If you are here, it means you are looking for ‘Content Marketing.’ Usually, when content marketing comes to our minds. We think it’s about blogs, Facebook, and viral videos. But content marketing strategy is an effective strategy used to draw, and engage. And sustain its readers with the help of relevant content articles.
So, what exactly is content marketing? We can use different types of SEO content formats. Such as videos, infographics, images, and podcasts. And other platforms to market your product and services to grow your online business. It will help in promoting the brand, spreading awareness, and engaging the audience.
Content marketing develops and distributes relevant content. Such as newsletters, emails, and blog posts on the website. And other techniques to attract new leads. The consistent use of these marketing strategies helps in retaining old and new customers.
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Why is Content Marketing Significant?
Content Marketing is a proven strategy that works to drive traffic to your content. As per some trends, it is observed that businesses that have blogs get 67% more leads than other businesses. Also, around 47% of buyers check out 3 to 5 pieces of blogs before taking any action.
Many brands are using content marketing in digital marketing to promote their products which has a 30% higher growth rate. Another important fact is, that 72% of B2B marketers agreed that their sales increased with the help of content marketing.
How can Content Marketing Work for Your Business?
Content marketing aims to work in three stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Closing stage. To attract leads, it is needed to target your content to the right leads. Thus, it initially begins with the awareness of the product to start knowing about your services and products.
Let’s understand all three stages in depth:
1. Awareness: Your product should address the concerns of customers. Try to resolve queries of your audience, and resolve common issues and challenges. In the first step, your content needs to be educational. And it should aim to provide knowledge to your customers.
You can use eBooks, PDFs, videos, and other forms of content to spread the information. Write blogs on top ways, tips and tricks, and other informational types of content.
2. Consideration: This is also a crucial stage. It is a hybrid of helpful information and marketing. Here, you need to provide information to your audience. Tell them about your features and how they can help them. You need to involve information along with your business offerings.
You need to write SEO-friendly content in the format of how-to articles, videos, case studies, and others.
3. Closing: It is the final and most important stage of the content marketing cycle. It is where when your lead is close to buying. Now, you need to focus on the sales of your product. Tell them about your expertise, offerings, knowledge, and other things.
Here it would help if you used blogs of case studies, buyer’s guides, research reports, etc.
Start with Content Marketing
Content marketing can be overwhelming sometimes. So, your strategy for content marketing must be manageable and sustainable.
- Finding Audience: You need to be clear about your offerings and services. Also, it would be better to set your priorities, challenges, and preferences at the prior stage. If you have content in the detailed form of your various segments, you can choose what to write.
- Choose Formats: Choosing the right format to convey your message or description of your services. It would help if you considered what formats would best help you to showcase value. For some, this will be a video; for others, an eBook.
- Content: Content writing should be high-quality content. And it should be error-free. An audience will read your content, so it needs to be perfect. Try to keep your work as professional as possible. You can hire a professional writer to write and review your content before it goes public.
- Distribution of Content: The platform needs to be clear; you need to decide where to post your content. Choosing platforms and formats right is quite important. A blog, for example, can be emailed, and a worksheet can be used for social media posts. And a buyer’s guide can be utilized as a follow-up to a pitch.
- Choose a sustainable schedule: You need to have a plan or schedule for content marketing that includes all your targets. Identifying the target audience and your content formats should be the priority. Create a short-term strategy and set an achievable target based on your budget and resources. Keeping track of all events is also important.
- Follow best practices: A clear and easy-to-understand piece of content is the boss. Try not to use jargon that can confuse the audience. Try including how-to advice and information. And at last, add actionable pieces of content.
Types of Content Marketing
Content marketing can be done in various ways; many types can be used. It is always better to understand the concept and topic as much as possible. Here, we will be discussing the top five types of content marketing. And these content marketing examples will help in thinking of new content ideas very easily.
1. Webpages: Webpages are considered the essential element to increase the website’s rank in search engine results pages of search engines. A few things that you should consider include making the web pages mobile-friendly and HTTPS secured. Additionally, according to the recent algorithm. You can take benefits of content marketing even from passages if they are relevant. Finally, use Google Search Console to check if Google is crawling pages.
2. Podcasts: Podcasts can be the fastest way to promote content and engage audiences. It can help you express yourself better than writing or any other format of content podcast submission sites.
3. Infographics: These are graphical representations that include figures, statistics, charts, and pie graphs. And other numerical information about data. Infographic submission sites are known to be among the effective methods to leave a print on your audience’s brain.
It would be more impactful if you could get them designed professionally by hiring a contractor. An infographic cost will be around $1,000. But all this cost is worth it because it will back your content.
4. Videos: In today’s world, everyone is using this media. With the rapid growth in technology. Creating video content for promotion has become very easy. As a result, every small and large business uses video format content to promote their products.
