10 Effective Corporate Content Strategies For Your Business
Whether you are a small-time business owner or a flagship company catering to many clienteles, there is room to improve on creating content in a company. When a client decides upon which companies to support, regarding their wants and needs, you as a business owner are essentially forming an ongoing loyal customer relationship. Creating relationships with your clients can be time-consuming when you’re running the whole show and still trying to figure out which best algorithm will work when it comes to creating a successful corporate content strategy for your business.
What is corporate content?
The content within a business can be seen as a “food web,” where each type of content strategy contributes to the overall bigger picture of marketing and increasing your client base. As much as you want to see those sales figures rise annually by a certain percentage, it’s not all about you. It’s about finding the opportunity to create content tailored to the interests and greater good of your cliental base. B2B marketers mention how at least 50%, if not more, of the content they produce is for the interest of their audiences. You should want to build an overall trust with your clients, taking short-term leads and turning them into long-term growth.
Define your niche before creating content for your business
Every business has a specific audience that they target. Jumping on the bandwagon of creating content strategies that will increase your flow of virtual online traffic means that you will need to tap into providing valuable and consistent information to your specific audience.
What issue are you covering or solving? The more tailored and knowledgeable one is regarding their business’s niche(s), the closer it brings them to their audience in providing useful and practical information that creates value and an interest in wanting to return to your company’s site.
Creating content in today’s world is competitive in itself, which is why finding a specific niche, or more than one of them, is important in reaching the audience necessary to improve the number of people you are reaching. Creating a more specialized route to follow helps in finding the best content strategies for your business.
Now that you know what niche you are aiming to focus on, here are 10 effective corporate content marketing strategies to look into when building your audience and creating a good relationship with them.
10 effective corporate content marketing strategies
1. Blog posts
Having been around since the 90s, there is a reason why many blogging is referred to as not only the king but the kingdom of content creation. Besides the importance of generating website traffic and promoting your goods or services, it is the key element in putting a face to the voice of your company, essentially building trust with potential customers.
Your website offers what you are selling, whereas blog posts offer a why you are selling it and are a way to keep your clientele up-to-date on the latest news regarding your business’s whereabouts. Generating more published blogs relating to customer-relevant information increases your chances of being discovered by ranking higher on the search engine results page. This brings in new visitors. Blogs generate 97% more inbound links than websites without them, resulting in a higher long-term return on investment (ROI).
2. SEO content and optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does exactly that, it optimizes the search results based on accurate information regarding an answer to a question your audience is looking for. When generating new leads, optimizing your blog posts can be a helpful way to make your business more visible in the virtual and real world. This involves, but is not limited to, utilizing certain keywords as well as the session time a user spends on your page. Much like how this long-form blog post may take 10 to 15 minutes to read, increasing your session time and providing key information for creating content for your business.
3. Video content
How does your audience best retain and focus on new information that’s readily available to them? Many people are intrigued by finding relevant information about a business in a blog post, however, audiovisual learners, as opposed to just visual or written, find video content very convenient and easier to digest. Many social media platforms such as LinkedIn and blog posts are starting, if they have not already done so, to implement video engagement with their audiences as this also contributes to longer session times spent on a business’s page. YouTube is one of the oldest and still most relevant video platforms reaching a wide span of different audiences, with TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn following in the footsteps of video content strategies for business growth.
4. Podcasts
With over 115 million listeners in the U.S. as of 2021, podcasts are still on the rise. Podcasts can become an effective platform to channel smaller clips or key takeaways into social media posts, blogs, or email marketing. Audiences enjoy the snippets or funny bloopers behind the audio and video of podcasts. Some people simply enjoy putting podcasts on in the background when running their daily errands, when going for a long walk or whilst they are busy working. They can also be useful by transforming podcast episodes into SEO- optimized blog posts, driving even more traffic.
5. Email marketing and gated content
A new member of your audience has come across your website or blog post and has engaged with the content that describes what your company is all about. Now what? What measurable action is provided in turning that short-term lead into a recurring visitor? Well, email marketing can be a suitable way to say “Hey, now that you’re here, why don’t you sign up and get a free guide emailed to you on how to optimize your corporate content strategy.” This is known as gated content. By signing up to an email listing, you gain access to an extra piece of information that wouldn’t otherwise be available to you, had you not signed up. This is also extremely helpful in continuing leads and withholding the current flow of traffic to your website.
