A comprehensive content marketing strategy is your best shot at coping with the rapidly rising competitive spirit in the HVAC, plumbing, construction, and home remodeling fields.
Achieving such a solid strategy demands leveraging several powerful content marketing avenues such as earned media, owned media, and paid media. These avenues are all cohesive pieces of a complete content marketing mix that will take you to the level of brand exposure you have always been raring for.
Your content marketing strategy should focus on ramping up content sharing, engagement, web exposure, and traffic to your content.
With the aforementioned content marketing trifecta working together for you, realizing such goals becomes possible. Continue reading to find out how.
You can also learn more about what professional HVAC content marketing, plumbing content marketing, content marketing for construction companies, contractor content marketing, and home remodeling content marketing services really entail.
What is Earned Media?
Earned media refers to the publicity you have gained as a result of content promotion. When both owned media and paid media are well planned and coordinated, they always give birth to earned media. Think of it as your customers working for you to promote your brand.
That essentially tells you earned media thrives on content sharing. The resultant outcome being both offline and online conversions.
This content sharing is made possible through word of mouth in form of mentions, shares, reposts reviews, as well as recommendations.
But what actually drives earned media?
Three things. High quality content, a strong brand content distribution network, as well as solid organic rankings on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing through proper search engine optimization (SEO).
With a strong SEO strategy, you are sure to rank on the first page of search engines. This further and better exposes your owned media platforms such as your website and blog posts as well as your content links while attracting more content engagement and shares.
Furthermore, a great content strategy does a lot to complement your SEO strategy. It doesn’t matter the type of content-video, infographic, e-book, images, or text files. As long as the content is valuable and interesting, the value you can derive from earned media is immense.
Let’s take a deeper look at some of the earned media strategies.
· Mentions
When online references are made to your brand, company, or services, that qualifies as a brand mention. Such mentions can feature in blog posts, product reviews, news articles, or educational journals. These efforts then directly shape your brand reputation and credibility.
When people can trust your brand, they have no issue referring it to others.
· Shares
Content sharing can help a lot in nurturing customer engagement and referrals. You can share both your website content and blog posts widely across diverse social media sites or applications to boost your audience each.
· Reposts
Content reposts by third party sites, influencers, and bloggers add authority and expertise to your brand message making it easy to drive more conversions. The more your content is reposted by especially authority sites, the more it is viewed and labeled as valuable.
· Reviews and recommendations
Referrals can also take the shape of customer reviews or partner recommendations. Preexisting reviews are very crucial when informing new purchase decisions because they reflect the level of user experience customers get with your brand.
Brand recommendations arise when customers and industry partners alike act as market advocates for your brand. This may in turn result in more lead generation.
What is Owned Media?
Owned media refers to all the content marketing channels directly owned by your business. It is therefore anchored on your unique website properties such as your mobile site, blog site, and social media channels.
All these three are extensions of your website. And your website draws its significance from your brand. Therefore, the exposure cycle goes a long way.
Not only the quality but also the quantity of owned media your business has determines how much online presence you establish. Why?
Because through SEO incorporation into such media, you can fully optimize your search engine rankings. That means the more relevant brand information features in many of your owned sites, the higher you are likely to rank on search engine result pages (SERP).
You can refer to our SEO content writing services to learn more on how this integration works.
To gain more insights on owned media properties, we shall analyze each strategy separately.
· Website
Content marketing done on your website is your easiest way to attract, engage, and retain your target audience or prospects through creation and sharing of relevant high quality content. Such content can take diverse formats including images, videos, podcasts, text files, or infographic.
When your content remains top of online consumers’ minds, they are more likely to convert into actual customers.
We can help you create website marketing content that sticks in the customer’s mind.
· Mobile site
Optimizing your content marketing for mobile devices such as smart phones widens your audience reach. Through mobile devices, your brand content can find its way on apps and is easily shared on social media and other mobile-friendly sites.
Since almost 70% of online consumers begin the search for your HVAC, plumbing, construction, or home remodeling services on their mobile phones, optimizing your content for these devices is highly paramount.
· Blog site
Content marketing through your blog posts is a highly effective way of achieving brand loyalty. Why?
Because blog posts address your audience rather directly and personally, igniting their interest on your specific brand.
With frequent blog updates, you are more likely to retain your audience through active engagement.
· Social media channels
Social media marketing platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitter serve three purposes-educate, inform, and entertain your audience. Creating attention on social media sites is fast and can equally result in fast leads and content shares for your brand.
To regularly keep your social media followers engaged with valuable, entertaining, and interesting content you can hire the social media content marketing services of a reliable professional.
What is Paid Media?
Paid media refers to all of your marketing activities requiring a paid placement. It is essentially anchored on advertising. That means your business pays to leverage various content advertising channels like PPC, display ads, retargeting, paid influencers, paid content promotion, and social media ads.
Through proper use of paid media, you can maximize your brand content promotion by propelling earned media and drive more traffic to your owned media. That’s exactly how the interdependence of these three content marketing media is activated.
The role of paid media is therefore to give your brand some extra exposure beyond just the organic traffic.
As mentioned earlier this extra brand exposure can be realized through:
· PPC
Through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on popular search engines, your site receives additional traffic beyond the organic traffic. You only pay for the ads once an online consumer clicks on it. The more clicks your ads get the higher the chances of conversions.
· Display ads
Also known as digital display advertising, display ads refer to online paid advertising through visual displays of videos and images or banners. When viewers click on such visuals, they are redirected to the corresponding landing page.
· Retargeting
Retargeting ads help you recover buyers who had initially expressed interest in buying your services but never got to complete the purchase. Such customers are easy to convert because they once had a near-purchase decision around your brand.
Since about two thirds of your first time website visitors exit the site without making any purchase, recovering them is very imperative.
· Paid influencers
You can also decide to pay social media influencers such as celebrities, trend setters, and thought leaders to represent your HVAC, plumbing, construction, or home remodeling services. This will essentially boost not only the recognition, but also the reach of your brand message.
· Paid content promotion
Sponsored placement of content in different advertisement media like TVs, publications, and newsletters presents a convenient way to target various market segments with relevant brand content.
· Social media ads
By running paid advertisements on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn you could potentially boost your website along with its content.
Want the content marketing trifecta to work for you?
To better expose your brand you need to explore all the above mentioned content marketing strategies. Then, analyze your marketing budget to better understand the level of resources needed for each strategy.
Of course each strategy has its own merits but combining all three makes your content marketing strategy all the more effective.
Check out our entire offering of content marketing services to discover more visibility opportunities for your HVAC, plumbing, construction, or home remodeling business.
By working closely with our professional digital content marketers, you get to hit three birds with one stone and realize full-range marketing gains.
Contact our content marketing team to get started today!