Content Marketing on WordPress: Tips, Plugins, Benefits

Lynn Martelli
Lynn Martelli

Many companies advertise products and services, write expert blogs, launch educational webinars, and create their own brand media. All this relates to promotion through content. We’ll explain this promotion format and its features in simple words.

Definition and Advantages

Content marketing in WordPress is a way to promote using useful or entertaining content: blog articles, posts, and stories on social networks, educational webinars, and videos. Its advantage is that it works at all sales funnel stages — from generating demand to making a purchase.

Here are the goals and objectives this method of promotion can accomplish:

  • Introduce the product and tell how it benefits customers. For example, a furniture and home accessories store produces a video about why blackout curtains are helpful for sleep problems.
  • Demonstrate expertise. Posts, articles, or videos that bring useful information for potential clients increase customer confidence and show that the company employs professionals. For example, a manufacturer of plastic windows produces a video in which an expert explains how to choose a profile with good sound insulation.
  • Gather a loyal audience. Helpful or entertaining content gets people to subscribe to newsletters, read a blog, or follow a business on social media. Subscribers can be “warmed up” so that they become increasingly interested in the brand’s products.
  • Increase the number of sales. Content motivates people who are already interested in the brand’s products or services to purchase. Posts, newsletters, and other materials that talk about a specific product and contain calls to place an order are suitable for this.
  • Collect feedback. Using content, you can build a dialogue with users — for example, at the end of the post, ask readers to talk about their experience using the product. It is a way to learn about potential customers’ needs, questions, and objections directly from them.

Pro tip: All of these benefits can be made even more powerful when you add SEO APIs to the mix. Make sure to try more options and find what works better for your business.

When Is This Type of Marketing Beneficial?

This promotion works most effectively for two categories of business:

Products with long decision cycles, such as real estate. Buying a house or apartment is an important event, and choosing the right option can sometimes take months. Detailed reviews of apartments with photographs and plans or a mailing list offering a preferential mortgage may push the client to choose this developer.

Complex and expensive products, for example, in the field of IT, education, or medicine. It is how an orthodontics clinic that installs braces, a task manager, or an online school can promote itself. Content helps justify the cost and explain how the product works and how it differs from similar ones on the market.

For example, an employee of an online school produces a short video in which he says that during English classes, students communicate with native speakers. Read about it in more detail on LaunchSpace.

Content marketing in WordPress may not work:

  1. For local business. These are companies that customers turn to because it is convenient for them to get there. For example, a person can buy a cappuccino at a coffee shop on the way to the office or look for the nearest car service center on the map if his car breaks down.
  2. Manufacturers of consumer goods. Buyers will use household chemicals or batteries in any case, so starting a blog is unnecessary to talk about their benefits. In this segment, promotions, loyalty programs, and quality service can increase sales.
  3. For content marketing to bring sales, a business must have a streamlined customer interaction process. Let’s say a brand has an interesting account on social networks, but managers take a long time to process incoming applications. Then, a person can go to a WordPress website using the link from the post and place an order, but not wait for a call from an employee and turn to competitors.

Additionally, content is not the fastest way to attract customers. It takes time to create and fill a blog, and it can start bringing in its first clients a few months after its launch. Therefore, this method of promotion is best combined with other tools, such as contextual advertising in maps and search engines.

Plugins for Content Marketing in WordPress

And several plugins can significantly help anyone working with content. Be sure to include data analytics to monitor the results.

Editorial Calendar

It is a calendar planner for WordPress users that will help you plan your publications. You can schedule publications, change them, move them to other days, and work with articles in a convenient way.

Possibilities:

  • View all posts and the time they were published.
  • Publishing posts and working with drafts.
  • Ability to drag and drop posts to change the publication date.
  • Ability to see the status of posts: draft, pending review, planned
  • Ability to work with posts from multiple authors.
  • The plugin is simple but very convenient, especially for those who value the regularity of posts.

Grammarly

It is an indispensable plugin that provides spelling and punctuation checking. Illiterately written text instantly spoils the overall impression of the article. Therefore, do not neglect checks. The plugin will allow you to find and correct errors and suggest optimal wording quickly.

