Strategic Content Marketing 101: Fueling your blog, social media and SEO efforts

Over the past few weeks, we’ve taken a look at how you can pick a topic for a content marketing guide, how to write and design it and use it to build your email list — now it’s time to come full circle and see exactly why I refer to it as “centerpiece content.”

As the name implies, centerpiece content is a great way to bring focus to your content marketing efforts and create a solid foundation for ongoing strategies to build your business.

One of the best aspects of centerpiece content is that, while it can be a bit challenging to write and design, there’s a variety of ways you can “extend” its life to get the biggest bang for your buck as well as feed your social media and SEO efforts for your Shopify store.

Breaking it up

Back when I discussed your ideas for outlining your centerpiece content, I mentioned keeping this outline handy for future reference. Here’s where that comes into play.

Each of those sub-sections of your centerpiece content is a “seedling” for one, two or even more blog posts that are relatively easy to author.

When writing these posts, it’s a good strategy to start with the sub-section as a basis for the post, but use the opportunity to sprinkle in some new insights on the topic:

• Don’t simply copy and paste the content from the main guide, but you don’t need to reinvent the wheel either. Find a way to rewrite the paragraphs in the guide.
• Blog posts are a perfect opportunity to expand upon the content found in the guide itself with additional examples, tips or visuals.
• Another good way to expand upon the content in your guide is to feature customer profiles or case studies.
• Your blog posts can also be used to dive into more detail about a specific product or product feature.
• While a blog post doesn’t need to be overly “sales-y,” it can still be focused toward potential customers. Think about what type of information customers are looking for at different stages in the decision making process and try to create a post that addresses each of those unique mindsets.
• A blog post is also a good way to add a sense of timeliness to your guide. For example, you could discuss the latest developments that might not be included in the guide or tie content in the guide to current events, holidays or seasons.
• Look for ways to incorporate mentions of vendors, suppliers or businesses you admire that complement your product line and link to their sites or social media accounts.
• Your posts don’t need to be super long. Although 750 words is often considered a good minimum word count for a blog post, don’t feel like you should have to write that much if all you’ll be doing is repeating yourself needlessly.

The final key to this strategy is that each of these individual blog posts can not only serve as standalone blog posts that can be prepared relatively easily — but each one becomes a way to promote your centerpiece content and, if you’re using this strategy, build your email list by encouraging readers to subscribe to get access to the entire guide. You can even remind them of this and provide a link to sign up at the end of each blog post.

Social media

Now, here’s the beauty of this strategy.

Each of these blog posts can then be a great opportunity to fuel multiple relevant and captivating posts on your various social media profiles:

• Be sure to craft each post for the network you’re using. For example, Facebook and Twitter can be crafted for a wider, more general audience.
• Instagram and Pinterest are obviously more image-oriented. Note that since Instagram doesn’t allow links in non-paid posts, but you can run these posts as ads or remind users to look in your bio for a link to your homepage’s featured blog section or your main blog page.
• Posts on LinkedIn can be more focused on business or relationship building.
• Posting to Snapchat is a good way to reach a younger audience, but be sure your messaging matches the “quick” and visual-heavy format that Snapchat is known for.

When posting to these various platforms, keep these points in mind:

• Because social networks with newsfeeds are constantly experimenting with the algorithm that determines who sees what posts, experiment with posting the same blog post to each profile a few times over the period of a few days to increase its visibility. Try switching up the headline or imagery each time to see what gets the most interaction.
• Be sure to tag any people or businesses you mention in the blog post. This increases the likelihood they will repost or “like” your post, opening your post up to a new audience.
• Since your ultimate goal is to make sales, consider how you can use social media posts to answer potential buyers’ questions, build confidence in your brand or give them more details about your products.
• If you have the budget, you may want to consider experimenting with paying to promote or “boost” your post. This is a good way to increase the exposure to your blog posts at a relatively low cost. One thing to note with this strategy, however, is that the types of clicks generated via boosted posts may not result in immediate sales — but they can be very effective in introducing people to your company or building your email list.

SEO

Breaking your main guide into topic-specific blog posts can also be a great way to boost your SEO.

