A Strategy Guide for Content Marketing

"The right message at the right moment to the right customer."

Content marketing in Germany

We start our content marketing in a very meta fashion. We needed to research this anyway, and we figured chances are you will need this guideline somewhere in the future. So we are not making a lazy article, we are working smart!

Around 2.72M blog posts are published every day. It is easy to get lost in this ocean of content. The following bullet points are basic dos and don'ts in content marketing strategy, which should always be remembered.

Personal tone

You want to connect with our customers on an emotional level.

Specify your audience

Always keep an ideal reader in mind and write for her/him.

Find a niche

The tone of your articles, the subject, how you encounter your topic, etc. should be different from the rest.

Plan your publishing

It is essential to post regularly (every week, months, etc.) and maybe get a theme or a series going.

Be consistent with your style

The reader should recognize that it is your article, even without seeing your label.

Never forget your business goal

You want to sell products.

Write about the interest of your readers

How many articles can you write about ecology coffee mugs? Not many. So write about things people who buy this kind of product find interesting.

Structure of a blog post

Most users read-only around 60% of your article, therefore the headline and hero image are the most important parts of any blog post. This also means that the content of the article must be clear from the start! For this reason, most keywords should be at the beginning of the text. This will make it easy for humans and search engines to "scan" the article.

Not only the beginning but also the end of a text is crucial for the reader. To engage him even more, you could change the structure of the blog post. For example, start with a (controversial) thesis to get your reader hooked.

But no matter what you write, here are some tips to increase your reach!

• Write meaningful alt - text

• Bulleted lists and highlighted keywords are an excellent way to help the customer to navigate the text

• Short sentences and short paragraphs, help the customer to stay focused

• Combining Visual elements with Lists is a good way to increase your range

• Put a visual element every 75 – 100 words to increase your shares by 100% (this is only a rough assessment, it is more important that the visual element is fitting)

• Visual elements can be everything, from videos to highlighting relevant text with quotes, GIFs, memes, stock photos, and free design tools

Sharing rates for visual / text interaction

When to post on social media?

Probably one of the most important questions for any blog post is the question of when to post on social media. This question is challenging since there are be some slide differences depending on your audience and your niche – so you should check sites like Fanpage Karma and Facebook Analytics. But generally, the following times are an excellent start.

Weekend

Between 12 pm and 1 pm (but overall lower engagement, compared to the workweek)

Work week

Between 12 pm and 3 pm (1 pm – most shares / 3 pm – most clicks)

• Thursday and Friday are the best Days.

The fewer people want to be at work, the more they are on social media

How to promote the blog post

There are a lot of ways to promote your content, and listing them all would take ages. But here are some ideas.

• Be active in fitting Facebook groups / blogs and forums - answer questions and give a link back to your article, for more in-depth advice

• If possible, submit your blog post to other sites

• Posting with a question or exclamation marks gets more interaction: 23% for questions and 300% exclamation

• 100% more shares if the Facebook text is more than 80 words long

• More interaction when the Facebook post has a picture (the figures are very significant. At least 37% maybe even 150%) and even more if it's a video

• Rework an old article as an info graphic is excellent for Instagram

Further sources

• Becker, Braden. Image Alt Text: What It Is, How to Write It, and Why It Matters to SEO: blog.hubspot.com/marketing/image-alt-text

• Fanpage Karma - fanpagekarma.com/start

• Giphy - giphy.com/

• Imgflip - imgflip.com/memegenerator

• Pinantoan, Andrianes. How To Massively Boost Your Blog Traffic With These 5 Awesome Image Stats: buzzsumo.com/blog/how-to-massively-boost-your-blog-traffic-with-these-5-awesome-image-stats/

• Schreiber, Tucker. 22 Amazing Websites with Stunning Free Stock Images: shopify.com/blog/17156388-22-awesome-websites-with-stunning-free-stock-images