Introduction

Content marketing is a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind when it’s time to buy what you sell

What is content marketing?

Content Marketing is the technique of creating and sharing relevant, quality, valuable, and consistent content that can acquire and attract audiences and aims at driving user's profitable actions. When it’s done right, this content conveys expertise and makes it clear that a company values the people to whom it sells.           

The consistent use of content marketing establishes and nurtures relationships with your prospective and existing customers. When your audience thinks of your company as a partner interested in their success and a valuable source of advice and guidance, they’re more likely to choose you when it’s time to buy.

The key difference between any form of advertising or marketing and content marketing is the “value” that content adds to a customer or a user. It is a strategic approach to connect and engage with the audience through highly relevant content. Brands build trust by creating and sharing relevant and personalized content and establish strong relationships with their customers. Content helps brands or publishers to resonate with target demographic as their trusted resources. The central idea of content marketing is to anticipate and meet the needs of customers and viewers by providing valuable information instead of focusing on elevating a business.

Why it’s important

Content marketing is a go-to tactic that’s proven to work. Also, it provides a competitive advantage. Take a look at what the data says about content marketing:

• Businesses with blogs get 67% more leads than other companies.

• Forty-seven percent of buyers view 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative.

• Companies that use content marketing see approximately 30% higher growth rates than businesses not using it.

• Seventy-two percent of business to business (B2B) marketers say content marketing increases engagement and the number of leads they generate.

Objectives/Goals of Content Marketing

• Attract prospects and generate qualified leads.

• Expand customer base and foster strong customer relationship.

• Initiate or Increase online sales.

• Create brand awareness, credibility, authority, and trust.

• Engage users for lasting relationship.

• Drives conversions and bring more traffic through engagement.

• Aware and educate customers or audiences.

• Position your business as an industry expert.

• Move buyer's quickly through their buyer's journey.

• Improve search engine optimization and online visibility

• Reach a specific audience by reaching customers who are interested.

How content marketing works

Your business can use content marketing to attract leads, make a case for your product or service when someone is researching what to buy, and close sales.

To use it effectively, you’ll need to deliver the right content at each stage of the sales cycle—from awareness through consideration to purchase.

Here’s how companies use content marketing in each stage of the sales cycle to engage and sell.

1. Awareness stage

At the first stage of the sales process, your content should focus on the top concerns of your audience. Writing about their pain points, challenges, and questions gives you the best chance of engaging with them. Content at the awareness stage should be educational, how-to advice. Save your selling for the consideration and closing phases.

Best content for this stage: articles, blog posts, e-books, videos, newsletters

Examples:

• A restaurant writes a blog post about how to plan a menu for a graduation party in the spring.

• A bike touring company creates a short video on the topic “3 Ways to Choose the Right Bike Trip.”

• An architecture firm creates an e-book called “Questions to Ask Before Hiring an Architect.”

2. Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, content should offer a hybrid of helpful information and marketing. It should educate the reader about what features or functions to look for and how various features address their needs. Of course, your content should have a bent toward what your business offers.

Best content for this stage: case studies, how-to articles, how-to videos, checklists/worksheets

Examples:

• A cloud-based phone system company creates a checklist entitled “8 Ways to Improve Your Phone Customer Service” that details the features and functions that make great customer service possible.

• A landscaping company creates case studies about “The Biggest Mistakes Most People Make When They Hire a Landscaper.”

• A catering company features case studies of successful events with a focus on the benefits they offer, such as “How to Accommodate Food Allergies at Your Next Event,” or “How to Ensure Your Caterer Uses Sustainable Practices.”

3. Closing stage

Content marketing plays an important role when a prospect is close to buying. At this stage, you can focus on sales, as long as you continue to drive home why you’re the best choice rather than just how great your services or products are.

Your central message here should be your expertise, knowledge, and the differentiating benefits of what you sell.

Best content for this stage: case studies, user-generated content, buyer’s guide, product video, research report

Examples:

• A consulting firm creates a research report proving that businesses that engage in strategic planning, assessments by outsiders, and other services—shaped by what services it offers—experience higher growth.

• A design agency creates short videos showcasing the variety in its work across different industries to demonstrate its diverse expertise.

• An orthodontist practice encourages patients to contribute testimonials about its state-of-the-art equipment and top-notch service.

7 step strategy building process

1. Define your goals

Before you begin working on a specific piece of content, it is important to define and communicate your goals. This is particularly important if you need to justify your budget investment to your company’s executives, as it will help you quantify your results later on.

You can also build your content strategy with specific goals in mind — for example, increasing your number of Facebook “likes” or growing your database of email addresses. By setting your goals right from the start, you can then focus on building your content in a way that will increase the chances of meeting those benchmarks.

Tip: While it may be tempting to analyze the direct influence of content to sales and make this one of your key performance indicators (KPIs), in reality, your content efforts probably will not function this way. Instead, decide on goals that will align with your other marketing strategies, such as improving your social media presence or harvesting email addresses for future email marketing campaigns.

2. Record your performance metrics

Once you have decided on your goals, you need to work out how you will track and measure your performance against those metrics.

