Content Marketing

Content Marketing

Did you know 53% of marketers reported that blogging was their top content marketing priority in 2021? (HubSpot, 2021)

But why? 

Shouldn't they be focused on creating copy for ads, social media posts, and landing pages instead of articles and content?

Well, not exactly. 

According to a study done by Key Difference Media, 78% of consumers admitted they would trust your brand more if you create more customized content.

According to Dragon Search Marketing, "61% of consumers' buying decisions are influenced by custom content."

The average close rate across all industries is 4.1% on the Google search network, 0.6% on the Google display network, 1.7% on direct mail or print advertising, and 14.6% on SEO leads, according to smartinsights.com and Search Engine Journal.

And, while it's not quite comparing apples to apples, the main idea is "content is king." Well, "customized content targeted to the right audience is king."

What is Content Marketing?

 Content marketing is a type of marketing centered on designing, creating, and sharing content for targeted users online. All businesses, companies, and organizations of any size can benefit from content marketing. It doesn't matter if you own a restaurant, plumbing service, real estate agency, brick-and-mortar business, virtual business, or operate a charity. All organizations and companies at any stage can benefit from content marketing. Whether you're starting a business and content project from scratch, expanding your services, trying to solve a complex problem, or run an already established business, content marketing will help you grow.

How does content marketing help my business?

 So, why should you utilize a content marketing strategy for your business?

There are several advantages. Implementing a content marketing strategy helps your  business by:

1. Drawing attention to your site and developing leads.
2. Increasing your client base.
3. Generating or increasing sales.
4. Raising brand awareness or credibility.
5. Engaging an online community of users.

But, how? How does a content marketing strategy make all of this happen?

Generate more leads

 According to Demand Metric, content marketing generates three times as many leads and costs 62% less than traditional marketing methods.

The best content marketing stories effectively educate and provide value to your audience. Content marketing should be a natural conversation with your target audience to offer them appropriate value regarding your business, product, or service. This free value pays dividends as providing it leads to a growing number of potential customers.

Improve SEO ranking

 Quality content marketing also increases the chances your target market finds you. When creating content, you should keep your customer's potential pain points in mind. If you're unsure as to what problems your customers would like to be solved, make a list whenever someone is asking questions about your business. Additionally, using the tools mentioned later in this section will help you think of additional topics to cover.

So, you’ve created the correct content, but how do you know customers will find what they're looking for?

Choosing the right keywords is essential to this process. What are keywords? According to Yoast SEO,

"A keyword, or a focus keyword as some call it, is a word that describes the content on your page or post best. It's the search term that you want to rank for with a certain page. So when people search for that keyword or phrase in Google or other search engines, they should find that page on your website."

Choosing the right keywords can be overwhelming for many. Luckily, those who are interested in creating compelling content have fantastic paid and free tools at their disposal. Some include Google's Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Keyword Explorer, and Answer the Public; all are valuable tools to help you figure out which keywords to use and see what your competitors are doing.

How does content marketing create brand value?

 Content marketing isn't only helpful in bringing potential customers to your site; it also builds trust and adds to your reputation on each visit. 

Solving customer's "pain points," your business provides a value they could not find anywhere else.

This contributes to brand awareness and brand loyalty. Brand awareness is how conscious consumers are regarding your brand and message. This matters because consumers are 71% more likely to buy from a company they recognize.

Not only that, but strong content shows your customers the qualities that make your brand unique.

How do you start developing a content marketing strategy?

 Developing a content marketing strategy can be broken down into two stages: the Planning Stage and the Action Stage.

Planning Stage:

Ask the Right Questions

 At this stage, understanding your brand's position and unique value proposition (UVP) is the most important thing. When you realize who or what you want your brand to be, you can understand what type of content you want to create. 

Some question that you might want to ask yourself to start brainstorming about your UVP and position in the market are: 

• What is unique about my brand, product, or service?
• What problems does my brand, product, or service help to solve?
• What makes my brand, product, or service a better choice over my competitors?
• Who are my existing and potential customers?
• What kind of experience are my current and potential customers looking for?
• What is the competitive landscape in my industry?
• How do my top competitors market their brands?
• How can I highlight my brand's personality and uniqueness?

Define Your Business Goals

What do you want your business to achieve by implementing a content marketing strategy?

Conventional content marketing strategy goals include:

• Receiving more high-quality leads.
• Executing more sales/ increasing revenue.
• Expand brand awareness to gain influence and be seen as an authority in your field.
• Increasing the amount of traffic to your site.
• Improve SEO optimization and show up higher on Search Engine Result Pages.
• Foster more engagement with customers, whether online or through social media.
• Cut costs by creating less costly higher-converting content.

Once you establish your goals, you can start to engineer how you're going to reach them.

Get Familiar with Key Performance Indicators

 Have you ever been overwhelmed by a lofty goal you've wanted to accomplish?

According to Neal Samudre, Director of Marketing at Michael Hyatt & Company and writer for Lifehack,

"It's hard to recognize where you are at reaching your goal if you have no way of measuring where you are with it."

So, it's ok if you don't accomplish that lofty content marketing goal right away. That's part of the process.

But what if there's a way to increase your chances of achieving your content marketing goals?

