From publishing content and hoping to acquire leads to gaining audience insights and making personalized content, content marketing has come a long way.
Those days are gone when brands used to ponder upon whether they should include content marketing in their overall marketing strategy.
Now, the paradigm has shifted. The question is not why you should include a content marketing strategy, but how you should do it has become the primary concern.
Due to the competitive modern business environment, more and more companies are paying attention to content marketing to thrive.
In fact, without a content marketing strategy in place, companies find it hard to put their brand before the public effectively.
But if you are still wondering why content marketing is essential for your business, we have you covered.
In this article, you’ll learn the benefits of content marketing and why your business needs it. Also, you will get insight into devising a killer content marketing strategy for your brand.
So without further delay, let’s get started. Read on.
Why Is Content Marketing Essential for Your Business?
Content marketing works wonders when it comes to building brand trust, generating leads, and establishing a loyal customer base. But above all, it is important because the customers tend to appreciate good content more than ever.
Ask yourself, can a food, travel, or clothing brand exist in this digital era without a social media page or marketing videos? No, right?
Similarly, how-to explainer videos and ebooks have become a norm in the tech sector. Even the companies in the financial industry develop apps, promote blogs and tools to aid their customers.
However, this was all unheard of nearly a decade ago. But ever since the concept of content marketing has entered the marketing realm, it is truly changing the game.
If you want to stay afloat and make your business successful in this modern age, you have to develop helpful content for your target market.
Therefore, you will see a wealth of relevant and remarkable content behind every notable or successful brand. Why? Because helpful content connects the audience with the business on a much deeper level.
However, your job is not only to make useful content but also to market it effectively among your target prospects.
Because no matter how great content you make, your business will never flourish if you do not market it the right way. And especially in this digital era, where information is in abundance, you need a solid content marketing strategy to stand out.
With that being said, let’s look into how you can develop a killer content marketing strategy for your brand.
How to Make a Killer Content Marketing Strategy for Your Business?
In order to have a reliable source of website traffic and acquire new leads time and again, you need to have a content marketing strategy in action.
One blog post, marketing video, or ebook can generate tons of leads and traffic, provided that it is marketed effectively.
But how? Let’s learn the specifics.
Set Realistic Goals
Marketers often get caught up in how to market content so much that they overlook why they are doing it? So first things first, you need to define your goals by asking some questions like:
Why do you want to develop a content marketing strategy? What do you target to accomplish as a business entity with this marketing plan?
Being clear in your head of what you want to achieve will aid you big time in moving forward with your plan. However, a crucial thing to consider here is to set realistic goals.
By setting realistic goals, we mean that you should consider your resources such as budget and time. Before moving forward with your plan, figure out how much money and time you can spend developing a content marketing strategy.
After that, reflect on your goals and make sure that they are sustainable in the long run also. To have a clear and focused content marketing plan, set three to five realistic goals max.
Further, to see whether you are headed in the right direction with your goals, ensure to measure your content marketing ROI.
Find Your Target Audience and Perform Segmentation
If you aim to achieve something, you must know what and where to target.
After setting your content marketing goals, it’s now time to figure out who are the people you need to aim your brand at.
More often than not, companies get too busy producing great content that they forget to point their efforts in the right direction. As a result, they end up being confused and lost in the process.
So if you are wondering how to find the right target audience to market your content, here are some tips.
- Conduct market research and understand pain points
- Survey your competitors
- Create Customer Personas
Conduct Market Research and Understand Pain Points
For starters, you need to conduct thorough market research to understand all the aspects of the market. This research includes finding:
- Location(international, national, local)
- Buying behaviors
- Market trends
- Psychographics(personality, likings, activities, lifestyle, values)
- Demographics(gender, age, income, marital status)
After making yourself aware of all the essential factors contributing to your brand’s market, you need to focus on the pain points of your potential target market.
Find out what problems they are facing and analyze how you can solve them to make their lives easier.
Survey Your Competitors
Another great way to define your target audience is to see what kind of people engage with your business rivals.
By surveying your competitors, you will not only be able to figure out which audience to target. But you’ll also have the chance to attract those people with your own compelling USP.
Further, you can also get tons of content marketing ideas that can help with your strategy down the road.
Create Customer Personas
Customer personas depict the key traits of your target audience. You make these personas with the help of data you collect and research you do to understand your target prospects.
Creating different customer personas will enable you to gauge the personalities and the actual requirements of your target market.
You can create buyer personas by conducting market research, surveys and by analyzing digital engagement. You can also gather some similar information that can provide a brief outlook of a customer. Personas may include your customer’s day-to-day likings, hobbies, interests, etc.
Moreover, after finding the right target audience for your brand, you need to segment it too.
This means that you should take a deeper look to analyze your target market’s geography and behavior. Why? Because the audience’s preferences change with the change in their geographical locations.
Therefore, you must also segment your target market into smaller groups to serve them best and as per their needs.
Plan Your Content Production
Exceptions are always there, but most audiences appreciate all types of content especially, videos and blogs.
So after conducting in-depth market research of your audience, make sure to have a diverse mix of several types of content to attract each person of your target audience.
Content types may include:
- Videos
- Social media posts
- Blogs and articles(including listicles and how-to explainers)
- Infographics
- Ebooks
- Podcasts
However, while producing content, you need to keep a couple of things in mind to get the maximum output. For example:
Create content That is SEO friendly
Content marketing is all good and fine. But do you know that 53% percent of the traffic comes from users’ organic search? Therefore, search engine optimization of your content is also vital.
