Content Marketing Services

Content Marketing Services

Content marketing services are becoming a valuable asset that all businesses of any industry are investing in. It involves curating written content, implementing internal and external links, as well as optimizing images and videos. Coupled with making your website stunning for all kinds of devices, your visitors will find your web page and website much more engaging and easy to use. Content marketing services are a crucial component in SEO and make up a significant amount of traffic for businesses. Content marketing has multiple functions in your interactions with your target group and make an impact on how your company is perceived - content marketing is part of the SEO strategy, yes, but it's also so much more than that.

What Is Content Marketing?

By investing in great content marketing services, you can start ranking your site organically on search engines! Content marketing encompasses a lot of different aspects. It's the photos, videos, words, and the audio. Before the online boom, content marketing took only the form of television ads, radio, and print. These forms of media aren't irrelevant but the world is moving fast and it's an online world -  your content marketing encompasses everything you create and put online to tell your story.

The Internet has revolutionized how businesses market to their audience. Regardless of what people are looking for, they go to the internet. They go to a search engine and type in a question. You want to reach them in the results. By having good content, you differentiate yourself from the competition and establish trust with your target market. Content marketing has become a hot topic amongst businesses as new discoveries on the power of content marketing are being found constantly. What better way to interact with your target market than to speak directly to them through your content?

While content marketing services have been around for many, many years, the tools have changed and altered so businesses of any size can compete against the seasoned veterans. Nowadays, a great starting point is starting with a blog. At Digital Shift, we offer a blog writing service that will get your business introduced in the online community. As every age demographic has access to the Internet in some form or another, you must be aware of what roles and responsibilities you have to your readers or viewers. Digital Shift can help to get you familiarized with best marketing practices and will let you know who you need on your team to reach your exact goals. Let us help you revolutionize your business into something bigger and better!

Our Content Marketing Services Strategies And Success

Content marketing services are a combination of a lot of different efforts. Sometimes it's about building awareness, building buzz, or directly making money. Regardless of how you are defining your goal, you must know how you're going to measure success. It can simply be calculated by increasing your number of subscribers by 100 or getting 100 views to your video. Defining your success with tangible numbers will ensure that you know where you stand with your goals. If you have not clearly defined your goals, you will be missing out on valuable insights in terms of what you're doing right and what might need improvements.

There is no definitive procedure to measure success as different companies can do different things. A simple method is to implement Google Analytics to your site to track numbers and goal conversions. Regardless of how you measure your success, evaluate your efforts. When evaluating, focus on the good and the bad.

Everyone wants to talk about the great things, but if you ignore discussing what didn't work, you will not improve. Perhaps you will discover that your marketing strategy is not working. You might realize that audio didn't reach your consumers the way you had hoped. So maybe you'll shift to a video option that communicates with your target market much better. Constant revisions will lead your content marketing strategy to success. Essentially, this continuous improvement works in a cycle to better your marketing strategy and reach new users.

Define Your Company Culture

A company culture involves describing the values, attitudes, norms, and habits that define how an organization acts and interacts. Your company culture defines who you and your employees are and plays a crucial role in portraying your company voice. This voice will be reflected in all pieces of content you or your employees create which will be shared with your audience. Keep in mind to avoid copying another company's tactics. For example, larger companies have the ability to perform real-time marketing. While that has increased in popularity over the years, if you do not have the budget or the staff to do real-time marketing, don't do it. Most importantly, don't do it if it does not fit your company culture.

The voice in which your content is written has to align with the way you interact (or would like to interact) with your audience. This is directly linked with your company's culture. Maybe you're a contemporary, edgy business with a youthful target market. Perhaps your content can be playful and even a little daring. Perhaps you own a very professional business that caters to all community members. Your content style might benefit from writing, images and videos that are conservative and reflect your sophistication. But whatever you choose, ensure that your voice stays true to your values and persona as a company. At Digital Shift we're able to help you figure out how to interact with your audience so that you reflect your business' most authentic self. We know from experience that when you blend your company culture with a unique voice, you will find success.