Neal continues, "Make your goal measurable with questions such as, "how much?" or "how many?" This way, you always know where you stand with your goals.

Luckily in content marketing, we can do this easily with Key Performance Indicators or KPIs.

KPIs allow you to know when you accomplished your goals by equipping you with milestones you can tick off as you go along.

Virtually every management tool has Key Performance Indicators, and many allow you to customize your own KPIs, so you can focus on what goals are essential to you. 

Some critical Key Performance Indicators you might want to consider are those that show:

• A specific revenue target within the month, quarter, or year.
• The number of signups from your lead magnet.
• The increase or decrease of new email subscribers.
• Onsite traffic and engagement.
• Search ranking of your key pages.
• How many social media mentions, shares, and comments for your content.
• Marketing and advertising spend and the cost of acquiring leads.

Identify Your Audience

 To hit your KPIs and have a successful content marketing strategy, you need to know your audience. Knowing your audience allows you to create the appropriate content to reach them.

The first step in this process is to collect existing information on the demographics of your site's visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers.

This information will allow you to determine important factors about your audience like:

• Gender
• Age
• Location
• Annual Income
• Education level

The next step to identifying your target audience is to get customer feedback. This information will provide insight into:

• Understanding your customers' needs.
• How they feel about your brand and content.
• Obtain testimonials, reviews, referrals
• This will allow you as a business owner to:
• Address those needs.
• Make adjustments to your content.
• Create more on-brand content.
• Once you understand who your target audience is and what they want, you can start building customer profiles (customer avatars/ buyer profiles).

A customer profile describes your ideal customer or reader so that you can target that person more efficiently.

The most reliable customer profiles are those that rely heavily on the data and feedback you've already collected. This includes a customer's pain points, obstacles, motivations. With this information, you'll be able to create meaningful content that will benefit your audience.

Find Relevant Topics and Get Organised 

 By this point in the strategy you should already know what your target audience is interested in. You can further supplement this by using a tool like SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, or Answer the Public to give you additional ideas for subjects to cover questions to answer and possible subtopics.

Have a Content Distribution Plan

 When creating a content distribution plan, there are several things you should remain mindful of.

The first is to implement omnichannel communication to your audience.

What does that mean?

Omnichannel communication is a fancy buzzword that means sharing a consistent message across all platforms and devices. This provides current and potential customers a clear, organised image of who you are as a business.

Your next step is to determine which platforms your audience spends most of their time on. We can go back to the Identify your Audience section of this guide to see what demographics to look for and which social media channel demographics align with your business's. The type of content you want to create also plays a vital role in which social media platforms will best suit your business:

• Pinterest categorizes visual content pieces like infographics, schemas, or original images. These can be linked to draw traffic to a website.
• Instagram is an excellent place for individuals or businesses that have products or services that are visually appealing and is especially effective for B2Cs.
• Facebook is excellent for an older audience where stories are prominent and can become viral.

It's up to you to determine which social media platforms will be best for your business.

Action Stage:

Create Your Content

 Before you start writing, you need to recognize two things:

1. What's already out there.
2. How your content will provide a new real value for your audience.

Doing a quick Google search will allow you to observe the top content on the topic you want to cover. After that, you can determine if you wish to improve on that information or contribute original research.

Now it's time to write! Keep your brand's personality in mind while you're crafting content.

 Distributing and Marketing Your Content

 Your content is written, and you're ready to share it with the world. Congrats!

Here are some great ways to distribute your content:

• Schedule your content to be posted on your various social media platforms.
• Email marketing is the best way to share content with customers who have already opted-in to your brand.
• Sharing content through a network of influencers is a great way to reach a wider audience of like-minded individuals who may not have seen your content otherwise.
• Blog and article sharing platforms like Medium, Outbrain, and PR Newswire are great ways to amplify your content marketing reach.

Analyze Your Performance

 Analyzing your content performance after sharing it is the most beneficial way to learn what connects with your target audience and decide what type of content to create next. 

Your readers will give you a clear indication of what interests them by either choosing to engage with your content or not.

Here are some Key Performance Indicators to watch after sharing your content:

• Unique visitors
• Pages per session
• Bounce rate
• Likes, shares, comments, and mentions. 
• Organic Traffic
• Number of leads 
• Conversion Rate.

It doesn't matter what type of business you run; with an effective content marketing strategy in hand and the ability to execute it, your brand will surely see improvements. It's crucial to have quality content marketing because it will draw attention to your business, develop leads, grow your client base, increase sales, raise brand awareness, and engage an online community of users. Creating a solid content marketing strategy is the key to creating quality content marketing. It takes a lot of planning, but if you're able to focus on asking the right questions, define your business goals, get familiar with some Key Performance Indicators, identify who your audience is, find relevant topics to write about, have a content distribution plan, create your content, and analyze the feedback, you will be successful. 

If you're stuck at any point in the process, we have hundreds of resources (and experts to help you) right here on SavvySME - from marketing agencies to bloggers and writers.

Whether it's content creation, content distribution, or content marketing, we've got you covered.

We understand there's a lot of work involved with running a business, but the good news is you don't have to do it alone!

Read more about content marketing agencies, the services they offer, and how they can help you. 

You may also like to read our content marketing Q&A, or check out our list of related articles.