Content Marketing for Your Gaming Website

According to HubSpot, "70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing." Content marketing, as a whole, aims to fill a website and its connected platforms with content that intrigues, engages, and ultimately educates readers on important news and updates in your industry. For a gaming website, this means your content strategy may include everything from game reviews to behind-the-scenes interviews with developers, first-looks at upcoming game launches, and information about gaming industry events.

Of course, you can produce content covering some or all of these topics without a strategy, so why do you need one? A content marketing strategy ensures you're hitting on the right topics at the right time. Since your strategy will be backed by in-depth research into your audience, along with their pain points, interests, and the challenges they face in the customer journey, a strategy will make each piece you publish more robust.

Sound complicated? WordStream puts it this way: "A pain point is a specific problem that prospective customers of your business are experiencing." With a content marketing strategy, there's no sitting down and wasting time trying to figure out what to cover or if your audience will care. Instead, every move is highly researched and calculated, allowing you to see consistent performance by publishing great content often, not just on your website but on social media and all other platforms you want to reach your audience through.

The results? Your audience begins to view you as a thought leader in the niche because you're directly speaking to their interests and not parroting what all the other websites are doing. Unique perspectives, original content, and a writing style that speaks to their needs and concerns allows you to nurture them into qualified leads and, ultimately, get them to convert with less hands-on work from your sales team.

Not convinced that content marketing is a smart move for your gaming website? Consider the following benefits that will ultimately save you time and money, and get you more customers, if you invest the time into creating a content marketing strategy.

If your gaming website currently doesn't perform well when it comes to search engine rankings, you're likely either dealing with sporadic traffic when a post does perform well or you're having to spend money on ads in order to consistently drive traffic to your website. In either case, you're not getting as many leads as you want to be, and those you are getting, you're probably paying for in the form of an ad.

There's no doubt that SEO is a complex game, and that's all the more reason to invest in a content marketing strategy. After all, in order to create your content strategy, you have to do two things: perform in-depth keyword research and understand the type of content your audience interacts with the most. All the while, your strategy is keeping you focused on delivering high-value content to your readers rather than plugging your products and services every other paragraph.

By nature, a content marketing strategy will improve your rankings -- along with user engagement and conversion rates -- because it caters to your audience and their interests. Google says it themselves: "Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site."

While it takes time for a content piece to earn a ranking, investing in content marketing means you'll begin seeing results a few months down the road and continue to see results for as long as you continue developing your strategy alongside on-page SEO strategies. Soon, you'll also begin seeing good websites link to your site and perhaps be able to earn featured snippets.

Ready to create a content marketing strategy that offers a real boost to your gaming website? Follow these steps to ensure it's effective.

Before you continue creating any content on behalf of your brand, it's essential that you ensure its consistency by creating a brand book. A brand book is a valuable asset that basically sums up who your brand is, the colors it uses, the phrasing it uses, the people it wants to reach, and so on.

Say you're outsourcing to a content writer or a marketer: Giving them your brand book is the only thing you'll have to do to inform them on how they should represent your gaming website. If that doesn't sound like a big deal, remember that consistency is key in branding. If your brand doesn't have content with a consistent voice and style, readers will rarely begin to associate your content with reliability and authority.

Whenever your brand "speaks" to its audience, be it through customer service or on Facebook, it's essential that everyone talking on behalf of your brand knows how you want to make customers feel, the words and terms they should and shouldn't use, and the overall writing style they need to adopt. Your brand book puts all of that information in one place for easy reference.

Chances are, you have a pretty good idea of who your readers should be. You might be targeted young gamers in high school and college, for example, or maybe you're targeting parents who are making game decisions for their young children. While that might seem like a good start, it's not nearly enough to build an informed content strategy.

In order to reap all of the benefits discussed early, your content has to be understanding of your audience's pain points, customer journey, and the questions they have. To know all of those things, you're going to have to take a deep dive into who your audience really is. This means creating at least one customer persona representing your ideal reader. Most companies end up creating 2-3 customer personas since there's diversity in every audience.

Once you have your customer personas in hand, you'll have a better understanding of when and where they consume content, the type of content they interact with the most, and what they're actually looking for. With this solid foundation, you'll be able to build a content strategy that truly works.

Once you know who your audience is, you'll be able to answer important questions like what social media platforms they use. You'll also be able to discover valuable insights into the type of content they prefer to consume, like videos and articles, and plan your content accordingly. This will inform the next step in your content marketing strategy, which is to create a content calendar.

A content calendar is basically a schedule that summarizes when you're going to publish content on each platform and what format that content will be. For instance, if you want to publish an article on your blog three times per week, your content calendar will specify the days it will go live. Meanwhile, if you want to start a podcast, your content calendar will specify if it's a weekly or monthly podcast and on what day you plan to release it.

Other things you should include in your content calendar are social media posts, and whether they're text, video, a poll, or something else. Also, schedule in your email newsletter or any other content you intend to produce. This includes marketing campaigns and more, so you have your full content plan in one place, showing the overlap and gaps. Case studies and other content should also be scheduled.

This visual representation of your content schedule will ultimately help you stay consistent with your publishing while also determining just how far your existing resources can stretch. Ideally, you'll start small and scale up rather than spreading yourself too thin by trying to be active on every social media platform under the sun. In other words, your content calendar will help you establish your content priorities.

While you may feel like the last two steps were plenty research-intensive, the fact is, a content marketing strategy is 100% research into your target audience. There are no blind guesses around here. Fortunately, all the research you've already done will further inform your next research project, which involves finding the keywords and topics your audience is looking for.

Long-tail keywords with high search volume help reveal the topics your audience cares about. Meanwhile, targeting those topics also can increase organic traffic to your website, making it a real win/win. Use tools like Google Analytics to dive into your audience's search habits and determine which topics are worth creating content around. In the gaming industry, a lot of content isn't evergreen, like announcements for an upcoming game, so consider the timeframe when planning your content.

Of course, as you plan your content, you should also consider the format it will be best represented in. Should it be a blog post or a video? Is it worth talking about on your podcast? Is it big news that you should cover on multiple platforms? Those are the questions you'll ultimately be asking yourself as you plug topics into your content schedule. Always think back to your audience and their preferences when making those decisions.