What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the creation and sharing of online assets which are designed specifically to help you meet your digital marketing goals. It can differ in format, being anything from a video or infographic to a blog post or email. Content should be creative, valuable and entertaining to showcase what your business can offer. Relevant and high-quality content can be used to generate more traffic to your site. It’s an essential part of attracting the right customers.
To get the most out of your content marketing, you will also benefit from understanding sales copy. Copy is created for advertising purposes. It aims to sell something or persuade its audience to take a specific action – for example, buying a product or joining a mailing list. Sales copy might be easy to spot because it should include product specifications, a call-to-action and/or a unique selling point (USP).
Content marketing goes beyond copy. It should tell a story while generating interest in the service or product you’re offering. By sharing regular & relevant content, you can improve your brand reputation and authority – and also maintain and attract new customers. Journalists and other professionals are likely to share content that is not too heavily branded or openly trying to sell something. As a result, content marketing is beneficial, as its reach can be amplified through sharing.
Content marketing can help to build a high level of trust between you and your target audience. It can create the impression needed to meet your objectives in a mostly organic way. We’ve listed some benefits here:
Backlinks and site traffic – The more shareable content you produce, the more traffic you will drive back to your website. You can target your customer profile and attract users who are likely to convert.
Credibility and authority – Producing relatable content can help establish you as an authoritative and knowledgeable voice in your industry.
Improved SEO and online visibility – Content can be creative and cover various topics that users will search. By improving your content marketing, you will better your SEO.
Cost-effectiveness – It can be a cheaper alternative and attract new audiences who may be less interested in traditional advertising channels.
Building relationships – Keeping an audience in the loop with valuable and informative content can be a way of encouraging users to revisit your site.
Growing your social media following – Your content marketing plan can help your business stay relevant as a result of following trending topics and conversations.
There are several content marketing metrics which let you measure whether the content you’re sharing is helping to meet your goals.
If you want to know whether your people are engaging with your content, you can measure social shares, unique page views, content shares and the average time spent on site.
To find out whether your content has improved your SEO, you can monitor its visibility in search engines, the organic traffic it receives and how well it ranks for keywords.
You can also check the quality and number of backlinks to your content. Things such as brand mentions and referrals will let you know if your content is being picked up.
By using Google Analytics, you’ll be able to know whether your site visitors converted as a result of your content. Also, things such as whether they visited a product page. This is a good indication of what kind of content is drawing in the right audience for you.
Once you decide on your content goals and your success metrics, you can think about your strategy. This might sound obvious, but the first step should be researching what type of content you could produce. There are different ways to go about this. You can analyse existing content to see what works and also check if there are any gaps.
It’s important to figure out what is right for your brand. So, you’ll need to identify your customer profile and what they are interested in / searching for. By using advanced analytics, social listening and persona mapping, you can gain valuable insights.
Once you’ve done enough research, you can brainstorm some creative ways of sharing content. Depending on your objectives, this could be anything from a blog post or even a GIF. The great thing about content marketing is the creativity involved. But, your strategy planning will let you analyse your ideas in terms of whether they are relevant to your audience and your aims.
A content roadmap is a great way to keep track of your campaigns and ensure they’re complementing each other, rather than competing against each other. Your roadmap should be a firm plan (not just a list of your content). It should tie it all together in a way that makes it clearer across the different stages of your marketing funnel.
You might want to mark down any key dates throughout the year. For example, does the product you’re selling have any link to an upcoming event?
It’s good to start thinking about how you can use things outside of your business to draw attention to your content.
We hope this has given you an insight into how content can improve your online presence. If you want to find out more about which types of content will benefit your business, or if you have any other questions, please get in touch!