How Content Marketing Can Help Your Business
- August 28, 2023
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Since the marketing world changes quickly, businesses have to adjust their marketing efforts to stay competitive. This includes leveraging different marketing strategies, such as content marketing.
Content marketing has been growing steadily for the past couple of years. You might have heard every content marketer say that, “Content is King.” This popular phrase was actually coined by Bill Gates in his 1996 essay, wherein, he also mentioned that most of the money made on the internet will come from content alone.
And over two decades later, this statement still holds true, proving that content marketing is an extremely powerful marketing strategy that you can use to grow your business. In fact, its importance cannot be overstated, especially now that digital marketing has become the norm.
Getting started with content marketing may seem simple. If you do a quick search on the internet, there are many articles that can give you a complete guide on how to generate different types of content or even a list of content marketing strategies that you can employ right away. Nevertheless, reading through everything can sometimes feel overwhelming.
To help you out with this, we’ll cover all the details bit by bit in this article, so keep reading to find out what content marketing is and how content marketing works.
What Content Marketing Is All About
To put it simply, content marketing is the process of creating, publishing and utilizing content to build brand awareness, connect with a targeted audience and improve conversion rate. It provides useful, and interesting information that keeps the crowd engaged. For this reason, content marketing is usually associated with inbound marketing.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that concentrates on attracting potential customers by delivering content and experiences tailored to them. Unlike outbound marketing, in which audiences are interrupted with content they don’t need or want, inbound marketingtyle=”font-weight: 400;”> utilizes pull marketing strategies to draw attention and drive traffic to a website. Essentially, it is very similar to content marketing
Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing
There is always a connection between content marketing and inbound marketing. Each of these tactics focuses on satisfying the interests and needs of the targeted audience. However, despite their similarities, each strategy includes different activities.
Content marketing focuses on content creation and publication of quality content through a blog post, social media site or any other online medium without obviously promoting a brand or service. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, involves targeting and engaging customers to take an action, such as making a purchase or signing up for an email list. It involves various activities such as white paper, (SEO) search engine optimization
Basically, inbound marketing is an umbrella term that covers content marketing. It is a broad business methodology that includes other pull-marketing strategies that creates brand awareness, targets consumers and spurs sales by delivering them highquality content.
Is Content Marketing Important?
There is no doubt that content marketing is important since it enables businesses to produce engaging content that creates connections with potential clients, builds trust while increasing their conversion rates. Apart from this, it offers a number of other benefits that work wonders for the business, some of which we will discuss in the next section.
Reasons Why Content Marketing Matters
Perhaps successful content marketers will never tire of explaining why content marketing matters. Its significant benefits speak for themselves, which explains why it has become an essential marketing strategy today – and every traditional marketer will probably agree. To give you a better understanding of content marketing and its advantages, here is a closer look at a few of them.
Build an Audience
In content marketing, you can easily build an audience by focusing on developing valuable content based on the specific needs or interests of your potential customers. You can use simple visual content, a blog post or even an informative video content to reach your targeted audience.
Increase Brand Awareness
Content marketing can be a smart way to boost brand awareness. You can use it to easily capture the attention of every potential client by developing different types of content that is useful and interesting and which they can share with others, thus effortlessly increasing your brand awareness.
Develop Trust and Loyalty
Content marketing allows you to build relationships with your prospective clients. You can establish trust and loyalty with your customers by providing them with engaging and factual content. You can also take advantage of user generated content such as reviews, images or posts. Audiences will find it authentic and believe they are being seen as well.
Boost Conversion Rates
When done correctly, content marketing can significantly boost your conversion rate
Improve Visibility on Search Engines
Aside from utilizing the right seo tools in your marketing strategy, content marketing can also improve your visibility in search engines. In fact, search engine optimization and content marketing work well together. Search engines such as Google love relevant and fresh content, which is why you will rank higher when you consistently publish these kinds of write-ups.
These are only a few reasons why content marketing is worth your investment. Furthermore, content marketing is relatively inexpensive compared with other marketing strategies, which is why so many marketers and business owners are leveraging it.
Is Content Marketing Effective?
A number of case studies have shown that content marketing is definitely effective. For example, one particular statistic indicates that businesses that use content marketing see a 5X increase in sales at a 62% lower cost than traditional marketing. Not only that, another case study by Tiger Fitness shows that they got a 60% returning customer rate with video content marketing. Data like these clearly show that content marketing delivers results worth taking a chance on.
