Content marketing is a strategy that businesses use to attract, engage, and retain a prospective audience by creating and sharing relevant content. Content in this context can be anything in the form of infographics, blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc.
However, content marketing isn’t just creating and publishing a thin piece of content and hoping the target audience will like it. Content marketing also involves a series of best practices, such as tailoring your content to your target audience. This way, your target audience can find you in the inbound way instead of outbound.
Content marketing can effectively generate traffic, leads, and sales growth if done right. Here is what you need to know about content marketing.
Content Marketing Definition
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a marketing strategy used to create and distribute valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract, acquire, and retain a clearly defined audience to drive profitable customer action. Content marketing can also be defined as the process of consistently planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content through channels such as blogs, social media, podcasts, websites, press releases, apps, publications, etc.
Consistency in content marketing establishes and nurtures a long-lasting relationship with prospects and existing customers. It increases the odds of converting prospects to actual sales or engagement from interested parties, especially if you establish authority and knowledge in your field.
Why is Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing is a time-tested, go-to strategy that provides a competitive advantage and is proven to work. When done right, content marketing can benefit your venture in multiple ways, such as:
Higher Search Engine Rankings and More Organic Traffic
Proper content marketing can help your site rank higher on Google and other SERPs for the keywords and phrases that prospects use during their research process.
Content Marketing Boosts Conversions and Leads
Businesses with blogs receive 67% more leads than those without.
Increased Engagement
Besides earning more clicks and views, content marketing can keep visitors scrolling and clicking on different pages. Content marketing keeps prospects on your website and engaged with your brand longer. The more engaged your audience is with your website and content, the more trust and credibility are built.
Shorter Sales Cycle
Proper content marketing educates and qualifies your leads, making them more likely to close faster. Businesses can also create sales enablement content uniquely designed to help close more deals for their sales team. In addition, using assignment selling, sales representatives can resolve prospects’ concerns and questions before a sales conversion.
Reduced Overall Costs and Increased Returns On Investments
Content marketing is 62% cheaper than traditional marketing methods, like billboards, banner ads, and paid advertising. It leverages no-cost or low-cost tools like SEO, blogging, and social media. On the one hand, hiring a seasoned specialist to own your content marketing strategy can be costly. On the other hand, the work builds upon itself and generates an impressive ROI gradually.
Build Trust
An effective way to beat the competition in your industry is to appeal to create a loyal customer base that trusts you. When you focus on educating–rather than trying to sell to–prospects, you can showcase your authority and expertise and humanize your brand. Consequently, you will build trust with your target audience.
Content Marketing Best Practices and Tips
While the benefits of content marketing may be clear, it is vital to have a solid foundation in strategy, creation, optimization, and analytics to get your content to its maximum potential. Below is a round-up of the best content marketing tips and best practices to give a competitive edge in content marketing.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Be clear on who you’re trying to create content for. You can base this research on gender, age, profession, interests, values, etc.
By understanding your target audience, you can create valuable content tailored to answer and meet the needs of this specific audience. You also need a clear understanding of your brand and your offerings to create content that supports your brand voice and supports your products and services.
2. Invest Time and Resources in Keyword Research
Proper keyword research can increase your rankings on search engines. Research varying keywords falling under the overarching categories you’ve settled upon. Organize these keywords in your own tracking doc.
Alternatively, you can use the rank trackers coming with your content marketing tools. When using keyword research tools for organic keyword research, check out for the main keyword elements, including:
- Click volume
- Search volume
- Keyword difficulty.
You can also check your competitor’s keyword strategy that ranks them higher and replicate or improve on it for your content marketing strategy.
3. Create A Content Calendar
You need to establish a content publishing pace to establish a readership or a solid following. Your audience wants to know what to expect from you and when.
Creating a content calendar also aligns everyone involved in the content management process. Editors, contributors, and project managers will know what stage they are, any upcoming deadlines, and what should be done next. A content calendar keeps you consistent–an integral value in effective content marketing.
4. Promote Your Content
Your newly published content will be practically invisible, failure to put it in front of an interested audience. Ways to promote your content include:
- Sending content links to your newsletter subscribers
- Sharing content on all your social media accounts
- Run ads.
Promoting your content is key if you’re starting out or don’t seem to achieve any meaningful results from your content marketing strategy.
5. Repurpose Your Content
Turn your content into multiple formats and share it on various platforms. For example, you can turn a blog post into a video and share it on YouTube or Instagram. Creating content once and distributing it forever can save you time and money.
6. Track Progress and Results
Strive to set baselines and track the results of your content marketing strategy. Do you have any content goals? What does a successful content marketing strategy look like to you? You can set goals around traffic, engagement, backlinks, and conversions.
It is also important to track every progress and result. Tracking and monitoring can help you decide what you need to add or remove to optimize the content strategy.
Bottom Line
Compelling content should be clearly written, produced, valuable, engaging, and tailored to meet a specific audience’s needs. It should contain detailed information and should be a relevant, actionable piece of content.
While these are the basics of an effective content strategy, the ability to share and market your content effectively can also be part of an effective content marketing strategy. In addition, whether you’re a business or solo content creator, you can always outsource your content marketing efforts to a third-party content marketing agency to save you time and increase your ROI.
At Kore Media, we specialize in enhancing your digital reach by increasing its visibility via a sturdy content marketing strategy and other forms of digital marketing. Reach out to us to get you started on winning content marketing strategy.