So whether you are creating blogs, making videos, or publishing infographics, do not forget to enhance your content’s SEO friendliness.
Repurpose Your Content
After creating a single blog post, do not just sit and watch the blog perform. Instead, use the same content to create short social media posts and infographics to publish on different channels.
For instance, on the one hand, where you are sharing your blogs on your website, you can make short social media posts out of those blogs and promote them on Instagram and Facebook, on the other.
Similarly, you can make infographics from those same blogs and promote them on a visual search engine like Pinterest.
But before starting to make content, reflect on your purpose for creating that in the first place. This will help you to come up with content that can cover every bit of your user journey.
If your content can help your visitors at every stage of their journey, you are more likely to develop a long-term relationship, resulting in increased revenue.
Choose Right Distribution Channels
The next important thing to make a content marketing strategy is to select appropriate distribution channels.
Why bother if you make super informational or long-form videos for your target audience but promote them on Instagram rather than Youtube?
Promoting your content on the wrong channel will not only fail to serve the purpose of your target audience. But you will also not be able to see a rise in your sales graph.
Therefore, along with making amazing content, select the right distribution channel to promote it on.
To begin with, identify the most relevant distribution channels. Your focus should be on the top media channels your target audience spends their most time on. These will be the platforms where your content will receive more engagement.
For example, Pinterest is a great platform to post infographics or creative designs. Likewise, Instagram is one of its kind when it comes to building brand identity through visual stories.
However, at the end of the day, it all comes down to which platform your audience uses the most. Not to mention, this will influence your content creation and publishing process.
Analyze and Adapt
After implementing all the above steps, you will have a great content marketing strategy by your side. But your job is not finished yet!
After making your content public across different platforms, now is the time to analyze the performance. And adapt accordingly.
Gauge which content is engaging the audience and which is not performing up to the mark. This will help you to understand which type of content you need to keep on making. And which content you need to change the strategy for.
In short, you have to look nowhere because you will get clear signals from your audience regarding your content performance.
Typically, there are four categories that content metrics lie under. That is:
- Engagement: How many likes, shares, views, and comments your content is getting
- SEO results: How many backlinks you are getting, organic web traffic, users dwell time on your site
- User behavior: How many pages per session, new visitors, and bounce rate
- Business revenue: Conversion rate, no of leads generated, existing leads performance
It’s Time To Put Your Campaign To the Test
After making a content marketing strategy, it’s now time to put your campaign to the test. The idea is to start small and find out what is working for your content and what is not.
You can start with posting some blogs or videos across multiple platforms and gauge what kind of people are liking the content.
To see which content is performing best and which is not, you can use Google analytics. It tells you stuff like how many views your content is getting and what your bounce rate is.
With the help of this tool, you can also get insight into the audience. For example, you can find out what kind of people are engaging with your content. And what their location is.
Through this activity, you will be able to identify which audience is and is not interested in your content. As a result, you will direct your content marketing efforts in the right direction with the right approach.
By now, we have understood why content marketing is essential for your business. And how you can make your own content marketing strategy.
But what are the benefits of marketing your content?
Let’s have a detailed look at the three topmost benefits of content marketing.
Increases Sales and Conversion Rates
Exceptional content combined with good marketing tactics is meant to receive eyeballs. And the more the eyeballs(engagement), the more the chances of sales increment.
So if your content is receiving higher engagements, you are most likely to generate new leads. Why? Because people tend to buy from the brands that provide them value.
Therefore, if you’re helping your leads through your content, they are most likely to purchase from you down the line.
Moreover, efficient content marketing can also improve your conversion rates drastically.
However, your content alone can not navigate your readers to buy from you. This means that you need to make a little extra effort and include compelling CTAs in your different types of content.
Call to action is a short persuasive text that tells the users to take a certain action. And in most cases, CTAs direct users to a landing page where they can perform their purchase.
So you use it to your advantage and turn your helpful content into a conversion machine.
Further, you can use CTAs anywhere in your content. Just ensure not to overuse them, as it can make you look overly promotional.
Boosts SEO and Website Traffic
Anybody who knows inbound marketing well understands that SEO is incomplete with a content marketing strategy.
After dealing with the technical SEO of your website, all you need to do is make high-quality content with some relevant keywords. When your content matches the search intent of users, Google rewards you with higher rankings.
And if your target market can benefit from your content, the sky will be the limit.
Why? Because helpful content spreads like a bushfire. As more and more people will see it, it will result in high website traffic and enhanced SEO.
When your content builds trust and authority among the target audience, your ranking in SERPs consequently increases. And so does website traffic.
Builds Brand Awareness
No doubt, there are several ways to build brand awareness. But content marketing builds it quite uniquely.
There is an undertone brand building if you are making content with which the audience is connecting actively.
Moreover, every piece of content you make opens the door of opportunity for the audience to get familiar with your brand.
When the audience finds something informative or helpful through your content, they think more highly of your brand.
Final Thoughts
From the last decade or so, we have witnessed a significant shift in consumer behavior. People are responding less to the traditional ways of marketing and are more interested in modern methods.
Content marketing is one such by-product of the latest digital marketing scene. What makes it so effective is that brands can promote their offerings and expertise without being overly promotional.
So your top-notch content, along with exceptional marketing tactics, will be enough to put you ahead of your competition and generate more sales.
However, bear in mind that content marketing is a long-term game. You may not get the results of your efforts overnight. But with persistency and dedication, you’re bound to achieve success.
Are you finding it challenging to produce and market content at the same time? Well, leave it on us.
Here at Atoll Digital, we help you stand out with a high-quality content marketing service that serves both your business and audience needs.