Communication

Businesses often overlook the importance of communication in a content marketing service or blog writing service. A common thing businesses seem to do is to immediately integrate the latest, hottest, and the most exciting things to their marketing efforts. While that works sometimes, you must integrate across the board. Essentially, this latest and greatest thing gives your content spice but isn't necessarily the bread and butter.

How you properly integrate content across different platforms is to have good communication with your team. In a small company, it's not so difficult. However, with larger companies, it's important not to have silos, where you have one department doing your online marketing and the other doing print without knowing the foundation of how you have chosen to effectively communicate with your target market.

The biggest mistake we come across with companies is inconsistency in voice. Your audience has come to know you, your persona, your values in a certain way. If they feel that this changes depending on which department they come into contact with or which content of yours they view, they'll become confused. You'll be missing out on the relationship you could have been fostering with your customer because they no longer see you as an authority on your topic and sense that there is confusion within your own brand. Another reason that consistency is valuable is that your audience is not concerned with your departments or who was responsible for what role. They are concerned with how good the content is and will share it if they find it engaging and meaningful. Break down those walls to act as one company and your combined efforts will be generously rewarded.

Plan In Advance

Content marketing is about planning weeks and perhaps even months in advance. Think about magazine companies. Writers are not sitting down and deciding what to write about the week before it's scheduled for publication. They are planning weeks, months, and seasons in advance. With content marketing, plan for the next three months. Think what you could cover. You may have a big product or event launch coming up, which you will want to tease for it in the previous months. Before its release, you can put out photos, videos, or a snippet of the product description. On your social media channels, you can create tweets, Facebook status updates, or post a demo photograph on your Instagram or Pinterest. After its release, you're going to create much more content.

Choosing Proper Platforms And Tools

The success of our content marketing services comes from choosing the most effective platforms and tools. There are already ample networks available, and there are new ones being introduced all the time. There are a few of them that you need to have a good, solid foundation on to establish a credible online footprint. In addition to the obvious - having a website - there are other social media that you not only have to have, but should also be active on regularly.

Facebook is the biggest social network out there and will not be going away anytime soon. With Facebook, you are guaranteed significant numbers in your audience pool regardless of what your business is. Make sure that your business page is tagged correctly, is being indexed the right way, and keep adding to it. Another almost equally important platform for your business is Twitter. Twitter is growing in popularity, and chances are that many of your potential customers are already searching and discussing your products or service on there.

While photography may not play a big part in your marketing strategy, it should not be ignored. By having a presence on Instagram, it makes it easy for your customers to tag you in photos with your products. Google+ may not be a highly discussed social platform, but it is owned by Google. This means that the "plus ones" you receive are shared out there and get fed into Google search results along with customer comments. Also, to simply have an account on there is good for SEO purposes. It makes you more credible to Google when it comes to searches. Keep in mind that all social media platforms are essentially "rented land". Someone else is controlling their functions and options. This is why they serve as the foundation to driving traffic to your site where you have complete control.

Have a Blog!

While content marketing services can be difficult and frustrating, one of its great highlights is its easy starting point. At Digital Shift, we have a blog writing service great for small businesses. Creating a blog is one of the easiest and a critical part of your content marketing efforts. Blogs have transformed from diary web journals to powerful content management systems. So, by having a great blog writing service, you can get leads faster! Nowadays, entire websites can be powered strictly by a great blogging software. A wonderful thing about having a blog is its ability to house many forms of your content. Whether it's video, audio, pictures, or written word, it can all go on your blog.

If you are a smaller company, any of the blogging software can easily set up and build a website for you almost instantly. A recommended blogging software is WordPress. It's simple, yet powerful. It's been around for many years and there are always new themes and plug-in additions that will help your website look more professional. WordPress is free and you can quickly customize great themes without hiring a designer. Essentially, WordPress can save you a lot of time.

However, if you're a larger company, it is best to get your IT team on board. They are the knowledgeable ones and may already have the appropriate software for the job. Also, they may already have people that can support you. Regardless of what platform you create your blog or website on, share all of your content on it. It will build traffic and that audience will find your products, services, and all of your content in one spot which makes it easier to access.

