sound research and a focus on performance.
Content Marketing Ballymena: The Right Audience
Some good news? Content can be shaped to speak WITH – not to – very select groups of people. Knowing your segments means talking to the perfect audience for your particular product or service. Not sure how? ProfileTree can design a content strategy build around results for your business. How do we do this? By using the methods tested in our own business, and local businesses like yours, to drive results. We always test all our content marketing tactics on our own internal brands first: Connolly Cove, Learning Mole, Amazing Food and Drink, Amazing Cars and Drives.
Content Marketing Ballymena: The Right Responses
Attracting traffic to your content is only half an achievement. Why? Planning how you want your audience to respond is the next part of the content process. Want more sales enquiries? Event attendees? Content can help target customers to convert once they are ready, and to stay in touch in the meantime. So, instead of hoping your online activity achieves the results, content can shape both your traffic and how those potential buyers behave online.
Content Marketing Ballymena: How Much Does Content Marketing Cost
Working with so many different businesses over the years taught us to work with different budgets and requirements. We have created multiple packages for each of digital marketing services. Of course, every content marketing project has its own requirements but generally, we use your requirements and budget to come up with a suitable content marketing solution. And we hardly ever give our clients one solution – we usually give them multiple to choose from. In other words, you set the requirements, we tailor a package within the limits of your spending. Our content marketing packages start at £450 for one month’s content.
Content Marketing Ballymena: Ready to Book a Free Content Marketing Audit?
A content marketing audit is where one of our expert team members go through your digital marketing channels such as social media pages, website, or email marketing and analyse the content to give you a brief report of your brand’s digital well-being and how you can utilise content marketing to your advantage. Fill the form and send us your questions, we will be happy to answer all of them. Please let us know if your business is registered in Ballymena, County Antrim. Alternatively, you can book a chat with one of our team members to audit your content for free and find out how we can help you establish a strong content marketing strategy in Ballymena, County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
More services: Social Media Marketing Ballymena, SEO Ballymena, Digital Training Ballymena, Digital Marketing Ballymena
