06
10
2020
How to step up your content game in time of crisis

How to step up your web content game in time of crisis

The COVID-19 has brought significant changes in world economies and businesses are finding that they need to shift from traditional means to digital methods. So, how should you step up your web content game in time of crisis?

The COVID-19 or coronavirus crisis that recently struck at the heart of public health and safety has brought significant changes in world economies and how businesses operate. Due to the impacts of this pandemic, businesses are finding that they need to shift from traditional means to digital methods when it comes to processing payments, taking and processing orders, and even with sales and marketing.

Now more than ever, businesses should have a dedicated website and step up their content game effectively during this COVID-19 crisis. In this post, you’ll learn about the best ways to boost your web content to stay competitive and thrive during times of crisis.

Go Back To Basics

Everyone has some relevant ideas or insights about effective content marketing during this time of crisis, ranging from creating engaging content, optimizing content, strategic social sharing, to implementing the best practices of content marketing. Before you get caught up in the details, it’s essential to focus on the fundamentals by going back to basics when creating content to ensure that you provide practical solutions based on the emerging needs of consumers nowadays.

Here’s how you should create web content based on the fundamentals of effective content marketing:

  • Write For People: Many marketers and advertisers are overwhelmed by the technicalities of search engine optimization (SEO) and maintaining great key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics. However, successful content marketing means helping people by writing content specifically designed for your target audience. By doing so, you’ll benefit from long-term organic traffic. It means that good metrics will follow.
  • Regularly Update Your Posts: Once you have a website, you have to consistently supply fresh content to continuously benefit from the traffic, conversion, and sales that a great website provides.
  • Make It Natural and Relevant: It’s so easy to incorporate keywords into an article but the question is, “Are their placements natural or relevant?” You don’t want your visitors to end up frustrated and exit your website because they find your content too stuffed, unhelpful, and unnatural.
  • Split Test: Split testing or AB testing is crucial in creating content. This step is usually overlooked by business owners. But, it helps eliminate guesswork so you can improve strong or highly-viewed content, improve slow-performing content, and delete or eliminate poor quality content.

Promote Your Product Or Service Through Guest Posting

During this crisis, it’s hard to build connections, authority or link juice, and the necessary exposure you need to make your website stand out above the rest. Doing all of these tasks can take several months, or even years for some. However, you don’t have to shoulder the burden involved in these tasks by yourself. Guest posting is one way to gain instant exposure and reach.

What is a guest posting? It involves writing and publishing articles on someone else’s blog or website, and is an excellent way to promote a product or service. It’s a great digital marketing strategy in which you can pitch ideas to top-notch or high-ranking websites on search engines, like Google, by writing your content on another website.

Guest posting provides you with a written post or a byline on another blog. You can establish mutually beneficial relationships with guest posting since many websites are outsourcing their content. Also, it’s a great way to build brand awareness. In fact, popular blogs like Forbes have guest posting, encouraging writers to guest blog. So, it’s about time you took action and embraced guest posting as your new content game plan.

Here are the benefits of guest posting:

  • Guest posting has mutually beneficial impacts on both websites when it comes to content sharing. Provide free content on one website and, in return, get exposure and traffic on the other website, and vice versa.
  • By following actionable guidelines for guest posting, you avoid engaging in spammy practices focused on merely acquiring easy backlinks. Guest posting should be used to educate consumers and build brand awareness for your company. It’s not for large-scale link building.
  • Guest posting on new websites enables you to target new audiences who might be interested in your business or products and services. Posting your content on new sites or seasoned, high-domain authority websites provides you a wide array of audiences to promote your products and services.
  • With guest posting, you can build good industry relationships. Referrals are considered the golden standard for making sales. It’s a great way to create better business relationships for websites and get to know other site owners.

Diversify Your Content Strategy

Developing a diversified content strategy should be included in your content game during this pandemic crisis. Because every business launches its own online marketing campaign, the online world is flooded with paid ads, social media content, and other types of web content. So, how do you diversify your content strategy? Here are some tips for how you can do it:

1. Determine Your Content Home

This doesn’t mean that you have to use your own website as your core content home. There are a lot of online channels you can utilize, such as a Youtube channel, if you have a knack for creating cool and helpful videos and video-editing skills or background. You may want to contribute on a podcast channel or an Instagram profile, and make them as your core content home.

What if you don’t have any idea of what your core content home is? Check out these sample questions you might want to ask yourself to ascertain the best core content home for you:

  • What main type of content do you want to create? Is it text-based? Is it a video? Or is it audio or photo-based?
  • What do you want to attain with your published content?
  • How much money and time are you willing to invest in content creation and distribution?
  • Do you know where your targeted readers are found online? How about creating a Facebook content strategy or an Instagram content strategy? What are the other channels or platforms you need to reach out to?
  • Are you willing to build your brand or web presence on another channel outside your website?

2. Brainstorm And Choose The Right Topic

During this pandemic, it’s important to brainstorm with your content marketing team to determine the right topics applicable to your audience to implement effective content creation. By understanding your audience, you’ll be able to create engaging, relevant, and valuable content topics.