Google Analytics is great for recording goal completions, and Google is always adding to its available measurement features and functionality. If your desired goal is getting readers to take an action, such as tweeting your post or signing up for a newsletter, make sure you are tracking the results for each of these events. This information will help you to work out your conversion rate, as well as allow you to better analyze the success of each content effort and identify areas for future improvement.

3.     Gather your data

         Most successful content does one of two things:

• Introduces a brand new concept, idea, or news story to your audience (existing or new), or

• Repurposes an existing idea into a new format

Whichever way you do it, you will need to begin gathering data that will provide value to your target audience. This data should offer a unique perspective of your industry and could be gathered through interviewing customers, discovering the success rate of a particular initiative, finding out satisfaction rates — anything that will offer a valuable insight into a particular sector.

This may be data you gathered from scratch or existing information; but this process will dictate the success of your entire campaign.

If you decide to collate your own data, you may want to use services like Survey Monkey, which are helpful for creating and delivering questionnaires which could go out to your email database. They can also be placed onto a page on your website, and you can use incentives such as discount codes to encourage site visitors to fill them in.

You could also create polls of your own customers or website visitors, or utilize social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to ask questions and compile data on a subject.

If you are looking to repurpose other people’s data, look for independent industry authorities who are known for collecting relevant information. For example, online marketer Sean Revill has produced a comprehensive list of resources for data gathering efforts.

There are pros and cons to using other people’s data vs. collecting your own. If you use other people’s previously gathered data, you can lose the immediacy of producing something unique and newsworthy. However, by repurposing data, you can help expand its reach to new audiences — and if the original content author likes what you’ve done, they may even promote your content in return.

4. Decide on your content types

Once you have your data, you are free to create your content in any way you like. You aren’t restricted to one piece of content either, as you can create a wide range of content depending on what you are looking to do with it.

For example, you can compile the data into an info graphic that you display on your website, and then write a blog post to go with it that discusses the info graphic in further detail. The information can then be worked into a press release that promotes this content on your website, or you can even create a guest post on a relevant website that discusses the data from a different angle.

5. Create content

The topic of content creation is worthy of a number of posts all of its own, but for the purposes of designing your strategy, you should ensure that every piece of content is professionally created by someone who specializes in the particular content format you are working with. For example, press releases should be written by copywriters, and designers should be responsible for info graphics.

Regardless of who creates your content, though, you should also dedicate sufficient time to headline writing, as this will play a big role in dictating the success of your campaign.

Your content also should be created in alignment with your overall marketing strategy. So, for example, if you are trying to promote yourself as an industry authority, the types of content that you produce should all be aligned to benefit this aim. Write press releases and produce media packets targeted at relevant news websites; create graphical interpretations of your data that you can approach bloggers with; and make sure that you dedicate a section of your website to your subject: If you’re using external content to promote yourself, it is likely that you will see visitors to your website looking for more information on the subject, and you could lose their interest if you have not aligned your on-site strategy with your off-site goals.

6. Distribution

One of the biggest problems encountered with content marketing is that once content pieces are produced, they can exist in glorious isolation on the website on which they are hosted. Distribution is everything, so you need to make sure that you forge a clear path for those you want to engage with your content.

To do this, look at your existing routes to market, and analyze the weaker areas. Can you utilize social media, the press, or your existing visitors? Can you leverage industry authorities to share your content through their own networks? Could you approach the authors of your data and encourage them to promote it?

The work is not over once you hit “publish,” you need to make sure that you spend the same amount of time and effort that you did in creating the content when you go about marketing it. For example, think about who you want to read your content, and consider where these audience members are likely to be.

You also need to consider the image you are trying to portray. If you are looking to boost your authority as a financial thought leader, for example, you will need to target esteemed financial publications, rather than smaller, less authoritative blogs.

7. Follow-up for SEO

Even if you have run a successful content piece that has been published by all of your target websites, you might still have to do a bit of housekeeping to ensure that you receive all of the SEO credit.

Many people may publish your content but not include any links back to your website, so you need to keep as complete a list as possible of the websites that have run your content.

This can be done by setting up Google Alerts that email you whenever your blog title is published or your company is mentioned. You can also use services such as Followerwonk to track social media mentions.

Once you have compiled a list of websites that have published your content, you can analyze each one and make sure they have linked back to your website. If you have produced the content then you certainly deserve the credit.

If you find websites that haven’t linked back, simply drop them an email or a tweet and request that they include a link to your website. If they have used your content, most will be happy to do so.

Also, don’t worry too much about the anchor text used in the link. If they are coming from authoritative sources, you don’t need to be concerned about what the anchor text says.

Types of Content Marketing

1. Videos

Visuals are always more effective than normal text. Videos are the perfect way to deliver your message to your target audience. You can easily aware your audience about your company, business, products, and services entertainingly and attractively. You can share your video content on your website, blog, and social media channels.

