Institutions that have content marketing strategies get to have success in business since it is a vital factor in generating traffic to your site. However, there is a high affinity for sites with the same audience, to copy data passing it as an original. 60% of B2B data marketers in 2017 foresee that producing original and engaging content as their biggest challenges. This leaves many of your competitors to spy on your sites and social media pages to copy your data.
Here are tips on how to make your data marketing impossible for your competitors to copy.
Comprehensive, Original and Exhaustive Content
Producing original content that is value packed with your audience is one of the biggest challenges for Singapore companies involved in B2B marketing. Creating original data can take hours or even days to complete. The best way to avoid a competitor from copying your data is by fully making it comprehensive.
This way, your competitors will have a hard time coming up with an entirely different angle to copy due to the exhaustive nature of the contents.
Diversify the Content
By diversifying your content, competitors find it hard for to echo data from you. Aspire to add production value to ensure that it is more difficult to create derivative content from your blog or website.
Use branded data on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, detailed infographics, and interactive data that encourages user engagement on your website.
Cooperate In the Production of Content
By collaborating, you reduce the number of competitors and increase your audience. Find a way to collaborate with your competitors through interviews, write guest posts on their sites and blogs, work together in the production of infographics, and co-authoring of original as well as engaging data.
The best way is to identify the competitors who share the same audience as your company. This will ensure that you can stay ahead of the competition in their content marketing. Be proactive in the generation of data, to ward off competition.
Perhaps you can look at simply engaging a digital marketing company like MediaOne which has had almost a decade of experience creating winning campaigns for clients like Fuji Xerox, ST Electronics, Sheraton Hotel etc. Give them a call today at 6789 9852.
The above three tips will hinder competitors from copying your content. However, it would be best to do more to get ahead of the competition and rank highly in SERPs. One of the surest ways of achieving these goals is by creating evergreen content.
What is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is content that is not time-bound. Users will read and find the information relevant many years after publishing. This form of content is the golden ticket to growth in the competitive online business landscape.
With millions of blog posts being published daily, Google and other search engines prioritise long-form content that offer REAL value to the readers.
The main downside of publishing conventional posts is that they will only generate traffic and sales for a limited period of type. Once the hype is over, the post will be pushed to page 3 or even 4 SERPs.
Another benefit of creating evergreen content is that it will help you save time that would have been spent creating new posts now and then. You have to frequently update the content with recent statistics and information to keep it fresh and relevant to the target audience.
Getting backlinks from authority sites also becomes easier if you create and publish evergreen content more often. Other authors will cite your statistics, case studies, or concept explanations when creating posts for their websites. The links will supercharge your evergreen article to the top of SERPs and increase the chances of winning a featured snippet.
9 Secrets on How to Create Evergreen Content
Relevance is the number one factor you should strive to achieve when creating evergreen content. Do extensive research on a particular topic before settling down to write to ensure that the final copy is packed with valuable information that the readers will be willing to share with other people online.
Here are the secrets to creating evergreen content today and knocking off your competitors from the top spots in search engine results pages.
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Case Studies
The chances are that already there are thousands of indexed and probably highly ranked blog posts on the topic you intend to write. Dethroning those articles can take weeks or even months, and you don’t have much time luxury. The website needs to get to the first page of Google as soon as possible and start generating revenue.
What do you do? Case studies. Yes, you heard me right. Case studies are effective in grasping the readers’ attention compared to the ordinary content as they are packed with relevant information and based on market data.
While the conventional articles discuss topics in detail, case studies take a different route to provide insights on how a strategy works in the real world. As a result, the content is more relatable as the readers can actually use the information to enhance their businesses or resolve problems.
The same case applies to product or service marketing content. 79% of online consumers trust online reviews and perceive them as personal recommendations from friends. Instead of writing lengthy reviews of your product, go against the grind and write a case study describing a client’s actual experience.
Walk them through every stage and use a conversational writing style to hook them right from the first paragraph. As mentioned earlier, Google loves long-form content, so expect your case study to get the search engine bots attention and soon, it will be ranked on the first page.
Make sure that the information in the case study is accurate and verifiable. Resist the urge to include wrong statistics to promote your product’s efficiency or service performance. Every detail in the case study should be factual and relevant to the primary topic.
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Create Infographics
The truth is that most people are not fond of reading articles online. Impress the audience by creating visually appealing infographics about a topic of interest to get ahead of the curve. The infographic doesn’t have to be developed using fresh content or statistics; you can repurpose an existing article.
Lovely graphics are great, but even more important is the quality and relevance of the information in the infographic. Below are some ideas on how to beef up your infographics.
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- Including compelling examples
- Find accurate findings and present them in graphs or charts
- Focus on providing concise content that answers the audience’s questions
- Interweave valuable and concise copy to describe the graphics or stats briefly
Once the infographic is ready, distribute it on social media platforms and email to unlock its full potential of scaling up your business through increased organic traffic and sales.