The right topic is the right story for the right audience. This means that you need to understand your audience. For example, your target audience spends a lot of time on their mobile phones and many of them stay at home with their family, watching a Netflix show. So, when choosing the best topics for your content game plan, keyword research is crucial.

Here are the benefits of in-depth keyword research:

  • Keyword research helps you find some keywords with high ranking factors so that you can incorporate them in the articles you’ll be publishing on your blog.
  • By using certain keywords, you’ll save time and effort so you can create relevant content, eliminating guesswork. It means that you’ll be able to answer or provide solutions to the most common questions and concerns of your target audience. You can utilize keyword research tools, like MOZ, Ahrefs’ keyword explorer, or SEMRush, to find the best keyword ideas and answer all questions that your keyword is currently ranking for.
  • Having a core keyword increases your chances of creating evergreen content, so you won’t need to post new topics every day or publish new content every day.
  • Keyword research is a great addition to your other content marketing channels, such as for podcasts or your YouTube videos.

3. Think About Content Elements

The primary web content elements include visuals or images, texts, and audio. Having a good combination and balance of these elements creates a great content core geared towards an effective content marketing strategy. For instance, you can combine video blogging and podcasting together to create an effective social media content strategy to promote your published web content.

Here are the important reasons for paying close attention to your content elements:

  • Images and texts are important when creating content geared to attain organic traffic and even when creating banners for advertising.
  • If you want to transmit a direct message to your audience with a touch of entertainment, visuals, like images and videos, are more effective than texts or words.
  • Visuals can add fresh or new information to your articles, such as charts, graphic representations, screenshots, and infographics.
  • Recording a podcast on interesting topics that your audience loves or starting a video channel on YouTube can increase your traffic and reach. If you target young audiences, audio makes for great content for mobile users.
  • Videos answer questions directly and have greater appeal than reading text because it takes less time to watch videos.

Use Expired Domains And SaaS Testing

Including the use of expired domains in your content marketing game plan is a good idea. Expired domains refer to previously used URLs or websites that were not renewed for some reason. One major benefit of using expired domains is enabling the transfer of link juice or authority from these domains to your main website.

On the other hand, software as a service, or SaaS, refers to a model for licensing and delivery of software that is centrally hosted and availed on a subscription basis. Some examples of SaaS include Google Apps, BigCommerce, Salesforce, Dropbox, ZenDesk, MailChimp, DocuSign, Hubspot, and Slack. With SaaS, you can easily plan, create, and share content without the tedious process of sending emails or fax.

Big companies or enterprises can greatly benefit from including SaaS in their content strategy during this crisis. With Saas testing, you are assured that your content data has backup and is secured in a cloud-based storage system. Why is this important in your content marketing? You want to ensure that all your business data and content plans are kept secured and won’t get leaked to your competitors.

Check out these important things you need to know about SaaS testing:

1. SaaS Versus Traditional Testing

SaaS provides the utmost convenience, accessibility, and affordability. SaaS application evaluators undergo comprehensive testing to enable users to benefit from it and require knowledge about domain names about the application’s configurable and non-configurable components.

Compared to traditional application testing, SaaS testing isn’t affected by a server or client installation, backward compatibility, versioning, or multi-platform testing.

Here are the advantages of SaaS testing as compared to traditional testing:

  • Lower cost of maintenance and application upgrade
  • Less risk for more focus on adopting new innovative ideas
  • Easily accessed via the internet without software installation
  • Pay per use

2. Essential Tips For SaaS Implementation

  • Your business should have a clear objective for choosing SaaS. By doing so, goals are identified at an early stage to achieve the best results.
  • Planning steps and procedures early is important in order to satisfy business requirements and reasons for SaaS implementation.
  • Make sure that the team involved in SaaS implementation has knowledgeable and skilled developers about the SaaS concept, multiple technologies, and the industry’s best practices. IT professionals should be available to provide tech support and documentation during the delivery of software services.
  • Before you sign any contract, make sure that you fully understand the terms and conditions of the Service Level Agreement (SLA).
  • When building the infrastructure, you can set parameters in mind, such as scalability, network bandwidth, security and backup, and recovery.
  • It’s crucial to have a good plan for disaster recovery to ensure that it doesn’t become the reason for discontinuing the application.
  • Establish a customer support call center to deal with questions and concerns after delivering software services.

Conclusion

Now that you’re ready to step up your content game during this COVID-19 pandemic crisis, you can kick start your strategy by resorting to the basics of content marketing. It means creating useful, relevant, and natural content that is made for your target audience and not for search engines.

It also pays off to embrace guest posting or guest blogging to access a wider audience and increase your reach. Also, using expired domains can help you build authority and SaaS testing will keep your website and your business system secured. This will safeguard your content and other sales and marketing plans from your competitors.

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This article has been written by Fabrice

Economist, linguist and investor, Fabrice is the co-founder of Cultures Connection, where he holds the position of Operations Director.