You have a business, and you want to grow it, but how? Content marketing is one of the best ways. It's an effective way to create content that will attract your target audience while also bringing in leads and sales!
In this blog post, we'll cover why content marketing is so important for your business—no matter what industry you're in or the size of the company you work for.
1. What is content marketing, and how does it work?
First of all, content marketing is simply providing valuable content to your target audience. There are various definitions of content marketing and one of them came from Marketo which defines content marketing as "marketing that involves the creation and sharing of content to engage, inform, persuade, or motivate a targeted audience."
That being said content marketing has some goals. This includes:
- To attract users to your website;
- To make them click on links in an article; and
- Make more sales through quality content (website content).
Content marketing lets you help your target audience solve their problems. By providing content, you'll get more traffic to your website because people will search for information related to what they need and find it on your site—which means these are the customers who could potentially become leads or sales!
Your content can be in various forms like blog posts, videos, or even infographics! You can create helpful content with webinars and white papers as well.
The idea is for people to learn who you are and what you stand for, as well as why they should be interested in your company.
2. The benefits of content marketing
Optin Monster in an article claimed that content marketing is being used by 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers.
This is due to content marketing's ability to provide numerous benefits including the following:
- Building trust between your brand and customers;
- Creating quality backlinks for SEO purposes;
- Driving traffic toward your site or blog posts; and
- Ultimately improving your conversion rate.
Content marketing is a great way to build brand awareness and drive traffic toward your website or blog posts—it can provide you with numerous benefits that will help grow your business exponentially.
With content marketing, your audience will get excited when they see new content from your company because it's relevant to their needs (and yours!). This way, not only do you become a thought leader within your industry but potential customers start looking at you as an expert.
Customers will also start to trust your content because they can gauge that it's relevant and valuable to them.
Furthermore, you get a chance to build strong relationships with customers through content marketing. And content helps you learn more about who your ideal customer is— so you know how best to target them in the future!
3. Why should you invest in content marketing for your business
By creating content, you're not just building brand awareness, but increasing visibility within different search engine results in pages (SERPs).
This establishes your authority and attracts new prospects from all over the world to learn more about what your company has to offer.
It doesn't matter if content marketing isn't your only investment. Simply investing time and resources into content will help inform other content-related decisions that are meant for business growth.
Content should be used as a foundation for every single digital marketing effort. At the end of it all, content marketing will boost your brand's presence and help you engage with customers.
Businesses must begin to invest time into creating quality pieces of content before they can expect big returns on their investment (ROI). It is only through this phase where marketers know what works and doesn't work for their business.
4. How to create a plan for your content marketing campaign
Content marketing is more than just content creation. A content strategy requires planning, research, and promotion as well to achieve business goals.
For example: if you are trying to get a foot in the door of new markets or expand your brand's reach online — content can help with that too! You can use content to target specific audiences based on their interests and demographics (e.g., content about social media influencers).
The key here is that you need good content strategies for each piece of content to work together towards common goals across all platforms— not just individual success stories everywhere else.
A content marketing plan may include things like:
Content creation
This is the actual content that you share on your channels. This includes things like blog posts, email marketing campaigns, videos, and podcasts, social media updates, etc.
Content promotion
Getting people to notice all of the great content you are publishing daily/weekly/monthly can be a challenge! You will want to make sure you have a content promotion strategy in place. This may include things like email outreach, social media advertising, etc.
Analysis
Measuring your results is crucial to ensure that what you are doing has the desired outcome and then adjusting it for future campaigns
Content creation process
As an entrepreneur or marketer, this can often be one of the most challenging parts of the content marketing process. Most companies do not have a large team at their disposal and you will be doing many of these tasks yourself, so this requires time management skills and organization to complete all your day-to-day duties while ensuring that your content creation doesn't fall by the wayside of your routine.
And finally, make sure you don't neglect customer service when it comes to scaling your
business through content marketing.
5. Examples of successful businesses that use content marketing as
part of their strategy
Here are some examples of successful businesses that use content marketing as part of their strategy:
Airbnb owes its success to content marketing!
After focusing content marketing efforts on bringing people to their site and getting them excited about the service, it was time for Airbnb's content team to focus on how they could get new users from a strong position once they were ready to book.
Airbnb did this by capitalizing on social influencers' audiences—people who would be more likely to use Airbnb because they had a pre-existing trust in content from these influencers.
Moreover, they used another content strategy which was to allow Airbnb hosts to create their quality content, which was extremely useful for the company. This gave users a chance to get new ideas on how they could improve their listings and make them even more attractive.
On the other hand, Nestle took advantage of content marketing by promoting content that was relevant to their target audience, which is pet owners. Nestle was able to provide content that pet owners would find useful and entertaining.
They did this by developing a fun social media presence with the help of their employees who owned pets themselves.
This type of strategy allowed Nestle Purina PetCare Company to not only educate consumers on what they needed to know about taking care of pets but also gave them access to content that was relevant to them.
Their content team created a series of posts for each of its brands in Petsmart's online newsletter called The Barking Post.
Unicef USA is another business that succeeded with content marketing. To promote their content, they partnered with content marketing influencers and brands.
This helped them gain exposure for the content that was relevant to their target audience—parents. In this way, Unicef USA was able to reach more people and help even more children.
They also created a hashtag called #unicornthewayigrewup that parents could use on social media if they had any pictures of themselves growing up.
This content was paired with their content about children in the third world and how they can help.
As you can see, all of these companies were able to accomplish their goals by using effective content marketing strategies. If your business is looking for ways on how it can expand its reach and grow then implementing a successful content marketing strategy may be the answer that you are looking for.
6. Tips & tricks on how to make the most out of your blog posts or
social media posts, including ways to generate more traffic from them
A good content plan helps you stay organized, streamlines your workflow, and gives you clear goals to work towards in a short time.
It also explains what the audience would get from reading it, why they should read it, and how long it will take them to do so.
Here are some tips and tricks on manipulating your content for the most views and shares:
- Keep content short, simple, and to the point. Avoid using complicated words or phrasing that will lose your readers' attention.
- Use a catchy title, so people are more tempted to read it. This part doesn't have to belong, so keep it concisely informative but still enticing for someone to click on it.
- Don't be afraid to use provocative content that might offend someone, but at the same time, let your content remain informational and educational.
- The most viewed content is often a mixture of both newsworthy content as well as original content - this means you'll have to conduct research yourself or other experts to provide content that isn't just rehashing content from other sources.
- Write a good meta description and headline for your article. This ensures that people will click on it when they see it on the internet. Writing catchy but informative content is important, especially if you want to get more traffic from search engines like Google.
.png){kind=small}