6. Third-party mentions
Third-party mentioning involves exactly that; another company may be mentioned in a post of yours that resonates with a similar target audience that you both are trying to reach. You can strategically link other blogs or articles within your content that it is not from your website to increase accuracy and relevant information available to your users, ultimately ringing that trust bell again.
7. Backlinking and building up internal links to previous posts
Most effective content strategies for your business are aimed at increasing traffic to your site. A backlink is when you are featured in another company or person’s blog post, creating a link for the audience to click on and view your website concerning the content they are in search for. Another way in which this can be helpful is by referring to a previously published post and creating an internal link to refer back to. Google counts these as votes towards your site traffic. The more the votes and optimization in others and your own posts, the higher you will rank in the search results, ultimately increasing traffic.
8. Investigate your competitors’ corporate content strategies
Don’t scrap all efforts that have already been made in finding the right strategies for reaching people, build onto existing content foundations. Perhaps you already have a LinkedIn page for your company, or you and your team have the podcast up and running but it is generating as much traffic as you had hoped for or within the timeframe you had given it to curate. Looking into a competitor’s content and what they have to offer to a similar audience can help shed some light on your business approach and hopefully stay one step ahead of the ballgame.
There are many successful businesses that have done a great job in being at the forefront of their industries, but that doesn’t go without saying that they haven’t had competition with regards to other well-established brand.
9. Social media
Social media, the prime suspect, can educate, inform, entertain and inspire audiences, where all of the above outcomes may be possible in just one app. Take TikTok for example, one of the fastest growing and most used social media platforms as of 2022. Why? Because it is relatable and more “real” in the eyes of audiences that come across these short-clipped engaging audiovisuals. That’s not saying you should now hop onto TikTok and start filming, but the principles behind what makes the content more relatable is more what it is aimed at.
The beauty of social media is the cross-platform opportunities. LinkedIn has become the corporate Facebook. Business owners can link or outsource other social media platforms to build and reinforce brand awareness and relationships with both individuals and businesses. Killing two birds with one stone really.
10. E-A-T Evaluation
What’s that? Another type of algorithm Google uses for the training of a good quality search engine? Well, there are many of them, however, the Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) of your website are what will ultimately build those relationships and rank accordingly in comparison to other websites. Google ranks both quality of information as well as the quality of the creator of the content. Both high-quality content and creator are needed when Google rates a page according to the E-A-T algorithm.
Expertise looks at what credentials both your business and authors have to offer regarding a specific field or subject. Authority looks at the quality of the content that the author is producing and how external sources might rate the content. A company wouldn’t be authoritative if they were to advertise on a company’s page that is tailored to a completely different line of product or service. A website and a content creator can both offer trustworthiness by whether they have many citations under other high-quality websites. High-quality websites would include all the bells and whistles, such as an “about us” page or the reassuring fact of buying goods on a secured site that protects the confidentiality of the users’ data. This is secured with the HTTPS – Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure – encryption in the URL of a website link.
Which corporate content strategy is right for your audience?
You will never know from the get-go which content strategy will work 100% for your business. It’s referred to as a strategy for a reason, and it takes time to develop and analyze the results. The right strategy isn’t always a fixed, one-size-fits-all approach that you may follow to guarantee an influx of traffic. It may be a combination of many different platforms that then create useful content to address your reader’s needs and the information they are in search for, ultimately building a solid relationship with them.
Which approaches and app platforms are going to help tell your story? Are you looking to create quick helpful tips and how-to guides that could benefit your company’s LinkedIn profile? Bring your businesses personality to the table in order for your audience to relate directly to you. The type of content you and your team decide to put out for the world to see will determine which route to take when deciding on which platform to publish and it may be a combination thereof. In saying this, don’t attempt to cover too much. Stick to focusing on the few good things your company is known for.
A strategy wouldn’t be a strategy without research, just like how this article wouldn’t be providing you with any useful information if there was no food for thought behind finding the ultimate corporate content strategy to help reach your audience.
