Every marketing strategy has different goals. Content marketing aims to increase organic traffic to your site and should play a strategic role in your overall marketing strategy. Creating compelling content can result in better conversion rates as you establish yourself as an industry leader in your field.
If you're new to digital marketing, you will want to follow along as I cover the following:
What is Content (and Why Does it Matter)?
Content marketing allows you to attract your audience organically. While some methods rely on paid advertising, content marketing drives visitors to your site based on their interests (and your content). Creating content to captivate your audience helps build your brand reputation as you build a relationship with your audience. As you gain trust and loyalty, your leads will turn into clients.
Simply put, content marketing involves planning, developing, and distributing engaging information via social media, blogs, websites, and more. The goal of the content you distribute should be to increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty.
Content marketing serves a variety of purposes, making it an essential strategy. In addition to educating your leads and prospects about your services or products, content marketing allows you to solidify a relationship with your audience to create a loyal following. Marketing studies have shown it costs more to acquire new clients than to retain existing customers. Therefore maintaining a loyal following will help your bottom line.
Types of Content Marketing
The next step in understanding content marketing is to determine what types of content creation your business can use to leverage.
Blogs
Blogging is a powerful tool used by businesses to engage with audiences. This marketing method puts you in control of the message presented to audiences. Creating high-quality content, such as answering questions for your audience, will help establish you as an expert in your field.
An average blog post can range anywhere from 500 to 1000 words—longer is not always better. Create content that you, as a consumer, would find captivating and relevant. Avoid creating material for the sake of creating material!
Social Media
Social media may be the most critical aspect of content marketing, with 3.6 billion global social media users on the internet today. With platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and more, there is no shortage of consumer reach when you can properly create content to market on social media.
When social media is leveraged correctly, your business has the potential to quickly become a household name, with minimal cost spent on product advertising. Many social media platforms have started providing more access to tools and developments to assist businesses with materials to track how their message is being communicated—having this data readily available lets you see in real-time how your content is being received.
Infographics
An infographic is a visual representation of data or information that can provide your customers with a simplified explanation for complex details in a visually appealing manner. Data visualizations such as bar graphs, or pie charts, give your customers a minimalistic overview of details that may be otherwise hard to understand.
Providing your customers with this type of information gives your business a competitive edge as it strengthens your reputation as an expert.
With the ever-growing popularity of automated information, video content marketing is one of the best ways to capture the attention of your customers. Research shows that in 2017, 74% of all internet traffic was video, and by 2019 that number grew to 80%. In 2021, 13% of all internet traffic was projected to have resulted from live video streaming. Video content appeals to a mass audience by alleviating any questionable context, giving your customers a genuine representation of the message you are delivering.
Paid Advertising Content Market
Paid advertising can help you maximize your reach by expanding your message to a larger audience in exchange for a fee. The internet is a vast collection of users and businesses competing for the attention of potential customers within a similar market. When leveraging paid advertising, your business can gain more control over its potential reach without relying on organic search results or social media algorithms that are ever-changing.
By investing in paid ads, your business can take advantage of product placement, banner ads, and sponsored content. Doing so will also allow you to track the success of your advertisement and use social media analytics to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck.
SEO Content Marketing
When learning the ins and out of digital marketing, SEO is a term business owners should be familiar with. SEO works by utilizing key terms to gain more visibility on public search engines. What this means for your business is that when you can learn how to leverage common terms or popular search topics, you can utilize this content to come up first, standing out among your competitors in a market. When potential customers are researching services your business offers on platforms such as Google or Yahoo, SEO marketing will push your business to the top of results, increasing the likelihood of interaction and traffic to your website.
Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
Now that you understand the various types of content marketing you can use for your business; it's time to start mapping out a marketing plan to put it all together. There is no one size fits all approach. You want to tailor the message you want to portray to your target market.
Create a goal
Create a measurable goal so that you can track how your strategy is performing. Goals allow you to set a target for what it is you want to achieve and an actionable plan for how you want to achieve it. Be sure that your marketing goals fit in with your overall mission.
Research
Research competitors within your market, as well as the audience that you plan to target. Understanding what your customers want will help you create content they will want to share. Looking at what your competitors are producing and the level of engagement it garners will provide useful insight into what your clients are looking for.
Audit your content
Audit your content as it goes live. The goal here is to track the level of engagement such as comments, likes, and shares to determine what content is performing best. Once you know what works and what doesn’t, you can determine your next course of action.
Choose your resources
There are many resources at your disposal for developing a killer content strategy. You may not have the time to research topics, write compelling content, and design attention-grabbing imagery, but there are services that can help you. From freelancers to marketing platforms, there is no limit to the type of tools available.
Select your content type
As we previously listed, there are a number of amazing ways content marketing can benefit your business. What’s so fun about content marketing is that you don’t have to stick to just one method. Mix things up by sharing a variety of content styles. Whether it be blogging, social media, infographics, etc., you should map out what type of content you want to share on which platforms.
Publish
Once you have a plan in place, it's time to put it to action. Creating content and getting it out to the public is the next step toward reaching your marketing goals. Publish a variety of content, across multiple platforms often to ensure you are reaching your target audience. And don’t forget to respond to questions and comments regularly.
SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages to make them reach the top position in the search results of Google and other search engines. An optimized website will increase the likelihood that a business will be seen when being searched online. SEO marketing is a great way to increase visibility organically without using paid advertising.
Content marketing is a key aspect of creating long-standing relationships with your current clients and leads. Content marketing can be used to your advantage when done correctly. The benefits of content marketing are vast, from developing brand trust to establishing yourself as an expert in your field.
When you don’t have the time or resources to develop a content marketing strategy from start to finish, SYNDUIT can help. We take the guesswork out of the equation by providing professionally written and designed content that your audience will love. Plus, our automation software ensures you never miss a chance to connect with your audience!