Content marketing is a creative marketing strategy that you can use in your repertoire that is proven to be successful time and time again. Content marketing drives traffic, builds brand awareness, and increases sales.
It’s no secret that content marketing works as a large number of marketers actively invest in content marketing.
But what is content marketing, how does it work, and how can you best implement it in your business? Read more to find out.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the creation and distribution of content online. This includes blog content, newsletters, podcasts, video, images, infographics, social media posts, graphs, and more.
Content marketing is an inbound marketing tactic that drives consumers to you by providing relevant and informative content relating to your business. The goal of content marketing aims to educate and inform viewers within a specified niche.
Once the content is posted online, it can be used to generate leads through organic means (i.e., searching through Google, Facebook posts, hyperlinking). These posts might generate interest among potential customers, who then share them or use them for their own means.
Content marketing contrasts with outbound advertising methods such as PPC campaigns and advertisements designed to place an ad in front of viewers. Content marketing encourages visitors to use the information posted readily online; this would, in turn, give visitors time to become more interested in your product and to grow brand awareness over time.
How Content Marketing Helps Grow Sales
Content marketing is a powerful tool for growing revenue. It increases web traffic and builds brand awareness while providing your consumers with valuable information.
Providing valuable content can intrigue your target audience, converting them from readers to buyers. More and more customers will be drawn to your brand as you produce quality content consistently. As you provide your customers with more valuable information, they will learn to rely on your brand above others. This will lead to an increase in sales as they become loyal customers.
The more a customer learns about your business, the more likely they are to buy from it. Providing them with informative or educational content adds value to your company, and readers learn why it’s important for them to purchase your product or service. All in all, quality content leads to more traffic, which leads to more conversions.
But content alone will not provide results.
According to Hubspot, over half of shoppers say they use Google to research products before purchasing. We all use Google, but how many of us actually look past the first page?
Quality content and search engine optimization (SEO) need to work hand-in-hand to improve the visibility of your content. It’s simple—SEO boosts the ranking of your webpage. The easier people can find your website, the more traffic you will get!
Marketing expert Neil Patel also suggests that 75% of Google searchers never look past the first page. When you optimize your website using SEO tactics, your website is more likely to show up on the first page of a potential customer’s search results and in the eyes of viewers.
4 Reasons Why You Should Invest in Content Marketing
FACT: content marketing increases web traffic and sales. Here are a few reasons why businesses should consider investing in content marketing.
More Leads
Simply put, content marketing will give you more leads (potential customers) for less cost. Content marketing produces 3x more leads per dollar than traditional marketing! It also costs 62% less than traditional marketing! It’s a win-win!
94% percent of entrepreneurs exclaimed that the leads produced by their content marketing efforts were either excellent or good quality.
Keep up With Your Competition
INSIDER TIP: Check the SEO keywords that your competitors are using and find new keywords that outrank theirs.
Not only do you want your site to be on the first page, but wouldn’t it be great if your site outranked your competitors’?
It’s likely that your competitors have already implemented a content strategy (as 70% of marketers use content marketing). Making original content and effectively using SEO keywords is a great way to outrank your competition in the Google search engine.
Establish Your Brand as an Industry Leader
When you write authoritative content, you can establish your brand as a leader in the industry. By sharing insider tips and tricks with your consumers, you create engaging content that tells customers that your company knows what it’s talking about.
This will create consumer loyalty as more and more customers recognize and choose your brand above others in your field.
Content writing also creates brand awareness. More content will result in more traffic. The more traffic you have, the more consumers will familiarize themselves with your brand and look to your brand when seeking the products and services you provide.
How to Start Content Marketing for Your Business
So, how do you get started? You can’t begin content writing before you have a content marketing plan. To make a content strategy plan, you first need to identify your marketing goals and determine your target audience.
Identify Your Content Marketing Goals
Blog with a purpose!