Many of the posts you generate to refer to parts of your blog will naturally include keywords related to your business, industry and product line. Increasing the number of blog posts like this can be a great way to send search engines signals about what your site is about.

These blog posts can also be a great way to bring in users who enter more specific search phrases that are more likely to match one or more of your blog posts.

For example, our Madrid Shopify theme demo shop might be able to create a blog post that discusses “smart phone cases with extra screen protection” as opposed to just the rather generic “screen protectors.”

Search engines have been encouraging users, through the use of autocomplete and suggestions, to be more specific with searches, and users who are searching for highly specific terms are often more likely to become engaged with your content.

When creating blog posts on sub-topics featured in your centerpiece content, here are some good tips to following:

• Consider what types of more detailed search queries users might be entering to find out information about your products. A good way to do this is to start typing one or two keywords into a search engine and see what longer phrases it suggests — and then write blog posts that target those terms.
• If you’re breaking up each sub-topic into multiple posts, be sure to keep each one focused on one or two specific terms.
• Look for search terms and phrases that suggest someone is ready to buy. For example, “Six tips on how to buy screen protectors” or “How to protect your tablet and still look great with premium leather cases” target the terms “buy screen protector” and “leather tablet cases,” respectively, both of which are terms someone who is close to buying are likely to enter into a search engine.

Scheduling and planning

When creating blog posts aimed at driving traffic to your guide while also feeding your social media profiles and SEO efforts, a good strategy is to use a calendar or spreadsheet to plan a schedule on what blog posts and social media links will be posted when.

In general, a good rule of thumb is to aim for at least one new blog post a week, but authoring posts with the centerpiece content strategy discussed in this series can often make it easy to publish more frequently.

Pre-schedule blog posts on your Shopify store using the included scheduled publishing feature here.

Take advantage of pre-scheduling tools that many social media networks offer to pre-scheduled posts as well. This is especially helpful for when you’re promoting the same blog post a few times over the course of a few days.

Considering “mixing” your blog posts’ topics so you’re not posting about the same thing over and over again in a row.

When posting links to your posts on social media, also try to keep things varied. However, another good strategy to get more “life” out of each blog post is to repost links to it a few weeks or months after it’s originally published.

If you’re especially good at planning and thinking creatively about how to post unique takes on sub-topics, you can typically fuel at least a few months worth of social media and SEO efforts out of single guide — and it’s even possible to stretch that to a year or more.

It’s worth noting that this strategy has layered, exponential benefits. For example, from a single guide, you might get 15 or 20 sub-topics. Each of these topics can become the fodder for one to three blog posts and each of these blog posts can generate a handful of social media posts.

Final words

It is easy to get engrossed in fine-tuning your theme design, customizations and adding features to your site, but the ROI on those efforts can be relatively low; while they may seem “easier” or “necessary,” they don’t have as much impact on building a successful online business as you might think.

Here’s a point to consider — it’s relatively easy to install an app or change colors and fonts, but creating quality content is a bit more challenging and takes a bit more time and attention to detail.

But, because creating quality content does take more work, it, almost by definition, is great way to emphasize to search engines and potential customers that you’ve invested in the time and energy it takes to become a trustworthy place to shop.

All in all, creating a centerpiece content guide and then using it as a jumping off point for your content marketing efforts that can last well into the future is probably one of the best ways to generate new traffic and business for your Shopify store.

While it does take a bit more work and investment and it might not be quite as glamorous as trying a new color scheme or adding a new app or feature, this strategy, when used effectively, can bring in new leads and customers at a relatively low cost.

Working on developing quality blog posts along with product descriptions and meta descriptions and title tags can be a very effective way to improve your SEO and therefore introduce more new traffic to you and your business.

Ultimately, focusing your efforts on creating content has the ability to improve and feed into so many other areas of your business strategies — SEO, authority, trust, social media and email marketing — and is definitely a worthwhile investment of your time as a business owner.

Read the whole series

Be sure to explore this entire series:

• Creating a centerpiece for your efforts
• Writing and designing your centerpiece content
• Using your centerpiece content to build your email list