Complete Guide:
Everything You Need to Know About Content Marketing
What is Content Marketing?
Today, being on the internet is not enough. The issue, now, is how to be seen and increase conversion to a targeted audience This is a Content Marketing mission.
Content marketing is basically a strategic, non-verbal, or verbal marketing approach that focuses on delivering curative, useful, consistent, relevant, and interesting content or information to your consumers and readers all across the globe to retain a targeted audience.
Instead of always using a promotional tone and pitching about your products, you are providing relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.
Why use Content Marketing?
The most important thing to understand is why it is effective for your business.
Content Marketing is a foundation and complement to other Digital Marketing strategies. Whatever marketing medium you choose, you will always need the content.
It can help you achieve a few different objectives types in many ways, like educating people on how to use your product or service to solve their problems.
To understand why content marketing technology is effective, we would have to discuss the 4 most important steps of the sales cycle.
- Awareness
A prospective client has a problem but is unaware that there is a potential solution to their problem. It is nothing but a lack of awareness.
- Research
Once the person learns that there is a potential solution for the problem, they will research it.
- Consideration
After research, a person compares different solutions and gets attracted to the one that is best for his needs or problem. He also tries to compare by keeping several factors in mind such as price and availability.
- Buy
Once the consideration is done, it is time for your prospective buyer to decide which product they will buy. You need to take the help of the newest technology so that your voice could reach millions of people with the same issue.
Benefits of Content Marketing
- Attract visitors and grows your site traffic
Content makes you findable, especially on search engines like Goole. This will help people find your company among a giant quantity of information available online.
- Create value for your audience
Give the necessary message to your target audience by providing them relevant content at the correct time they need it. It will exceed the expectations and will turn you into an authority about that subject, generating value for you and your audience.
- Engage your audience
Giving your audience relevant and useful content is important as it will make them engage with your content like leaving comments and reacts.
- Educate the market about your products and services
Content Marketing is capable of teaching the audience that your solution exists and how it works.
- Drives sales to the next level
When you adopt Content Marketing, you win bigger coverage, reaching more and more consumers, but targeting them most effectively.
- Generate more leads
The more you generate leads, the better are the chances to sell. Convert prospects into leads, offering attractive that stimulates them to leave useful information to close a deal.
- Reduces Customer Acquisition Cost
Content Marketing can have a lower CAC because one piece of content can reach a large number of people and can be useful in different mediums and platforms.
- Increases the client lifetime value
If you offer relevant and usable content to your clients, you’ll keep them for more time on your base. They will feel important when perceiving that your brand keeps thinking about how to help them solve their problems, even after they closed the deal.
How to Create A Content Marketing Strategy?
Now that we have identified the benefits of including Content Marketing in your Digital Marketing efforts, it is now time to discuss the steps in creating a successful strategy:
- Create A Buyer Persona
Understanding who you are talking to is the first step to creating good content. It is not just about simple segmentation: it demands the creation of a character with all attributes of your target audience.
- Consider The Buyer’s Journey
Whenever you are writing marketing material, one important thing to note is the Buyer’s Journey. Create a plan or a way that could allow you to speak directly to buyers regardless of what buying stage they are in. Know each stage of the marketing funnel below.
- TOFU (Top of the Funnel)
Can also be linked to the awareness stage. Here your prospects is not yet sure of the problem and solution. Here you may attract many people, generally, people don’t leave their information yet. But, nothing prevents that it happens.
- MOFU (Middle of the Funnel)
This can be linked to research and consideration as mentioned earlier. Your prospects may have given you some information in exchange for valuable content. The best model for businesses is through blog posts, multimedia, and interactive content, keeping the focus on the solutions your company can provide to your lead.
- BOFU (Bottom of Funnel)
This can be linked to the Buy stage. The prospects in this funnel are really interested in your products or services and have big chances to purchase your products or services.
- Brainstorm Content Ideas
The first step in creating content is to think about the content you need to create. Your Buyer’s Persona would help you to create compelling and curative content for all of the audience. The content needs to be about their problems, the solutions they want, their needs, and the customers’ buying stages and patterns.
- Production and Optimization of The Curated Content
If you have invested your time and money both in creating compelling and high-quality content, you need to get the most out of it. After publishing it, you need to ensure that it remains updated and fresh. It does not only increase your brand’s credibility but also indicates to the readers that you are active in the market.
- Launch and Optimize
There are many types of content, mainly- early-stage, last-stage and mid-stage. The early-stage content does not bring any revenue but it creates brand awareness and visibility. Mid-stage and last-stage content really affect your sales and revenue. They are great opportunities for you to generate new leads and increase the conversion rate.
- Define objectives and KPIs
Define the strategic goals and the metrics you will use to verify if the campaign is successful.
The most common goals for Content Marketing are:
- Increase traffic;
- Generate more leads;
- Boose sales;
- Brand awareness;
- Audience Engagement;
- Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost;
- Increase client lifetime value.
- Knowing your goals helps you define the Key Performance Indicators that you need to achieve them. Remember that these KPIs must have a relation to the goals. Here are a few samples:
- If you want to increase traffic, monitor the site’s traffic;
- If you want to generate more leads, monitor the conversion rate on your site;
- If you want to increase brand awareness, monitor social media interactions like comments,
Diversify Content Distribution Channels
The best way to distribute your content is by utilizing different channels like blogs, social media, email marketing, etc. It makes it easier to access your content when searching actively for a specific subject, or even if it isn’t researching yet, it receives your content passively.
- Social media
Social media is no doubt one powerful channel as it allows you to publish content at no cost, which also explains its popularity among businesses. Reach a large audience and drive them to your blog or institutional website.
- Emails
This channel has the biggest ROI (Return On Investment) among the most commonly used channels in a Content Marketing Strategy as it allows businesses to use precise segmentation and create nurturing flows to automate their campaigns.
- Blog posts
The most common type of content marketing is blog posting. They are responsible for attracting organic traffic from search engines. After having the content written, you’ll need to optimize it thinking about all the SEO rules. This optimization is the key to take your content to the first position on the search engines.
- Infographics
An infographic is a content format that takes the information to readers through visual resources like images, vectors, graphics, and beautiful and functional typography. A 1,000-word blog post can do that just fine, but an infographic can make dense information easier to absorb.
- Videos
Video is one of the best content marketing tactics to reach and engage consumers. It is mandatory to include videos in your Content Marketing strategy to stay competitive in the online market today. Video marketing may engage your audience quickly and efficiently. People are consuming more video content than other formats. This makes video one of the best types of content to use on your strategy.
- Podcasts
Podcasts give you a clear path in a world of complexity. It is a form of content marketing type that people use to guide listeners. This way, they can tempt people to buy their products or avail of the services.
- Ebooks
Ebooks are an excellent content format to offer in exchange for some information such as name and email. Visitors can’t resist downloading this kind of publication, especially when the subject is relevant to them.
- Case studies and testimonials
Case studies and testimonials are the best credibility booster for a brand. That’s why they are so important at the bottom of the funnel. Case studies tell a client’s success story endorsed by their testimony.
- Paid Ad Content Marketing
Paid advertisements for content help you to reach a wide base of an audience so that you can position yourself on the internet as per your wish.
