Content marketing uses the power of content to attract, engage and retain an audience for a brand. This content can come in various forms, such as articles, videos, podcasts, etc.
The outstanding long-term success of content marketing and why it should not be underestimated is due to the fact that this type of marketing strategy shows a brand’s expertise in its field of activity and introduces it to potential customers.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the essence of content marketing and building a successful content strategy that benefits your business and makes people view your company as a long-term trusted partner.
What is content marketing
Content marketing is marketing that relies on quality content.
This strategic marketing approach is by no means a novelty but an old and tested way to capture consumers’ attention and convert them into customers.
Content marketing focuses on creating relevant and consistent content targeted at a clearly defined audience to drive them to action and bring profit to your business.
This is the main reason why content marketing is so important. Quality content created by your brand will make consumers want to keep in touch with it regularly. To seek it out themselves. And when they’re ready to buy, to choose it.
What types of content marketing are there?
Content marketing can be any content you create, including:
Blog posts
Articles
Videos
Infographics
Social media posts
Emails and Newsletters
This content has the primary purpose of stimulating audience interest in a company’s product or service without overtly promoting or prompting a purchase. Successfully applied content marketing does not look like advertising and is not intrusive.
It could be assumed that this type of marketing does not generate a profit due to the lack of a direct offer to buy. But in fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Quality content helps in many aspects of a business. The bottom line is that if your brand brings value to its audience, it will “allow” it to interact with it and build a relationship. Moreover, the brand will be in the audience’s mind when they are ready to purchase a product or service in the area where it operates. And when the time comes to make that purchase, your brand will be chosen over the competition.
Content – significance and what components it includes
Nowadays, nearly 68% of people spend time reading and exploring brands that intrigue them. In fact, online consumers spend 20% of their time viewing content. And businesses with blogs receive about 67% more inquiries than other companies. These are just some of the impressive data from content marketing research in recent years. You can see other interesting stats about content marketing in this fun infographic.
Why is content marketing so important? Because it helps a business build trust and credibility with its target audience, generate leads, improve customer retention, and drive conversions.
It’s a cost-effective marketing strategy that allows businesses to engage with their customers on a personal level, addressing their needs, wants, and challenges.
It’s often mistakenly thought that content marketing is simply regularly posting short pieces or a few social media posts.
But content marketing is much more than that. It must be implemented under a well-developed content strategy to successfully accomplish all those tasks mentioned above.
It includes the following steps:
Define your goals
Start by identifying your business goals and how content marketing can help you achieve them. Goals may include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, driving traffic to the website, or increasing customer engagement.
Understand who your audience is
Research your target audience to understand their needs, preferences and pain points. Create so-called buyer personas to help you tailor your content to their interests and needs. It’s possible to have not one “buyer persona” but two or three, but you should always consider whether you’ll be able to meet the needs of each. If you create too many personas, you may not have the capacity to meet the demand of each one.
Plan content
Develop a plan that outlines the topics, formats and channels you will use to reach your audience. You can use a calendar with dates and a content plan for each format. This will allow you to follow the overall planned content and clearly visualize if it works well together. Also, it will facilitate the process of uploading the content in any format.
Audit old content
Many businesses don’t use existing website content, which can be of great benefit. Review your existing content to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.
Create new, improved content according to your goals
Create new high-quality, engaging content that meets the needs and interests of your audience. And remember – it must be in the appropriate format for the channel in which it will be distributed.
Distribute and promote content
Share your content across multiple platforms, such as your website, blog, social media and email newsletters. Use targeted promotion strategies to reach a wider audience and drive traffic to your content.
Measure and analyze results
Track the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts using analytics tools. Analyze data to determine what types of content resonate with your audience. For example, which type of content attracted the new newsletter subscribers or which social media posts were shared or commented on the most?
Regularly measuring and analyzing results will allow you to see if your strategy is successful and make adjustments as needed. This will ensure you use content marketing effectively and have built a well-functioning, successful strategy.
Content strategy – benefits
Quality content, with a well-crafted content strategy, should give the audience a sense that the brand has expertise in its field and that it values the people it sells to.
Content marketing must maintain that delicate balance of an expert who informs without intruding on constant calls to buy. If the balance is disturbed, it risks becoming a source of constant spam for people to end up disassociating with the brand.
A successful content strategy nurtures good relationships with existing and prospective customers. A strategy that succeeds in making them believe in the fact that the company is their partner who cares about their success and is always available for advice or guidance.
All these elements of content marketing, which establish a friendly relationship between a customer and a brand, increase the likelihood that the customer will choose the brand when it is time to buy.
The benefits of a good quality content marketing strategy are:
Increased brand recognition
Engaging content helps build brand visibility and increase awareness of its products or services. This makes it more easily recognizable to potential customers.
Improved search engine rankings
Content creation is a key component of website optimization. It can improve your company website’s search engine rankings when it is of very high quality and with well-chosen topic-relevant keywords. This will naturally drive more organic traffic to your site.
Greater customer engagement
One of the biggest benefits of content marketing following a good content strategy is that it encourages interaction between your brand and your audience. And this leads to increased brand loyalty.
Higher conversions
Relevant and informative content can help guide your audience early in the sales process. You’ll have increased conversions and sales when your audience goes through all the steps of this process (or that sales funnel you’ve guided them into with your content marketing strategy).
Cost-effective marketing
Content marketing involving quality content is extremely cost-effective. This is because it’s more affordable than traditional advertising methods, but at the same time, it leads to a higher long-term return on investment. Well-planned and written by a copywriter, quality content can benefit a business for years to come. You can learn how this happens with the help of an experienced team here.
Better customer retention
Providing quality content regularly can keep your existing customers engaged, keep them following your brand and encourage a repeat purchase decision.
The article explained why content marketing is essential and how to properly incorporate a content strategy for your business that will bring you long-term benefits and profits.
If you want to harness the power of content marketing but need help figuring out where to start and what your content strategy should include, the CreateX team is here to help.
