Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that provides users with valuable, relevant and consistent content that attracts your target audience whilst influencing them to take a desirable action (e.g. to get in contact with you, browse through your products).
Content is the present and the future of marketing. Going beyond highlighting your products or services, you are offering your target audience content that helps solve their issues and engages them.
Don’t be that company that gives informational garbage to try and sell you “stuff”. Companies unload users with information all the time and most of this content is ignored. Stand out from the crowd by creating content that understands customers “pain-points” and addresses their problems. This will result in them finding out more about your brand, products and services.
Why is content marketing so important?
Marketing is impossible without great content. Here are some key benefits that content marketing can bring to your business:
- Increased sales and Return on investment (ROI)
- Attract better customers who are loyal to your brand
Content marketing should be present through all your marketing tactics. Integrate content marketing throughout all your business practices, it’s not something separate. It’s part of all forms of marketing:
- SEO: Google’s AI has shifted to ranking businesses that publish quality and consistent content at the top of the pile.
- Social Media marketing: Content marketing strategy should be linked to your social media schedule.
- Google Ads campaigns: You need great content and keywords that make your campaigns work.
- PR: Strategies that address issues readers care about are typically more successful.
ROI content marketing – How content marketing drives sales
So, above we have highlighted the basics of what content marketing is and why it’s important, but how does this develop into reducing the cost of a lead or bringing a higher return on your investment? Compared to other marketing tactics, publishing relevant content will bring you gains for months and even years to come, if optimized throughout.
The greater content you generate, the more chances you have for possible clients to find you through organic results. However, you shouldn’t post content for the sake of it! Focus on quality content which will save you time and resources in the long run. Organic traffic is a very valuable channel in generating revenue or enquiries and the best thing is, you don’t have to spend any money to build organic traffic. When you decide what content to create, keep in mind that there’s no expiry date on a piece of content. It will be online forever, make sure you update and optimize content where appropriate.
Don’t have the resources to do this in-house? See how IBT Online can help!
Challenges of content marketing
Since consistency is key when it comes to content marketing, one of the challenges you will experience is continually creating new content. You need to produce valuable content that is engaging your target audience and customers. Be disciplined, stay within certain topics related to your business. Begin by researching questions people ask around the topic, look at competitors’ content that dominates the SERP.
It’s all well and good creating content that you feel is engaging to your audience but if it’s not built for Search Engines then you’ll struggle to generate high quality traffic organically. Content should be SEO-friendly to get in front of people, but it should also make people want to click and perform an action that is relevant to them and valuable to you. It’s about finding a balance between creative content and search engine optimization. The trick is to plan before you start writing, blend these three elements together:
- Analyse audience interests around particular topics, understand the problems they face.
- Keyword research for SEO purposes
- Understanding the meaning behind your content and the keywords you’re using.
In short, there are a lot of challenges content professionals face, from the analysis of your audience to creating the content itself. Read on to find out our solutions to help you get started with content marketing.
Where do I start? What content should I create?
Great ideas aren’t always easy to come by. Even professional content writers get stuck in finding topics, but they still manage to create great content consistently. How do they do it? They could’ve done it through any of these options:
- Take inspiration from your competitors – What blogs are they writing? Compile a list of 10 blogs that are your favourite.
- Get personal – Tell a story on your blog, can be tricky but it’s a great way to engage your audience on a deeper level.
- Interviews and readers advice – Interview someone, writing a few questions for someone else is easier than figuring it out yourself. Ask your reader what they would like to read about to get some feedback.
- UberSuggest tool – A great (and FREE) resource to use for finding content ideas. Enter your keyword and review related keywords, questions and blogs that are relevant to your initial idea.
- Review content that is ranked at the top of the SERP - What keywords do they use? How is the content structured? What calls-to-action do they include?
- Don’t have to be creative all the time – if you have any case studies available then post them. What are they doing right? What can readers learn from them?
- Review of top trends – Use Google trends to see what’s hot right now and work that into your post to boost rankings.
- Google Search console – review of search terms that users enter on Google. Are there any questions that are asked? If so, address it and write a piece of content tackling the question.
Still don’t know where to start with content marketing? Watch our webinar on how to create great content for localized Websites.
Source:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/benefits-high-quality-content-consistency-brand
https://medium.com/swlh/do-content-marketing-drive-sales-dfa1a9beb2b3
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/tips-for-creating-content/
https://www.semrush.com/blog/most-challenging-tasks-of-content-marketers/