Content Marketing Strategy – enhance the visibility and credibility of your consultant business

Content Marketing has been established in the marketing world and yet not everyone is using its full potential: Content is a crucial factor for the success of freelance consultants and consulting businesses as well. It provides you with direct access to your target audience and the possibility to compete with other consultants.

However, doing so takes time, but is worth the effort, especially with the right strategy. As the study B2B Content Marketing 2019 verifies, 65% of the content marketers put their efforts on the right strategy and even 96% of the “top performers” agree that it has built credibility and trust among their audience.

Here are four useful tips you should keep in mind. It is important to focus on the right things and to know about the pitfalls that should be avoided. If you follow these recommendations, you will learn how you can improve the visibility and credibility of your company.

1. Define your Content Strategy

Before you start creating your content, define your intentions and your short and long-term goals. Each intention and action depends on what you expect your content strategy to achieve.

Tip: If you have several goals, structure them according to their priority. Make sure to document your efforts and milestones.

2. Synchronize your Niche with your Main Audience

Before you create the content, there are two key steps to take: It is important to know your target audience including their needs and requests. Furthermore, from a SEO perspective, you have to provide an accurate keyword research to make sure the content will improve your visibility afterwards. The main question thus is: what kind of information is your audience looking for and how can you address this by providing exclusive content?

Tip: There are several tools you can use to ease this process – check out this site.

3. Show your Expertise – on and off-page

During the creation process follow your editorial plan. Make sure to provide your audience with a variety of different media and information that shows your professionalism. This may include the following:

• checklists and PDF
• eBooks
• free templates
• whitepapers
• video testimonials or written statements from clients and professionals

Furthermore, make use of on- as well as off-page marketing strategies:

On-Page

The target of the content has changed, since it’s nowadays more important to focus on the reader instead of the search engine. Thus, it is not the aim to write content that is not in the interest of your readers or merely clustered with keywords.

You need to increase your credibility among your preferred audience with detailed, information that adds value while adhering to SEO principles. Consequently, long-term success requires a well-thought-out strategy that focuses on the audience, but does not disregard SEO.

Tip: The key is to find a good balance and adapt it to your business in your own style.

Be frequently active to keep your subscribers, but avoid spamming your audience with too much information. Additionally, a standstill in your presence will produce negative results regarding your visibility.

Off-Page

If you want to improve your visibility further, it is important to know that Google prioritizes sites according to how they manage to be seen as the experts in their niche. With regards to content marketing it is evaluated on the basis of the content on its own website and the publication of content on other websites. Thus, you have to broaden up your network through social media and platforms like LinkedIn in order to get links from other blogs/websites.

Tip: Be careful! The publication of weak content and links on websites and /or blogs presenting a lower standard than yours, can have a negative effect on your previous efforts.

4. Monitoring of your Efforts

Last, but never least and part of every good strategy is to monitor the efforts you put into your content marketing strategy. Only then you can make the necessary adjustments to improve the results you want.

Tip To avoid procrastination or letting the evaluation fall into oblivion, set specific deadlines to implement and evaluate your monitoring process. Learn from your mistakes.

Summary

In 2019 the provision of a well thought through and implemented content marketing strategy is still one of the most decisive factors of your success to be relevant as a consultant business.

Investing in content marketing can be fruitful for your consulting business and result in more visibility, traffic and a higher recognition and credibility among clients as well as professionals. Manage to avoid unnecessary pitfalls, with a well thought-through content marketing strategy.