Businesses should be able to reach their customers and interact with them effectively through digital channels. The marketing materials created should echo the customer needs and expectations. A well-planned approach to content creation often determines whether a brand succeeds or fails at appealing to its target audience or achieving conversions.
To put it in simple terms, content marketing is integral for business growth and brand narrative expansion. It incorporates the processes related to planning, drafting, producing, disseminating, and marketing targeted content. Your content repertoire can be as vast as you choose—blog posts and copywriting for landing pages, podcasts, videos, infographics, social media snippets, and so on. Other digital marketing activities, such as lead generation and nurturing campaigns, can also integrate and enhance content marketing.
Content marketing, like the rest of the strategies available to businesses, is still a fast-growing and tightly contested industry. With a well-formulated plan, businesses can utilize content marketing to drive positive business outcomes; however, having a proper plan ensures the best outcome.
What is content marketing?
This is a kind of content marketing that draws users with videos, texts, or audio that is useful or entertaining to them. Businesses have the opportunity to use content marketing to build trust and relationships with their mature audiences looking to scale. As such, selling your products becomes easy and fast.
There are marketers who consider measuring the ROI from content marketing campaigns a difficult feat, as content is usually a step within the customer journey. It is, however, easier to accomplish this with strong content marketing strategies, as they tend to reduce the customer acquisition costs and yield a compounded ROI.
Content marketers who aim to create a target audience tend to enjoy higher returns for every extra piece of content they publish.
3 Ways Content Marketing Can Help Your Business
Here were just a few of the reasons why marketers with excellent strategies have marketers with poor and average content strategies greatly lag behind.
1. Lower Customer Acquisition Cost
A steadily growing audience can be achieved with every piece of content, making the return on investment for each piece of content a lot higher, even if the quality content creation is still rather expensive. That’s how it works.
The first video, blog post, or social media post you share is likely only to be viewed by a small audience, but over time, as users discover your content and follow you, each new piece of content you publish will gain more viewers and provide better returns.
So, unlike paid ads, where you and your competitors can earn approximately the same ROI for every dollar spent, businesses that invest in comprehensive marketing strategies and already possess a robust following can capitalize significantly on every piece of content published.
2. Better Quality of Leads
Another content marketing advantage is the ability to sift through the type of leads you wish to attract based on the content you decide to publish.
For instance, if your problem is targeting CMOs, you can focus on discussing items that would be exclusive to a CMO, such as hiring top talent. You might also provide them with exclusive reports on industry benchmarks that they would be keen on.
In the same way, paid ads require you to place a lot of trust in the platform’s abilities to accurately capture your target market. Inaccurate audience targeting results in a reduced return on investment because user privacy concerns are growing.
3. Create a Consistent Lead Pipeline
Content marketing works like a flywheel and yields greater results over a longer duration, particularly if you include evergreen content. Evergreen content is material that remains forever relevant and continues delivering returns even years after it’s been published.
This means that even if you take a break from creating new content, there’s a high probability that you will still be receiving a consistent flow of leads, thanks to your evergreen content.
Best Content Marketing Tips
Tip #1: Start with Content Remarketing
There is a staggering amount of time and energy spent on creating and developing content only to leave you feeling disappointed after a blog post or white paper. This, along with the financial implications of having a content creation contentment, is why so many businesses are skeptical of the value of content marketing. The reliance on this perception can also be observed even in larger organizations alongside veteran marketers. Despite all this, there is a guaranteed solution that ensures a larger audience views, engages with, and engages your content, and that is through content remarketing.
Hopefully, you’re already using PPC remarketing features to maximize the efficiency of your campaigns. In the same way, you can use remarketing strategies to ensure more people view your content. You first set the criteria of the audience that you want to remarket to and subsequently use the Google Tag Manager to tag the visitors on your site so you can run banner ads through the Google Display Network for remarketing. This leads to better brand recognition and, with a little luck, more engagement with the content you invested so much time and effort in creating.
Tip #2: Interact with your consumers
Audience research is vital, but don’t just study them without interacting. Go engage with potential customers and discover their pain points while developing authentic connections.
Joining Slack and Facebook groups or other online communities can help you pinpoint the pain points people need help with. If you sell to hosts on Airbnb, this is a Facebook community you may want to consider targeting.
While you shouldn’t sell your products or services in these groups, feel free to respond to inquiries and use people’s questions as a basis for new content ideas.
Tip #3: Implement the Pillar-Cluster Structure
When trying to improve a reader’s experience while also focusing on SEO, consider organizing your content utilizing the pillar-cluster model. In this model, a pillar page encompasses an umbrella topic and cluster pages support that topic.
Internal linking is then used to connect all topics and inform Google that they are interconnected.
