Generating relevant and interesting content to build customer loyalty has never been more important.

Whether you are producing content for a blog, white paper, website, video, app, magazine article or for social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Linked in, you will need to have an ongoing strategy for developing content that is of interest to your customers.

How can it work for you?
Content marketing is about creating and sharing your valuable knowledge with customers. We all know a lot about our own business sector, products, services and related topics; therefore by freely sharing that knowledge you are developing a wider relationship and interacting with your customers.

A good example of this integrated approach is a blog. Adding content to your website via a blog has many advantages:

1. If you have a blog on your website and post regular articles, not only does the blog provide useful information for your visitors, but it will improve the page rank of your website on search engines.
2. New content shows search engines that your website is being regularly updated, again good for page rank.
3. Search engines will "crawl" the new content in your posts, which have the potential to show up in online searches.
4. By allowing readers to comment on your blog, they can leave a message against your post, which may be useful for market research and customer insight.
5. Link your blog to Twitter, Facebook and Linked in and gain backlinks to your site.
6. More visitors to your website will help to improve page rank.
7. Circulate your latest blog posts via a monthly email to your customers and prospects list.
8. Provide an option for visitors to subscribe to your blog to receive notification of new posts.

Whichever method you choose to communicate with your audience, it is important that the content is useful, interesting and informative and does not sell.

Well written content can improve the position of your website in search engine rankings; poor content can alienate your readers and have an adverse effect on your ranking.

The same rules apply to case studies, videos and press articles; think about what content your readers would be interested in and decide on the best way to communicate with them.

Mark Langston