What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a method of online marketing where content is created with a customer-first mentality on the web.
The content itself can vary depending on the needs of the company and its customers.
It’s necessary to create content that serves companies or websites target audiences the best.
The goal is to produce more sales and visibility without actually selling.
Content marketing should take into consideration customers in different stages of a sales funnel. Creating content that serves multiple goals will produce the most results in the long-term.
Every company and website should be utilizing content marketing in their marketing strategy. All you need is to find the right content strategy and approach, to fulfill the needs of your target audience.
Content marketing isn’t as distracting to the customer as regular advertisements could be.
Content Marketing Increases Trust in Brands Online
Content marketing builds authority and trust online. Building trust in brands can generate better and longer-term clients.
Produce value without selling.
When you help your customers to understand and solve their problems, it lowers the barrier to become a customer later on.
Through targeted communications, a company can educate their customer on their products and services and how they could help customers solve their various problems.
Controlling communications, a company can introduce the right answers to the mix. The correct answer at the right time speeds up the process of becoming a customer.
An increased trust also generates more referral business.
Search Engine Optimization and Content Marketing
A good content marketing strategy takes into consideration SEO because, without it, the beautifully created content wouldn’t be seen by anyone online.
Time and money invested in great content will not produce results if it’s not optimized well for the search engines.
What Is Good Search Engine Optimized Content:
- High-quality content is when it matches customer search queries and their interests.
- Content has to include the keywords wanted in sufficient amounts.
- There has to be enough content to answer the queries.
- Content has been created with real goals in mind.
- For example, the SEO of a product page will be different than the SEO of a blog page
- Always create evergreen content when it’s possible.
- SEO is never an instant process, and it requires time, therefore evergreen content is the way to go when suitable and possible.
- Improving mobile-experience of the content
- The percentage of mobile searches is very high and still growing, and ignoring it will lower results.
Search engine optimized content provides more organic traffic to websites in the long-term when done correctly. For example, blogs that solve problems and questions could bring most of the online traffic long after they’re published.
Always produce engaging content that helps your customers stay on the website for longer, thus increasing search rankings.
A diverse and wide selection of content on the website creates an opportunity to gain online traffic from a lot of keywords. Large content selection will be more engaging to your customers and help them stay longer on the website and eventually convert to your products and services.
Every blog post, article, and product page creates a unique page for Google to index to its search engine. A well-optimized page will gain higher rankings.
Producing additional content expedites the process of obtaining rankings in long-tail keywords (3 or more words), which would be harder to gain with just the primary pages.
A high-quality and large content selection increases domain authority, which also increases rankings in the search engines.
The more touch-points a company has online, the more opportunities to gain referral traffic and social media shares it has. It will increase more chances for a customer to react to the company.
Content Marketing Cost
The main content marketing cost is labor: The time spent by someone to create content, it’s planning, and strategy, and publishing.
Any company can reasonably quickly start with content marketing if they’ve enough time to invest in it. An obstacle, many companies face is planning the right strategy for the content. Without a proper strategy, content creation will not produce results, and companies won’t gain the benefits they wanted.
By outsourcing content marketing strategy, a company can achieve better and sustainable results. An outsourced strategy will show precisely what sort of content to produce, and to whom.
In the short-term, content marketing is likely not to bring in results. Investing in content is a long-term process, and in the future, it will become a cost-efficient communication and online marketing tool.
Active content marketing has a compounding effect as produced content starts to gain rankings in the search engines.
Content marketing benefits other marketing strategies that companies might have in place. The creation of content that was created the audience in mind will convert customers. Great content converts regardless of the source of the traffic.
The organic search produces inbound leads that can be used in automating sales processes.
Execution of a content strategy will take a lot of time and investments, but its benefit to companies is vast in the long-term.
Content Marketing Analytics
Most online content can be tracked through the usage of web analytics tools.
To correctly track content marketing, there needs to be set the right goals and targets. What do we want out of our content, and what would we seem successful?
Content marketing goals examples:
- Increased sales
- Increased leads
- Growth of brand awareness
- Promotion of products and services
Web analytics and its goals are used to measure the results of content marketing efforts. For example, to track how well received is the content by its readers.
How Would I Know if My Content is Good For My Audience?
- What happens when a customer comes to the website:
- Will they leave instantly from the site because the content wasn’t what was promised.
- The goals of communication aren’t reached.