Tip #4: Assess Your Competitors’ Ads
Earlier, we touched on the fact that analyzing competitors’ content marketing strategies is vital to grasp the types of content and topics that engage the audience. A more in-depth content marketing tip would be to analyze your competitors’ ads and use them to shape your own organic content marketing strategy.
Pay special attention to your competitors’ ads that have been running for a long time. It can be assumed that those ads generate the most sales, or else they would have stopped running them.
Tip #5: Use Multiple Avenues to Promote Your Content
In life, as in advertising, no one strategy will ever guarantee success. It is crucial to combine different marketing strategies to reach various audiences on the different websites and platforms where they spend their time.
Cooperate with several high-end advertising and social media networks that have a good reach. Create sponsored guest blog posts, videos, and influencer content to facilitate link building. Influencers in your industry create content that corresponds with your audiences. This process allows you to promote your content to the people who will most likely be interested in your brand.
Tip #6: Keep Track of Your Content Performance Metrics
Analyzing your blog analytics should be a routine task for you and your team. Monitoring is one of the most critical aspects when developing a content marketing strategy.
Your blog, just like the rest of the world, evolves. Trends and topics change over time. What might work well this week may not work in the next month. This is also true for search engine rankings, so remember to always track how well your content is performing in search engines.
If you are apprehensive when it comes to numbers, do not worry. You do not need to be a data analyst to stay abreast of the data. Please ensure you review the page and bounce rate of the blogs to assess what is gaining traction—what is featured or not. Use the Google Search Console for your results and don’t forget to follow the other content producers on Semrush and Google Trends to know how to set the narrative for your next content.
Tip #7: Keep content updated and consistent
At SwiftPropel, we recommend our content strategists exercise basic SEO techniques to keep content fresh and optimized for search engines. As they put it, “You can always tell there is a need to stay current, particularly to the subject matter, if keyword + year is in the related searches of a Google search.”
To keep your content fresh, relevant, and updated, Pan offers the following three pieces of advice:
- Do remember to refrain from adding the year to the URL’s content because you are optimizing it. Great URLs are timeless.
- Put the year in the title of the content.
- Set your editorial calendar to ensure that you review this content on an annual basis for ongoing maintenance, including updating the title tag, meta description, and the content itself.
Please keep in mind, if you will apply an optimization tactic, the URL must never be updated. Otherwise, for the sake of optimization, you will have to put in the effort of earning links all over again. Also, you do not want to create unneeded redirects.
Emphasizing consistency is crucial. Publishing content consistently improves SERP rankings and establishes trust with your audience.
Tip #8: Repurpose your content.
Creating engaging and useful content takes a lot of time and skill. Ensuring maximum efficiency by recycling content will help achieve that goal. In addition, changing the format of the content allows targeting different audiences. Let’s say, for instance, that your podcast team released the episode that performed poorly. Why not turn that episode’s topic into a blog post?
Or, perhaps you turned out a blog post that performed significantly well. You may now want to turn that into a video on YouTube for those who prefer watching over reading.
With the implementation of content repurposing, your audience stands to make the most out of your material and ensure they see it multiple times. Readers, viewers, and followers have busy lives. Consider applying a new promotion strategy on the content that deserves to be carefully brought back to public attention.
Advice On Content Marketing
If done right, content marketing can improve your brand reach and engagement. In case you want to further improve the strategy to reach your audience effectively, here are some tips for you:
Know Your Audience—This means that you have to take into account the needs, demands, and problems of the audience you are trying to appeal to. Use analytics, data, and insights to create your content strategy.
Emphasize Quality—Ensure that the content provided, such as blog posts and articles, genuinely offers value to the audience. Content that provides value is usually well researched, well written, and engaging, meaning it would most likely resonate with the audience.
Diversify Content—Do not use a single type of content exclusively. Make use of blog posts, videos, or social media updates, among others, as these would help capture new audiences and keep the old ones interested. The audience is constantly changing, and so should the means of reaching out to them.
Consistency is key—please ensure you establish a content calendar and adhere to it. Frequent and dependable guarantees in posting content help improve audience trust and recall of what the brand intends to offer.
Utilize SEO Techniques—Make sure to include relevant keywords, check the structure of your content, and verify that it can be crawled by a search engine. Doing this helps in increasing visibility and the chances of being found organically.
Make Use of Analytics—As with everything, you need to track data to see what is working or not. It is advisable to utilize engagement, traffic, and conversion numbers as a benchmark to understand how well the content is performing.
Conclusion
All in all, “going viral” is not simply shooting your shot; it requires a plan. Crafting shareable posts requires a deep understanding of your audience, their emotions, and current hot topics. In addition, do not forget to maintain visual standards, invite users to join in, and narrate relatable stories while forging deep connections with your audience. While pursuing virality does not guarantee success, implementing smart content marketing strategies, experimenting with new ideas, conducting thorough analysis, and exerting effort can set you on a path to viral success on social media.
