Last Updated on May 1, 2024 by Hanson Cheng
They say “content is king” and it should most probably rule over the world of your marketing strategy. Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to build your brand and grow your business. The right content can help you to attract new customers, improve your search engine rankings, increase sales and boost brand awareness. And that’s exactly why it should be in the core of your marketing strategy.
But how exactly? Let’s check some important insights and tips.
How Content Marketing is Driving Business Success
Content marketing is the cornerstone of digital marketing. It allows you to reach a larger audience, build relationships with customers, and establish yourself as an expert in your field. And while it’s true that content marketing takes time to develop and implement effectively, the results are well worth it—and they can provide a boost to your business in the short term as well.
Sometimes numbers speaks louder than words, so the following statistics will be a prove of the power of content creation in marketing.
- Traditional marketing is 62% more expensive than content marketing, which also produces nearly three times as many leads.
- When compared to non-adopters, conversion rates for content marketing are over six times greater (2.9% vs. 0.5%).
- 82% of bloggers in marketing report successful inbound marketing results.
At the same time, as content marketing is a complicated system, the following are some of its most crucial components:
- Generation of content
- Distribution of content
- Promotion of content
- Content analytics and measurement
- Content optimization
Each element is significant in its own way and contributes in a unique way to the overall marketing plan and the growth of the business. That’s why it’s so important to trust your content strategy and implementation to professions for the best possible results and for oviding unwanted outcomes. Making sure to partner with someone who offers captivating content production is definitely a game changer! It’s no surprise that 64% of B2B marketers choose to outsource their writing.
However, no matter if you decide to partner with professionals or prepare our content marketing strategy by yourself, here are some useful tips to help you along the way.
Define Your Buyer’s Journey
It’s important to define your buyer’s journey and understand the different stages of their purchasing process. The first step is to identify your target audience, then determine how they move through the buying process. Here are some common factors that influence people along the path to purchase:
- Awareness – When someone recognizes a need or problem, but hasn’t yet decided what action to take (or if they need a solution at all).
- Consideration – When someone is actively looking for information about options and comparing those options against each other to determine which one best fits their needs. This stage also includes shopping research—checking out products and services online before visiting an outlet store in person.
- Conversion – When someone commits to buying something after doing research online (or in person), but still might change their mind before making an actual purchase with cash or credit card.
Define your buyer’s journey by mapping out each step of this process so you can identify opportunities where content marketing can help move prospects closer toward conversion.
Create High Qualty And Targeted Content
Content marketing isn’t just a buzzword—it’s an essential part of how companies market their products and services.
The most effective companies in the world are using content marketing to engage with prospects, customers, and employees alike. They’re creating meaningful content—articles, videos, podcasts—that addresses specific problems.
Content marketing is about more than just creating good articles or videos. It’s about developing content that solves a problem for your audience in a way that will directly impact your business goals.
Make sure your articles are high quality by researching the topic thoroughly, including interviewing experts if necessary. Also make sure they’re useful by answering questions that people actually have on social media or elsewhere online.
Here are some tips for creating great content:
- Create valuable, unique, and informative content that earns links from other sites. If you create something truly unique, people will want to link to it because they’ll find it useful for their readers. In fact, this is the best way to get high-quality links from other sites — by offering them something of value in return.
- Use social media channels like Facebook and Twitter as part of your strategy. Build an audience on those platforms so that when you publish new content there, they’ll be interested in reading it and sharing it with their friends. That way, you’ll reach more people than if you were just posting links on your site.
- Use tools like Google Analytics to track how well each piece of content performs so that you know what’s working best for driving traffic (and sales).
Define the Channels You Will Use to Distribute Content
Next, you’ll want to define the channels you will use to distribute content. This can include social media, email and blogs. There is no one channel that works best for everyone; it’s all about what type of audience you’re trying to reach. For example, if you’re targeting millennials and Gen Zers on Instagram as a brand, then this is definitely where your focus should be. However, if your target customer base is older than 45 years old and they don’t have any interest in following influencers on Instagram but do love reading blogs on platforms like Medium or LinkedIn then those are great places for distributing your content as well!
Pro tip: Make sure you have a plan for each channel before starting the process of creating content because without it things can get pretty messy quickly. Your plan needs to outline who will create what kind of content for each platform; how often will new pieces come out? How long should they be? Who will publish them? All these questions need answers before starting anything else so think carefully about how big of an initiative this is going to be before committing too much time or money into it!
Create a Process to Measure and Analyze Results
You’ll need to measure the results of your content marketing strategy, and you can do so by setting up a process for measuring and analyzing these results. You can use this information to make adjustments or take steps to improve your strategy.
There are many ways you can measure the impact of content marketing on your business, including through social media engagement and website traffic. The exact metrics you use will depend on what matters most to you and your goals.
Pay Close Attention to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or webpage in search engines. It’s an important part of content marketing because it helps you to reach new customers. SEO is not a quick fix; it takes time and effort to get your site ranked highly in search results on Google, Yahoo and more.
SEO is important for your Google ranking, website traffic, conversion rates and brand reputation. It’s also important for your business growth.
As statistics show:
- 60% of search users click on organic results rather than paid links in Google Search Results.
- 90% of users never scroll past the first page of search results when searching online.
At the same time, if you want to earn a place on Google’s first page, you need to take a closer look at how Google crawls your site and ranks its pages in search results.
The key thing to understand about Google is that it’s trying to mimic human behavior… It wants to make sure that people who use its search engine are able to find what they’re looking for easily.
This means two things:
- A keyword should be relevant and accurately describe the content you are creating. For example, if your article is about how an ICO can help a small business raise funds, a keyword like “ICO” is not relevant because it doesn’t mention your small business specifically. Instead, you would want to use something like “Small Business ICO”.
- Your content should be created in such a way that it answers the needs of your audience as well as providing value for them (for example by providing information on how an ICO can help their businesses).
Now Google crawls all sorts of content including audio, video and images. However, it still relies heavily on text content and metadata when categorizing pages on the web. And you business should incorporate all of these aspects into your overall marketing strategy for an ensured success and fast growth.
How to Get Started
Content marketing is a powerful tool for building brand awareness and trust. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t take full advantage of it. They don’t know where to start, or how to distribute their content so it reaches the right audience.
Here’s a guide for how to get started with content marketing:
- Define your target audience
- Create an editorial calendar
- Determine what type of content you need (blog posts, videos, infographics)
- Build a publishing schedule based on your editorial calendar and target audience’s needs and interests (i.e., when they’re most likely to consume your content)
- Distribute your content on the right channels at the right times based on that schedule and your target audience’s needs and interests (i.e., when they’re most likely to consume your content).