- The audience doesn’t consume the whole content.
- The audience doesn’t convert or doesn’t convert the way it was planned.
- Customers are distracted on the website rather than consuming the content.
- Can the content be found with the right keywords from search engines?
Content marketing uses analytics to make better decisions to create even better content in the future. The goal is to reach your audience with the right content.
Experimentation and testing of different content types and styles are key in result-based content marketing.
The use of analytics provides content marketers with fresh ideas. For example:
- What kind of content resonates the best?
- What keywords to use?
Documenting every step is crucial in producing long-term value with content marketing. By documenting, we can analyze our past actions, improve upon them every time, and importantly recreate the best solutions.
Companies who document their strategies are three times more likely to gain better results with content marketing.
Content Types
In recent years many content types have become available to companies to expand their marketing efforts. Companies can utilize a large set of content types to represent their brand in the best and most useful ways.
Many content types can be used together to gain the maximum effect of content creation.
Example of Content types:
- Articles
- Long-form content that solves problems and gives a deeper understanding of a certain topic in the industry of the company.
- It opens the opportunity to grow authority in the industry.
- Press Releases
- Official channel of communication
- Website and landing page content
- Conversion-based web content is a great opportunity to grow sales and leads online.
- Blogs
- Opportunity to write easily more about the topics of the industry. The key is to remember, audience-first mentality.
- Social Media Content
- Great for repurposing content that was created earlier. It’s important to remember the specialties of every social media service and reproduce the content in the correct format.
- Social media can be used to experiment with different content ideas first. Through data, we can measure what types of content have worked the best in social media and use them on our website, for example.
- Videos and Images
- Videos have the opportunity to expand a topic that was previously discussed in an article. Sharing videos on Youtube will increase traffic on the website potentially. A benefit of videos on the website is to increase the time spent metric to increase search rankings.
- Images and infographics are an important part of search engines, and their part is growing all the time. Optimizing and using the right images can increase organic traffic tremendously.
- Online advertisements
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Reduce your customer support team’s workload with a great FAQ-Page. The faster a customer’s problems can be fixed, the higher the chance of customers converting is.
- Product Pages
- When product pages are created with the customer in mind, it will most likely bring in more sales for an online store.
- A product supporting blogs and pages increases the visibility of the product pages themselves, thus increasing sales.
High-quality content can and should be reused on other platforms as well. For example, creating a great search engine optimized article can be reused in many ways:
- Social media posts
- Used in online advertising (with the use of landing pages)
- Create videos
- Utilize in sales meetings
- Produce highly shareable infographics
- Discuss in a podcast
- Material for email marketing
We always recommend that when producing content that is should be published on your website first because you have complete control of it.
How To Find Content Ideas For Your Target Audience
Look for questions that your customers have proposed about your industry, products, or services. Try to answer all of these questions with the right content type. Types of questions that would be the best are those that can be answered directly with your services and products.
Discover the platforms your customers are on. Every platform has different requirements for the content, how it’s consumed, and how its found. For example, for some companies, social media would be an obvious choice, and for others, the search engine would be best.
For online content, look out for long-tail keywords that signify users’ interests and produce content around those ideas. Use keyword planning tools or search directly from the search engine for keywords.
Look at your direct competitors and how they are taking on content marketing. For example, your competitor has found a niche, and that might provide great ideas.
Discover more ideas using web analytics: Analytics of your website can provide more detailed ideas. For example, if your website has a search function, it might entail what people are trying to find on your site.
Analyzing previous marketing campaign data: Previous online advertisements can show great opportunities. Look for ads that have gained a lot of traction and engagement. Choose the best and decide how to expand the content strategy from there.
Search and analyze current and upcoming trends in your industry. Being early on trends can be highly beneficial for content creation and traffic generation.
Common Problems In Content Strategies
- Using correct measurements and goals
- Understanding the needs of the target audience
- Lack of time producing content
- Choosing the wrong content type and platform (Content distribution)
- Calculating return on investment (ROI) of content marketing
- Properly utilizing search engine optimization for online content
- Not fixing failing content strategy early on
Content marketing and its utilization have many benefits to a marketing strategy overall. Companies that have included it in their marketing strategy will gain more results.
Every marketing plan should include a strategy for content creation, especially when looking for additional growth online or otherwise.
Read more about growth marketing.
Engaio Digital Agency helps companies in creating a content marketing strategy with search engine optimization in mind.