Benefits Of Our Content Marketing Services

Digital Shift is always creating fresh content for our clients and for ourselves. Our team is a group of great communicators who are content creator specialists! We curate content according to relevant and beneficial keywords and plan your content accordingly. Regardless if it's photos, word, videos, or audio our content marketing services are monitored and created by our specialists to optimize your website for search engines. In essence, our content marketing services will benefit your business in the following ways:

• Our trained and professional team will ensure to play to your company's strengths when creating content
• We'll tailor content to each social media platform
• You'll establish authority (in terms of online searches, Google will view you as an authority on your topic and drive searchers to you)
• Our team is well organized and your content will be too!
• You will build trust with your target market through your credible and professional online content.

We understand that if you've just begun blogging, you won't be getting hundreds of comments or views. Your first video might not go viral. But you will always be a step closer to getting those comments and views by creating more. Our focus is to always be improving on your content through writing, video, images, and much more.  As our team is made up of individuals with strengths in different areas of content marketing services, we will ensure that your content is being created and monitored by a specific specialist. Digital Shift focuses on the following that help in your content creation.

Content Marketing As The Great Outdoors

If you're a small business just starting to invest in our content marketing services, understand that content marketing is like the great outdoors. When you build a fire, you need small sticks to start that spark. Then you start adding bigger wood, then logs to keep it burning. If you're promoting on Facebook and Twitter (which you should be), think of that as the small sticks. That's the content that will get you noticed, get your content nudged. The bigger wood is what will keep things burning. This includes content like your blog posts and photo essays. The logs you throw on is like the events you host, event videos, ebooks, or white papers.

A common mistake marketers often make is that they start throwing on the logs right at the get-go and assume that it will magically drive people to their campfire and be continuously coming back on a daily basis. The campfire feels like a community, and you're always trying to build the community feel by bringing people to your campfire to  consume what you create. If you're not giving them a reason to stay, there are a million of other campfires they can go to. Yours is not the only one.

Content is something that's going to keep going on and on, and you must keep creating on an ongoing basis to keep your readers engaged and entertained. By thinking like a publisher you are always thinking of what content you're going to create, so mix it up by creating little, medium, and big size pieces of content to keep your fire going.

Listening To Your Audience

Listening to your audience is a crucial component in our content marketing services package. Regardless of whether you're putting up a simple blog post, launching a new product, or putting up a new ebook, if you aren't listening to what your audience is saying, you are only doing half the work. There are many tools that have prices ranging from free to tens of thousands of dollars to help you listen to what people are saying. At a minimum, you can set up free searches on Twitter or free searches on Google.

However, listening is only half the battle. You also need to be responding. If a customer didn't have a great experience or wished a product had a specific feature and you fail to respond, why listen in the first place? While it is important to respond to meaningful negativity, don't ignore those who had a great experience. Even saying as little as a 'thank you!' will go a long way.

Nowadays, technology arms companies with the power to know what customers are saying and respond to their questions, concerns, or comments. By simply throwing content out there in hopes of getting a steady stream of traffic is wasting your efforts. Another part of listening is to pay attention what they are saying about the content itself. What are they reacting to positively or negatively? Maybe your target audience isn't into pictures or audio, so try a hand at video. Maybe they are really into your writing. Engage your audience with your content, listen to what they are saying, and respond to them. By not listening and responding, chances are you will miss out on something amazing.

We Implement Best Practices Into Your Plan

As content writing can sometimes be confusing and frustrating, it's always a good idea to be using resources to the best of your advantage. We implement our best practices into your plan. As such, Digital Shift's content marketing services have the following best practices that we implement to our clients' plan. By staying organized and keeping in contact with your content management team, you can rest assured that your attention remains where it needs to be.

Use An Editorial Calendar

Editorial calendars do not have to be as elaborate and complex as some people make them out to be. They can be as simple as a document or spreadsheet in Google Docs or excel respectively. A simple example of what companies can do with an editorial calendar is outlining on which days they will blog. You can even include what the titles of those blog posts will be, the topics that will be covered, and who is going to be responsible for what topic.

An editorial calendar can be as simple or complex as you want. For example, you can say that you're going to blog every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. However, you also want to make sure that someone on your team is engaging with your audience on Facebook every day. So you put a little note or symbol on your calendar from Mondays to Fridays. Twitter, you decided, also want to do every day. But because you want to post at least twice a day, you put double X's or something similar on your calendar. Now, you also want to have picture day every Friday. So you make a specific note for that.