YouTube is known to be amongst the biggest video search engines that will help you with video streaming. These are easy to consume, but people think it’s expensive and hard. Yet, as the cost of professional-grade equipment is getting low. Amateur video content marketing is also quite popular and used to sell blenders, launch new products, etc.
5. Books: Books are the strongest content marketing tools. People often think that books are selling themselves. But in reality, savvy marketers don’t sell books to sell stories of books. They sell books as the strongest marketing tools. Publish your book, and it does not need to go for a physical form. You can publish an ebook of your book; these books are quite in demand.
Other than this, white papers, eBooks, apps, and blogs are also the best ways of content marketing.
What is the Most Overrated Marketing Tactic?
More Forms of Content Marketing
There is a gamut of different formats in which you can cater to your audience. It depends on what you want to offer and how you want to provide it. You can choose any format as per your convenience and audience type.
Social Media
We all know social media sites are one of the most powerful tools for content marketing. And that is relatively quick, easy, and accessible to most people. It gives free access to mass with any market. You can also choose to run ads and get more traffic, which is relevant and with a reasonable conversion rate. Whatever your business is, you can get your target audience here.
There are a thousand ways that businesses can attract their audience entertaining. Resolve their queries, and understand their problems. And use all this to improve your service.
Social media aims to promote brands because it curates relationships. It is where you can grow organically and improve your conversion rate effectively. Once you’ve built your following. Marketing to them has become more accessible and less expensive than ever before.
Video For Content Marketing
Video format is one of the simplest forms to understand anything. It offers visuals that make it simple and easy to decode and understand the offerings. You can use the LIVE video technique to communicate with your audience on video sharing sites. And help build your image as a brand.
You can communicate with your target audience using LIVE video features. There are various platforms or software that can be used to fulfill this purpose. And it can be Instagram, Facebook, or any other alternative social media platforms. You can connect live with your people.
It is understood how powerful video marketing is. And it gives better engagement and shows trust. The audience can engage with you and get immediate solutions or help from you. It also helps bring transparency, which is one of the best things to have as a brand.
80% of online users can remember a video advertisement they’ve watched in the last month. It simply says that visuals are more powerful than any other medium. Another fact and figure is that 52% of marketers know that video content is the type of content that has the best ROI.
It is observed that viewers are more likely to watch live videos than regular videos. As per neilpatel.com, viewers watch live videos three times longer than regular videos.
Advertising and Content Marketing
Content marketing is somewhere between inbound and outbound marketing strategies. Most of the experts consider it as an inbound marketing tactic. Let’s understand all this in-depth, and if you have a small new business and growing customers. You might need customer growth by displaying advertisements to showcase some of your more relevant content.
It is simple to understand, and if you can wait for organic growth, you don’t need the help of an advertisement. But, in case you need some more traffic, you can use advertising to drive more traffic to your content.
You can use content marketing strategies on various platforms to attract an audience. For example, it is quite easy to run ads on various platforms such as Instagram. These platforms have a huge user base that can help in reaching a larger number of people.
Paid advertisements are the easiest and a great way to boost your traffic leads, conversion rate, and sales. As we know, the first step is the hardest. It is required in the initial days of your business. But with paid advertising, they don’t have to be.
Tips and Tricks for Content Marketing
There are ways you can follow and learn about content marketing. But, it is most important that you get through the concept altogether. Knowing the definition is one thing, and understanding practicality is different. And you can also learn from content marketing courses.
In starting, the chances are high that you might make some minor or significant mistakes while performing some strategy. So, it would be better for you first to understand how to implement all your gathered information. So, to help you with all this, we have listed some last tips and tricks that can be helpful in the future; please check.
- First, you need to decide the format of your content and the platform to promote or publish your content. It is quite important to understand the priority of these two things. Be clear with your thoughts, and then proceed to the next.
- Pay attention to your performance analytics. And the content performance needs to be appropriately analyzed to be improved. It would be hard to find the area of improvement without analyzing the performance of your content. This can help to find all the required information. You can use tests like A/B testing. It can help in collecting information and then analyzing it.
- Another main thing is, to make a content schedule. You have to work in an organized manner. Having a proper schedule or plan will help you achieve goals quite efficiently and effectively. Without a schedule, you are prone to inconsistency. And that will damage the effectiveness of the work.
Another term that can help you in content marketing is offline content marketing. These are some online techniques that are common and used widely by most people.
Offline Content Marketing
Marvel still is a big player in the comic book space by owning 34% market share alone. And rapidly growing order numbers for different comic book issues. But, in reality, it is as effective as online content marketing.
So, what do you need to ace your offline content marketing? Well, you need to have good storytelling. Although, as we all know, having a blog is not that costly. It is a fantastic way to see if your stories are working already or need some more work.
But isn’t content marketing all about the interwebs from the start? The fact is offline translates to online one or another way. You can use paid and free to promote your product and bring traffic. And improve engagement with the audience and others.
Big companies usually advertise business online for free to grab more traffic in less time. They use money and mind to improve the conversion rate and grow in less possible time.