Possibilities:

  • Text checking in real-time.
  • Custom recommendations based on the selected style.
  • A plagiarism check is useful if you buy texts.
  • Cross-platform compatibility. Grammarly is a plugin for WordPress and an extension for Chrome.

Easy Content Templates

The plugin allows you to create special templates, which can be used when creating new posts. Typically, a blogger already adheres to a specific post format — that’s why this plugin was developed. It allows you to customize a template and then apply it to existing or future posts.

By default, templates are available only to their author, but they can also be shared with other users. These users can use the template when creating their posts but cannot edit it.

Tips for WordPress Content Strategy

Here are some tips to help you make the most of your website’s content marketing.

Create Interesting and Original Material

Any blog’s success (or failure) lies in the material with which the author fills it. If you want your blog to become famous, you must regularly create engaging, high-quality articles with helpful content for your readers. In other words, you need to focus not only on what is interesting to you but also on what may be interesting to your potential clients, those people you want to attract to your WordPress site.

As a rule, this advice primarily concerns texts, as they influence search results, but you can choose some other way of self-expression — for example, photography (especially popular among travelers), graphics, or painting. High-quality original WordPress content is always very valuable on the Internet, which is why users demand it.

Add New Posts Regularly

Another key to success is regularity and content plan. The appearance of new entries will stimulate both ordinary users and search robots to visit you. Fresh material indicates the relevance of information and the “liveness” of your blog. Be sure to set yourself the number of posts you will create per week or month. To begin with, you can choose some minimum indicator, for example, one article per week.

In the future, try to increase the number of articles to two or three per week (or more if you have such an opportunity). At the same time, we recommend sticking to the WordPress content strategy no matter what: even if you have written two articles today, it is better not to post them at once but to share them with readers after a certain period chosen by you. If you are afraid of missing the time when you should add a new article, use the delayed posting feature.

Suitable plugins: Auto Post Scheduler, Auto Future Date, and Publish to Schedule.

Create Easy Navigation

In order to interest the users, it is essential not only that they visit the site but also that they are captivated by the topic of your blog. Therefore, I recommend using cross-linking in articles, that is, in one article, provide links to one or more other articles that are relevant to the topic (or keywords).

You can do this manually or using WordPress plugins. Pay attention to the so-called “breadcrumbs” — this type of navigation will increase visitors’ loyalty and improve your position in search results. Finally, don’t forget about tags — be sure to assign them to your posts to make it easier for readers to find material on the topic they are interested in; tags are also used to select articles on similar topics.

Suitable plugins: WordPress Related Posts, Breadcrumb Navigation XT, SEO Smart Links, and Simple Tags, another related post plugin.

Add a Section about Yourself and Feedback

It only applies to personalized blogs that highlight the author in one way or another. As mentioned above, firstly, it will bring you a little closer to the readers and provide emotional involvement; secondly, messages from your readers can contain a lot of helpful information, they can inspire you to write new posts, allow you to improve your blog and simply get to know interesting people better.

You can use your email address (or a link to a social media page) as contact information, but the most convenient way is to use one of the WordPress plugins. By the way, it’s also a good idea to create posts answering readers’ questions about you and your life — such feedback will bring you closer to your readers and make them want to visit your blog more often.

Suitable plugins: Contact Form 7, Fast Secure Contact Form, FormCraft — Form Builder.

Hold Competitions

Even if you run an utterly non-commercial blog, it is worth holding competitions occasionally to attract the attention of regular and new users. Try to choose some kind of creative task that will be interesting to the broadest group of users but is also related to the topic of your blog. At the same time, you can also organize voting when choosing a winner to attract even more visitors to participate. It’s an excellent plan for WordPress content strategy.

Suitable plugins: WP-PostRatings and Yet Another Stars Rating.

Conclusion

Content marketing goals should never be neglected. If your site is on WordPress, you are fortunate. This platform has many paid and free plugins that make it easier to promote your resource. With the right strategy and tools, you can get the most out of your content.

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