Whether you’re a freelance writer or a freelance marketer, you likely deal with a lot of content. After all, what’s the cliché saying — content is king? Hyperbole aside, content has become a critical factor of any digital marketing strategy.
If your business focuses on providing quality, search engine optimized content for your clients, here are a few of the best practices that you’ll want to keep in mind.
Always Put Humans Before Technology
Humans before technology — it’s true for your business interactions and the content that you create. With the latter, in particular, you should always prioritize the reader over search engine optimization. If a search engine displays a client’s content but it doesn’t resonate with the reader, it will ultimately undermine all of your content marketing efforts.
Always aim at your audience and create content that resonates with them, speaks to their pain points, and offers valuable information and solutions. This is one of the keys to a successful content marketing strategy.
Know Your Stuff — and Your Terminology
If you want to impress a client with your content marketing abilities, you need to demonstrate more than a basic grasp of either marketing or content. Prove a thorough knowledge of content marketing as its own niche within the larger digital marketing world.
For instance, as you interact with clients, don’t be afraid to explain that your services are specifically aimed at strategically creating, producing, and distributing content that is tailored towards their defined target audience. Furthermore, elaborate that this content can be educational or persuasive, but either way, the goal is to provide quality content for a reader that directs them toward a potential monetary gain for your client.
In other words, make sure to differentiate your knowledge of content marketing as a strategy in order to show the value of your skills for potential clients.
Be Organized and Comprehensive
Genuine content marketing takes incredible investment, preparation, and knowledge. As such, you must come across to your clients as both organized and comprehensive as you create content for them.
For instance, rather than simply picking keywords and writing articles to beef up a client’s blog, sit down and discuss what kind of content they’re lacking in their content marketing funnel.
- If they need more traffic, they may need videos, podcasts, and articles to attract visitors to their site.
- If they’re looking to educate visitors, they may want more elaborate whitepapers or case studies.
- If they’re failing to convert visitors into sales, they might need to create testimonials or even a demo.
Approaching the problem in an organized, comprehensive manner makes you a premier solution for the client’s content needs. By working with them to provide the best content possible, you set yourself apart from writers and marketers that simply focus on a broad, generic scatter-shot content.
Stay Up to Date
Finally, remember that the digital marketing world is always in a state of development. What works today may be dated tomorrow. As such, always strive to find time to research, take classes and tutorials, and generally stay up to date on your content marketing knowledge.
This isn’t just so that your work remains top-notch (although that’s certainly important). It also provides you with a marketing advantage, as you can then promote yourself to prospective clients as a content marketer with elite, cutting-edge industry knowledge.
Finding Success as a Content Marketer
If you’re a content marketer, you’re certainly in a hot market. However, that also means you’re up against a lot of competition. As such, it’s important to study and adhere to your industry’s best practices whenever possible.
By staying up to date, maintaining organization, being both comprehensive and knowledgeable, and prioritizing human readers over search engines, you can become an elite option that outshines your competitors at every turn.