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Write How-To Guides
Your customers are eager to learn how to use your product or service. The general posts are good at explaining the unique selling points, but to get even better results, you should create more compelling and laser-focussed content.
How-to guides will appeal to new customers as well as those who have been using the product for a while and want to learn new tricks to get maximum utility from it.
If you provide services such as website audits and SEO, create how-to guides for every level of expertise. Ensure that the topics are directly related to your product and include CTAs to encourage the readers to purchase it.
Check out the “People Also Ask” section on Google’s results page for target keywords for ideas on which topics to use to create the guides.
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Update Existing Content
Refreshing existing content can transform them from ordinary articles to evergreen posts. Use Google Search Console to identify posts whose ranking have dropped, then find new information related to the topics discussed and use it to update them. In addition, look for flaws in the content that could have prompted Google to rank down them, such as irrelevant links, broken links, inaccurate statistics, poorly optimised screenshots and more.
Resolve the flaws and add fresh content to make the posts relevant to the audience again. For example, you can search for new data, update the product information, replace the old images with new ones, add a video, add an infographic, add a section highlighting the current market trends and projections.
Google loves fresh content and is always looking for articles with the latest topics. Applying this hack will make your articles evergreen, rank better, and help you connect with a larger audience.
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Glossaries
Voice search is the new way of finding information on search engines. Most people no longer type keywords and phrases on Google. Instead, they use voice search. However, a significant number still use the traditional way of searching.
They often use question-based terms as opposed to 2-3 phrases. Creating a comprehensive glossary will attract massive traffic to your website. Unlike trends and other related topics, the content will forever be relevant since the definition of terms and concepts doesn’t change.
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Re-promote and Re-purpose Content
Re-promoting refers to popularising old content after updating it to make it visible to the current website visitors. The articles should contain information that is still valuable to the audience but need to be polished to be even more effective in helping the audience make informed decisions or solve a problem.
On the other hand, repurposing means using the existing content differently instead of creating new posts. You can create an evergreen round-up article by combining five top-rated articles that discuss the same topic.
For example, if you have articles with the following titles:
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- How to Get Started with Social Media Marketing
- How to Promote Business on Facebook
- How to Promote Business on Instagram
- How to Promote Business on Twitter
- How to Monitor Social Media Campaign Performance
- How to Get Maximum ROI from Social Media Marketing
The six articles can be combined to create an evergreen article titled “Social Media Marketing: The Complete Guide.” Depending on the length of each piece, the round-up article will be at least 2,000 words, and that’s great since Google bots gravitate towards long-form content and rank them better than the short articles.
Using the same example above, over time, some of the statistics and recommendations may become void or less useful in helping businesses generate sales from social media platforms. Consider editing or replacing such content with fresh ones to keep the round-up content green and effectively channelling customers to your website.
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Visual Imagery
One visual or graphic can represent the main topics discussed in a 1,000 – word article. With the attention span of online users getting shorter by the day, it’s essential to develop ways of delivering the intended message fast.
Earlier on, we mentioned creating infographics as a form of evergreen content. Go ahead and create stellar visual imagery to spur engagement with the target audience. If you’re in the photography or graphic design industry, you can create standalone graphics to showcase your work to potential customers.
Distribute the graphics on social media platforms to spur more engagement with the target customers. You could also use your artistic skills to create custom cartoons and memes to market your brand and stand out from the crowd.
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Create List Posts
A majority of the evergreen content published online is in list format. Many studies have proved that articles with this format perform better than ordinary ones. One of the plausible reasons for this is that the content structure is more digestible than blocks of text.
For instance, if you are an affiliate marketer, you can create a list post of all the related products you market, such as treadmills, in one article. Once published, you will only need to update certain product information such as pricing to make the most relevant.
A survey by Conductor confirmed that readers and search engines prefer numbered headlines.
Therefore, consider numbering the main title to get a high ranking and CTR. Complement it with a compelling meta description to convince the searcher to click. Be sure to include the target keyword in the main title and description.
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Aggregate Customer Testimonials
As mentioned earlier, online shoppers trust and read multiple customer reviews and feedback before making the buying decision. Posting positive testimonials on service pages or having a dedicated page for such feedback will crank up your site conversion rate.
Please note that evergreen content doesn’t have to be a lengthy article; a collection of short customer testimonials also qualifies as evergreen content. They will boost your brand’s credibility and win potential customers’ trust by proving that the product delivers the expected results.
You can also request some customers to record short videos using the product or highlight what they love about it. Use such user-generated content to promote your brand on social media and video-sharing platforms like YouTube. The videos will promote your brand and help customers make the all-important decision to convert for many months and years.
Content Engagement Strategies That Have Stood the Test of Time
Creating evergreen content will enhance your content marketing strategies tremendously. However, it would help if you came up with ways of spurring engagement to get maximum results from the posts. Here are seven proven content engagement strategies that you should start using today to get past the competitors.