What business objective does your content marketing strategy need to align with? What you want to achieve could be specific to each topic, but you must also think about the bigger picture. Ask yourself how each marketing task feeds into the larger content marketing goal.
Make sure your goals are SMART goals. These are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
Here are some key things to keep in mind to ensure that your goals are SMART goals:
- The more specific you get with your goals, the more you will attain a sense of direction for your marketing team to take.
- With measurable goals, you will know what marketing steps to take and when.
- If you are biting off more than you can chew and your goals are not attainable, you will not achieve them.
- Ask yourself if your marketing strategy and your marketing needs aligning.
- When do you want to achieve your goals? How often are you taking steps to get there?
Reasonable content marketing goals include:
- Generating more traffic.
- Supporting PPC campaigns.
- Creating content to share on social media platforms.
- Building brand awareness.
Creating content is the best way to increase traffic for a new website. It’s also important to consider how your audience will access your content.
How will your audience find you? Will they find your content through your use of SEO keywords? Or are you using social media marketing, on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn? Great content and your other marketing efforts won’t increase revenue if your target audience can’t find your site.
Identify Your Target Audience
You can’t start writing until you determine who you are writing for. So who is your target audience, and how do you identify them? You can’t convert a potential customer without marketing content towards their needs.
To identify your target audience, look at your most valuable leads (your repeat loyal customers). These are the people who are most likely to purchase your product or service. Identify your consumer’s primary demographics by examining common behavioral patterns.
Analyzing your competition will also help you determine your target audience. Look at who your competition is marketing to, and then sell to the same audience, offering high valued products and services at competitive prices. Examine their content marketing strategy and take note of the content topics they are writing. You can use this data for inspiration!
Create a Landing Page
Your landing page needs to tell your audience what your company stands for and the services you provide, or the products you sell. It must also be easy to navigate. You don’t want your audience to spend 10 minutes looking for your products!
Not everyone can create a successful website. Consider hiring a web development team and a graphic designer to make sure your website is efficient, operable, and has a design that will appeal to your target audience. Experts that specialize in digital marketing can create graphics to optimize the design for your brand.
It’s also important to consider what you want your audience to do on your page once they’ve found it. Here are some key questions to ask yourself when designing your website.
- What profitable customer action do you have set up on your page?
- Do you have links to products or services embedded in your content?
- Do you want your audience to sign up for your newsletter?
- Mostly, what calls to action are on your website?
It’s essential to set up calls to action to convert readers into customers.
Creating Your Blogging Strategy
FACT: 89% of content marketers used blog posts in their content creation strategy in 2020.
Chances are, you will need to incorporate blogging as part of your content marketing strategy.
Relevance is key! Try to plan topics that speak directly to your needs. It’s essential to keep up to date on the latest news in your industry. When you keep up with new trends and developments in the industry and how companies implement these ideas, you can join in on the conversation through content writing.
Reach out to the leaders in your industry and ask to interview them. Their expertise will add value to your content, and their audience will follow them to your site, increasing traffic. Sharing the leader’s insights will also solidify your credibility.
When gathering resources, it’s important to note that original, creative content is key. This will generate more empathy from your audience and separate you from your competitors. You can find more tips on what to write about here.
Content Writers and Content Marketing Agencies
You might consider delegating content marketing to one of your employees. However, appointing a writing task to an employee without writing experience could be detrimental to your company. If your content does not have value, people won’t go to your site.
If you do not have an experienced content writer and marketer in your company, you may want to consider hiring a content marketing agency. An agency can help you determine how often you should post, the length of the posts, the content topics, and implementing SEO keywords.
Content marketing agencies have years of experience! They know the best practices and latest trends in content writing and are better equipped to handle multiple content projects at once than someone without the experience.
Hiring an agency removes the excess responsibility of content writing from you and your employees and makes for an overall smoother process for content marketing. That way, your content marketing strategy can be running in the background to let you focus on your business!
Click here to learn more about the okwrite content marketing agency and how okwrite can address your content marketing needs.