2. Infographics

Infographics are the best content form which includes text, images, and graphics. They are the visual representations of your entire content and attract traffic in a more effective way than any normal content does. They can make any complex information eye-catching, easily digestible, and shareable. Infographics play a crucial part in today's content marketing strategies and the visual world of marketing.

3. E-books

E-books are great lead magnets. They are quite long as 10 to 30 pages but offer values. It's an electronic version of a printed book that includes in-depth information.

4. Webinars

A webinar is a video-based content that is a live web-based video conference that uses internet for communicating to the audience. This can also be used by the audience to ask questions and chat with the host.

5. Social Media Posts

Today companies cannot stand out without the help of social media platforms. A social media post is more engaging, effective, and attractive than any other type of marketing aspect. It's a lot easier to adopt and share. There are a number of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google Plus, etc. where your target audience is available, and you can share your content with them.

6. Surveys

Surveys are a method of gathering information from people, your audiences or clients. Surveys are very helpful for a business or company to know what their customers think about them, about their products and services. Surveys can be conducted in many ways like through mail, telephone, printed questionnaire, in person or through the web.

7. E-newsletters

They are the publications that are developed and distributed by business regularly. They are an effective way to maintain and stay in contact. It can also be used to promote products and services. There are plenty of e-newsletter directories available over the internet. You have to log in and find your interested topics.

8. Whitepapers

A white paper is an authoritative, in-depth guide or reports that reports about a complex issue to the readers and users. It is useful for readers to understand an issue, solve that issue and make a decision. As a marketing perspective, it is a form of marketing representation and a tool to persuade client partners and customers and viewpoint or product promotion. In other words, it is meant to market a company’s products, ideas, and services by educating their potential buyers about the same with credible and valuable information.

9. Podcasts

Podcast was named by combining “Broadcasting” and “iPod”. It is a video or audio broadcast that a user can download, subscribe and listen. It is distributed over the internet and usually has a format similar to television show or radio show. Subscription helps in automatic download of new series wo mobile application, user’s local computer or portable media player. The files distributed are in audio format. Videos shared through Podcast model are called as video podcasts or vodcasts. Podcast can be used by many digital audio formats and can be played on any portable digital device or MP3 player. Podcasting can help businesses to engage with their listeners by educating and entertaining them. It’s an alternative mean of letting the target audience to gain access to a company’s content.

10.  Case Studies

A case study is an in-depth examination of a subject of study or case. They are more effective than brochures and traditional sharing format. It involves telling stories about a brand. Case studies are niche-specific and very targeted. They can position your brand as authoritative, can explain how problems are solved, provide social proof, lead to spinoff content, and maximize conversions.

 Do’s of Content Marketing

• Create engaging content for the audience: Create content that emotionally engages your audience and let them be a part of your success.

• Focus on a simple layout that interests consumers: Have simple layout for customers to navigate and absorb the information provided.

• Content should be oriented to meet the needs of your customers: Identify the pain points of your audience and produce content that addresses your customer's needs.

• Content should act as an informative resource: Generate content which adds knowledge to your audience and which can be a resource to refer to.

• Content should emanate care for your customers: Create content that radiates care for your audience instead of trying to sell something with it.

• Content should be appropriate for the chosen marketing channel: It is essential to choose right media to share your content to reach the right audience at the right time.

• Content should be transparent and supportive: Produce content which is honestly customer-oriented and provide best customer support.

Don’ts of Dos of Content Marketing

• Irrelevant and not personalized content: Content marketing targets specific group of audience. Only relevant and personalized content will win the customers.

• Low quality and not useful: Information which does not provide a reader with some insights on a topic will always fail to keep a customer engaged.

• Inconsistent: Lack of consistency in producing and sharing high-quality and engaging content will make you fall behind in the race.

• Not measuring your metrics: Not following up the metrics leave you baffled about your content marketing strategy. Periodical check on the results of your content marketing will lead you to streamline your strategy for desired outcomes.

Benefits of Content Marketing

• Attracts New Visitors Content attracts new visitors to your site. High-quality content makes the visitors linger longer on your site, and this will make them familiar with your business. A new user spending more time going through your content will likely become a prospect and a possible customer.

• Boosts Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Adding relevant content in the form of blog posts results in higher visibility to the search engines.

• Achieves Higher Domain Authority Generating high-quality content on a consistent basis will increase authority and trust of your website. If the content is impressive it earns inbound links from external websites improves search rankings of your site. Increased search ranking will produce more organic search visibility.

• More Referral Traffic A valuable and educating content will bring referrals to your site.

• Increased Exposure on Social Platforms Promoting content through social media increases exposure of your brand.

• Increased Conversion Potential Increased traffic to your site will improve the chances for more conversions.

• Builds Trust with your Brand Informative and engaging content will improve the reputation of your brand and earns audience’s trust towards your business.

• Nurtures Customer Relationships A personalized content for target audience will make your customers believe that they are taken care in a personal level. This will strengthen the customer’s bonding with your brand.

• Universally Accepted Content marketing is suitable for any business type.

• Relatively Economical A good strategy and valuable content for a right set of audience at consistent intervals generate incredible returns. You have to invest your time properly that's it.