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Do You Know Your Target Audience?
How well do you know the target audience? As you embark on creating evergreen content, you need first to understand the information needs of the target audience. Additional information such as age, social class, and social media platforms usage will help you select the right channels for distributing the content.
Concisely, your content should resonate with the audience’s persona to effectively generate traffic from search engines and sales. Their background information, such as what they look for or believe in, will enable you to create the best content possible.
For example, if you sell bodybuilding supplements, you need to know the target customers’ concerns about the supplements. Such insights will act as a blueprint when researching and creating the content. The goal is to offer valuable content that is in line with the audience’s interests to lure them into converting or sharing the content with other interested people online.
Once you succeed in engaging them, you can introduce a CTA to guide them through the buying journey until the final stage when they purchase the product, join your email list, or contact the support team for more information.
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Create Engaging Headlines to Capture Their Attention
The first thing the audience sees on the search results page is the headline. It needs to be compelling and engaging to encourage the reader to visit your website to read the post. Statistics show that 8 out of 10 people who use Google read a headline copy but only 2 out of 10 take time to read the entire article.
Here are tips on how to create engaging headlines for your evergreen posts.
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- Be specific
- Ensure its unique
- Should be relevant to the target audience
- Maintain the brand voice
- Optimise it using keywords
For example, the “8 Email Marketing Tools to Promote Your Brand” headline has a trigger section that grasps the readers’ attention (8 email marketing tools), an adjective (Promote), and a keyword phrase (promote your brand). From the title, the reader will know outright what the article is all about. If the author chooses the topic based on audience research, the article will definitely get organic traffic and a top ranking in SERPs.
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Share Posts on Social Media
There are 4.5 billion active social media users in the world today. 54% of the users use social media to find information about products and services before shopping. Sharing links to your evergreen posts will give you free traffic from the platforms.
However, the Facebook algorithm recently started to bury posts that direct users off the platform. Circumvent this handle by adding native content to your post. For example, instead of just sharing a link, add a brief description of the topic discussed in the post. Sure, the native content will make your post longer, but that’s precisely what you need as it will stand out from other posts.
Go the extra mile and include social media buttons at the end of the article to encourage the readers to share them on their profiles. Please take note of topics that get the most likes and shares and focus on creating more engaging content about them to create a buzz about your brand. The comments section is also rich in ideas for future posts.
In addition, use hashtags to popularise the posts on the platforms, especially Twitter. If you decide to promote the content on Instagram, make sure that the post has a high-quality image as the platform is primarily tailored for sharing photos and short videos. The post image can be the post’s preview image.
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Consistently Publish New Content
We mentioned earlier that Google bots gravitate towards fresh content. Don’t just publish one evergreen article and sit back to wait for results. You need to continuously engage with the target audience by posting new content regularly.
The top-rated blogs publish 2-3 evergreen posts per week. Well, you may not be in a position to match their publishing frequency, but make sure that you frequently upload new articles to keep the audience engaged.
Note that once they get accustomed to getting a new article on a particular day of the week, they will return to your website expecting to find one next week. Don’t let them down by being inconsistent. Create a content creation and publishing calendar and stick to it.
With a busy schedule, you may not always get enough time to research. No need to worry, though; you can have an in-house think tank to provide ideas for the following content every week. Alternatively, you can hire a freelance content writer who has the required skills and expertise to supply several evergreen articles per month.
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Leverage Email Newsletters
A recent study by HubSpot revealed that email marketing strategies, on average, generate an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent by marketers. Not all people will find the time or remember to visit your website. Ensure that this audience does not miss out by sending weekly email newsletters with links to the new article.
You can get the same or even better results if you use email newsletters to popularise your new blog articles. Include a juicy description of the content in the email copy to encourage the recipients to click the link or directly visit your website.
Make the deal even better by offering exclusive discounts to people who take time to read the articles. Also, make the email copy more interactive by adding quality graphics related to the post. Ensure that the email is optimised for mobile as most people use their smartphones to read and reply to emails.
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Include Real Data and Examples
One way of knowing whether an author researched before writing an article is by checking the content for real data and examples. The two are vital not only to readers but also search engines. Google strives to provide the most detailed and accurate results to users.
One way of proving that your content is detailed and worth a spot on the first page is by including links to recent case studies posted on authority sites. Impress the readers by providing actionable advice backed by data and evidence instead of generic recommendations.
Here is a snippet of an evergreen post by Michelle Schroder-Gardener on creating a budget. She includes a statistic from the Gallup study to inform the readers of the importance of budgeting.
There is no shortage of case studies and statistics online that you can use to revamp your articles. Just make sure that the data is accurate to avoid misleading your audience. Consult widely before highlighting a statistic in your article lest you compromise brand’s credibility.
Remember to benchmark the amount of traffic that you get from the posts to know which topics to feature in the next series of articles. No matter your niche, rest assured there are content ideas you can use to create compelling and engaging evergreen content.