While it is up to you how specific you want to get with your planning, keep in mind to also be responding to comments. If you are a larger organization, this can get as detailed to knowing exactly what you're going to say on Facebook or what you're going to tweet every single day. If you are a smaller business, just laying the foundations of what you're going to be discussing or posting throughout the course of the week is enough to put you at ease. You also have the option of writing all of these blog posts on Monday and scheduling them out throughout the week. An editorial calendar is a tool that helps you and your editor keep this in line.

Write For The Web

What does this mean? Regardless if you're writing captions for photos, Facebook posts, tweets, or scripts for your videos, they should be written in a way that works best for the web. Now while every company's chose voice can be a little different, if you want online engagement you'll have to speak conversationally, speak like you care, speak like a human. When you talk in your company's acronyms or buzz words, people outside your company won't know what you're referring to. The simple interaction with another human is what gets you and your customers' attention. There are messages telling us to "buy" being pushed online almost every minute of every day, and the nature of speaking to another person, by having a conversation, is what separates you from all that repetitive messaging.

No matter what platform you're using or what kind of content you are creating, it doesn't always need to have the underlying message of telling someone to buy. Something as simple as saying good morning, thank you, is there something that we can help you with, can go a long way. By responding to people asking a question, your customers will pay attention to you more than anyone else. You are the ones that they remember and will want to come back to. Like yourselves, your customers do not want to hear your company language but want to be treated like a human.

Use Imagery

Content is not restricted to written word. A crucial component of our content marketing services is to optimize quality images. Images are engaging and captivating. Everyone loves to look at images. So, regardless of what kind of content you're creating, when you insert a great image with your content it can be the icing on top of the cake. Whether it's a blog post, e-book or a video, you want people to share your content. Most platforms allow you to put a featured image or a thumbnail that goes with your content. And by doing so, you'll increase your visibility by a long shot.

As you scroll through your Facebook feed, you see pictures. Some will make you stop and click. That is what you want your image to do. With videos, people are usually clueless as to why they need an image because a video is essentially one big set of images. But before people click on your video, what is the first thing that they see? They see the little icon, the thumbnail that is associated to your video and often has a play icon. The smart video creator will choose an image from their video that will prompt viewers to click, and the smart Facebook ad creator will choose a high-quality image that will, again, prompt viewers to click.

Platforms like Instagram allow us to take snapshots and share them instantly. As simple as using a smartphone, you can take a picture of your store, the office, or everyday objects that you can morph into your own creation for engaging content. By taking something simple and adding your personal creative touch to it, you will not only make your business stand out but also be better recalled by your audience. Your images might not always look like they belong in National Geographic, and while that can be the quality to aspire to, if you're just starting out, do not shy away from taking your own photographs and posting them in creative and engaging ways.

Photography may not be one of your biggest strengths or a strength at all but do not disregard its importance in increasing your CTR and traffic. Start small, start simple, and the more you do it the more you will improve. At Digital Shift we can help you sort through the right images to appeal to your target consumers.

Video And Audio

Video and audio are also great content marketing services to invest in as there is something unique about video and audio. Again, humans are very visual creatures. It's true that getting in front of a camera can be awkward and scary but keep in mind that it doesn't have to be you. Flip the camera and film your customers, your employees, or your clients. You don't need to be investing in video production companies for your videos either. Smartphones nowadays are equipped with a full production that gives you nearly all the basics you need at your fingertips.

Now, you might not have any problems doing video but are hesitating because you're wondering if it's worth the effort or even investment. Are enough of my customers watching videos? Can video content be relevant to what my company does? YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. The platform is filled with "how to" content, and videos are more frequently being shown on Google Search Engines. Your potential customers are going to YouTube or Google and typing in their questions.

If you make a product, why not showcase its functionality, behind the scenes, or customer testimonials. A convenient factor about videos is that you are killing two birds with one stone. Separate the audio and make it downloadable for people. If you are passionate about something, it will reflect in your tone which makes it more engaging for your audience to listen to. Recording audio is also simple to do with technology nowadays. You can do it with your phone, your computer, and a headset and microphone.

