How do you make sure that you are marketing your business effectively? The world is continually changing and so should your marketing strategies. It is essential to make sure that your marketing strategies are up-to-date. To stay competitive today, you need to be using content marketing. More than half of all marketers are involved in some form of content marketing. Let’s talk about what content marketing is, its benefits, and how to begin applying it to your business.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing strategy focused on creating and distributing valuable content to your target audience to drive new traffic to your business. This can be done in the form of blog posts, infographics, email marketing, pictures, or videos that provide solutions to your consumers' problems. The key to content marketing is to consistently provide solutions to your consumers’ problems that are educational, entertaining, and useful to your target audience. The content you share is information that is relevant to your business industry that can improve the life of your target audience. Providing valuable, relevant, and consistent content will strengthen your customers' trust and loyalty in your brand.
What are the benefits of content marketing?
Content marketing has become such an integral part of marketing today that nine out of ten consumers expect brands to provide content. This expectation is a great advantage for you to build on! Here are a few benefits of using content marketing:
Generates leads: There are so many businesses advertising their products online that consumers will choose products based off of content. 72% of marketers say that content marketing boosts engagement and leads. When you market your businesses with engaging content, consumers are drawn to your brand. Plus, the leads that come from your content marketing have already been well-educated about what you have to offer and will be higher-quality leads.
Build brand credibility: Consumers are more aware than ever about their purchasing decisions. The more consumers are exposed to your content, the more loyal they will be to your brand. In fact, 88% of marketers have reached their goals of creating brand awareness and building trust and credibility through content marketing. You can shape consumers’ opinions and promote your brand’s values, goals and passions. Content marketing not only increases lead generation but it creates life-long customers.
Content can have a high ROI: Creating original content has the potential to multiply itself. If you created a video for your website, you can also upload that video to social media, include it in a blog post, share it in a marketing email, or convert it into a podcast. People are more likely to stay engaged with what you are sharing because it’s original and helps them solve the problems your business is best at solving.
How to start a content marketing plan
Most businesses are eager to begin content marketing but many feel like they aren’t approaching their strategies effectively. These 10 steps will help you create an effective content marketing plan:
Create goals: Decide why you want to create content. Is it to increase traffic to your website? Do you want to build the credibility of your brand? How will you know when you have accomplished these goals?
Choose your target audience: Knowing your target audience is crucial for content marketing. Identify who will want your goods or services. What age, sex, income, occupation, location, pains, problems, obstacles, habits, interests, motivations, and lifestyle does your target audience have? What other characteristics create the profile of your target audience? By knowing who your target audience is, you will have better direction in knowing what type of content will appeal to them.
Learn about your competition: Learn about your brand’s competition. Your competitors can be other businesses in your industry, or news that cover the same topics you do. What content are they sharing and what seems to be the most successful?
Research keywords: Investigate what your target audience is searching for online. What keywords or phrases are they using on Google and other search engines? Start by going to Google Trends and searching keywords or phrases that you think your target audience would use. Google Trends will show you the past and current volume of those keywords, shares other related topics, and maps out geographical areas that have the most interest in those keywords. Your findings may give you more ideas of content to create.
Review your existing content: Review old content you have already published to know what type of content to continue creating. What topics have generated the most interest?
Build your strategy: A marketing strategy is a detailed plan of activities to accomplish in order to reach your target audience and accomplish your goals. Your previous research will help you make decisions. What type of content will you focus on creating? How often will you publish content? How will you distribute your content?
There are many ways to distribute your content. Keep in mind which channels will best reach your target audience. Here is a list of common channels:
Podcasts
Videos
Blogs
Email newsletters
Social media posts
Webinars
Ebooks
Choose who will run your content marketing: Are you going to create your content yourself or hire someone else to create your content? Who is going to be in charge of your marketing campaign? Who is going to respond to the comments and questions that your content gets? How much time can you realistically give to your content marketing?
Schedule your marketing calendar: Plan what days you will publish your content and who is in charge of publishing it. It is important to publish consistently and frequently.
Create and publish your content: Make sure that your content is always high quality and not rushed to meet a deadline.
Refine your strategy: Your strategy will evolve in time as you learn what content is more successful than others. It’s important to remain flexible in your approach to the content you create.
Still have questions about how to begin content marketing? Let us know which questions you have by filling out the form below! We want to help you achieve your goals!