Getting Started with Content Marketing
Content creation and publication can seem like daunting tasks. Aside from thinking about what and how to write quality pieces of content, you also need to implement effective content marketing strategies to ensure that your write-ups reach your targeted audience. Before diving deeper on this, let’s first understand how content marketing works.
How Content Marketing Works
Basically, content marketing works by providing your audience with valuable content that keeps them engaged and motivates them to continue down the sales funnel. The typical perception is that content marketing only involves writing a blog post, but in reality, there’s a lot more to it.
Different Types of Content Marketing
There are many different types of content that you can utilize depending on your needs and the interests of your targeted audience. Here are a few examples:
Infographics Content
Infographics are visual content that combines design, writing and analysis. It enables you to present information that is both powerful and attractive. Aside from this, infographics content enables your audience to scan through the contents without having to read through a lot of text, making it an efficient way of generating shares on every social media platform. Most often, this type of visual content marketing is used in the business world or education, but it can be applied to just about any field if it is done properly.
Social Media Content
Social media content marketing is probably a no-brainer, because even a simple social media post with a well thought out caption is already a form of content marketing. And since pretty much everyone uses social media, it is a great way to connect with your targeted audience. Also, it allows you to directly communicate with your potential clients, which in turn helps you build a relationship with them. Social media content marketing can also lead to more sales through better conversion rates and lead generation since it easily influences your audience to take action.
Blog Content
As we all know, blogging is a simple, easy way to create and publish content since it doesn’t require any expensive or complex tools to do so. Because of this, blogging is most likely the go-to content marketing strategy for small businesses and alike. Moreover, blog content marketing can be a cost-effective way of boosting your organic traffic when you optimize your write-ups for search engine optimization. This form of content can also be repurposed in any marketing channel applicable in order to ensure that your targeted audience is reached.
Video Content
Video content marketing is probably all the rage at the moment, especially on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. That is mainly because viewers are able to digest content in bite-sized chunks, which is more preferable in today’s fast-paced world. Additionally, video marketing allows you to develop diverse types of content in your field and create informative yet entertaining content at the same time. The type of video content marketing you use can range from product demos to user-generated content to thank you videos.
Podcast Content
Podcast content marketing can be seen as an evolution of radio broadcasting. It is an episodic series of recorded audio or video files that are available on streaming and podcast applications such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Similar to video content, podcasts have become one of the most popular types of content these days. This is because audiences find it convenient because it allows them to easily consume valuable information while doing other things, such as driving a car or cooking. The massive popularity of podcasts these days makes podcast content marketing the perfect way to reach your target audience.
These are just some of the content marketing methods available. Keep your target audience in mind when you’re starting out, because your content strategies won’t be effective if you don’t reach them. In the end, it’s best to do your own research to figure out what form of content marketing will work well for you because there are many types available.
Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Regardless of which type of content marketing you will implement, developing an effective content marketing strategy is crucial. It can make or break your overall marketing plan which is why you need to make time for it. To help you get started, here’s a simple beginner’s guide on how you can create a content marketing strategy that will benefit your business.
Establish your content marketing goals
Establishing your goals first allows you to easily pinpoint the steps that need to be taken to achieve them rather than trying to guess your way around it. Here are some content marketing goals to consider:
- Develop brand loyalty
- Increase brand awareness
- Build customer engagement
- Lead generation
Identify your target audience
It’s important to identify your target audience so that you can create content that will captivate them. You can conduct market research to better understand the needs and interests of your customers. In this way, you can determine the right types of content you should start creating.
Determine your voice
Assess your brand and determine your voice to ensure that you stand out from the competition. You can either sound friendly, passive or active, depending on the personality and style of your brand. Always make sure to create original content for your targeted audience as much as possible.
Create and schedule
Once everything is set up, you can begin creating content. Try to brainstorm ideas and conduct a quick SEO search to find keywords that can help you optimize your content. Additionally, if you want to do things more efficiently, consider utilizing scheduling tools to help you stay on top of your commitments.
The number of steps will likely depend on your plan. There may be other aspects to consider, such as the form of content you prefer, the distribution channel and the marketing objectives you have. Nevertheless, just keep in mind that these are just general tips to help you kickstart content marketing. Just keep an eye on your goals and be consistent when producing high quality content. Likewise, review your marketing efforts now and then to ensure they are effective and you are not wasting resources.
In conclusion, content marketing is an obvious choice for any business to optimize their presence and increase their sales, which is why it is at the core of digital marketing. And there is no doubt that content marketing is one of the most beneficial forms of marketing today.