SoundCloud is a great option for creating audio on your phone. Simply hit record and record your message for easy posting to your blog in a couple of clicks. You also have the option of adding a photo and geotag to it. If you're planning on doing audio daily, build your content strategy, and plan using your editorial calendar. The best features of video and audio are that there are no budget constraints and your possibilities are endless.

Tailor Content To Each Platform

A crucial component in our content marketing services is to tailor content to each platform. There's new social networks and tools coming out all the time. There are ones being created and implemented right now as we speak. While automation is extremely convenient, you need to be careful.

Let's say that you have a big event such as customer appreciation day or a product launch and you take some photos. You post it to Instagram and put in a little caption. While you do have unlimited space, keep it short and simple. Instagram allows you to easily share your content on Twitter automatically, and it will even pull the caption that you've written and posted to Twitter.

Instagram also gives you the option to post directly to Facebook. But don't. The reason for it is that Facebook allows you to put more text. When you have more text space, use it. Take the photo from Twitter or from your files and write a description of the event. The good thing about Facebook is that you can also tag the location and the people in the photo so it shows up on their wall so their friends can see it.

You can also put all the photos you've taken and put them on your blog. Write a recap post about it or put them up with lots of different captions and little descriptions. To take it a step further, make a video out of your photos. Nowadays there are a ton of tools out there like Animoto that allows you to upload a lot of photos and create a slick video for you. By creating that video, you can post it on YouTube or your other social platforms too. People often ask what social platform they should be active on. Regardless of what you are active on, ensure that you have a landing page on that network.

A crucial thing to keep in mind about social platforms is that they are controlled by someone else. In other words, they are rented land. They can change, eliminate, and add rules at any time. Perhaps they will start charging for specific functions or get bought by someone else. And while anything or everything can change, you at least have your blog where it is a platform that you hopefully control.

Always be tailoring content that matches a specific platform. So when people notice you, you won't be standing out for the wrong reasons. Keep sharing on these platforms. You can establish a solid audience if you keep sharing on the same platforms. There's always going to be new tools and platforms added all the time. Keep an eye out on what is being added and where your audience is going. This will help you find out what will work best for your business.

Your Content Marketing Services Company

Content marketing services are not an instant win gain. Make sure that you are in it for the long haul. It's going to take a while before you start seeing major results when you're just starting your content. Depending on what content needs to be created, we can add a personal spin on an existing idea that will help your brand stand out and gain a strong online presence or we can help you start completely from scratch. Digital Shift is always up-to-date with new tools that can better create your content.

There is a ton to consider when putting together and creating content of any kind. Whether it's written, photos, audio, or video, the first thing to keep in mind is the overall image of your company. At Digital Shift, we put great consideration to who your company is and what kind of services you offer so we can tailor content we create to best fit you. Content can be as simple as informing your audience about a service or as complex as telling a story.

Again, the great thing about content is that it's there for the long haul. People will continuously be finding your content weeks, months, and years from now. And continuous new content will make them stay. Here is a brief outline of what our content marketing service offers.

• Fresh new content for your target audience
• Embedding internal and external links
• Optimizing images, video, and much more
• Establishing clear call-to-actions

Digital Shift is an online marketing agency that helps small to medium-sized business create their best possible digital content marketing strategy. Our blog writing service is measurable with the SEOpressor score. This score is a part of our content marketing software that we implement into your content marketing plan. We get to know your target audience and what customer journeys they embark on to find your business.

Investing in content marketing services is valuable. The impact of content marketing is huge. When you put your content marketing in the right hands, you can drive your sales, reach your financial goals and establish strong brand awareness among your target population. When content marketing is done right, it helps your site rank organically and gets great ranking on search engines. Having great written content with effective keywords will help you rank on the first page of Google's search result. Good content tells search engines that your platform is relevant to what the user is searching for, has great information, and is written with correct grammar and structure. With Digital Shift's great content marketing services, you can rest assured that your customers are finding what they need on your online platforms. Your consumers will be clearly shown how your business can help them achieve what they want.