What is content marketing and why do you need this?
«Know your niche,
feed your fish!»
-Ilya Schreiber.
Being a long term strategy content marketing enhances connection between you and your customers. Feed their interest providing a useful content on a permanent basis.
Here is the definition by Content Marketing Institute:
«… a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.»
2 main reasons to start a content marketing campaign are Increased Sales and Customer Loyalty.
What probably can’t be measured with a traditional conversions, ROI and revenue as it occupy the top part of the selling funnel.
With all this noise of everyone’s daily routine we should be focused on providing a valuable content that catch attention and fit our client needs, wherever they are big guys from broadband company or a small retailer from California.
What is the most engaging content you can offer? Is it a guide-style set of articles describing a problem solution with every tiny detail? Always start from the client side. Concerns, doubts, wet wishes everything should be heard and represented in one of expected formats they prefer whether a video or an ebook, we will touch on this topics further.
People wants to hear a true story telling, that probably improves their lives, in the ideal case ending with a purchase of service or product.
Building a trust and long playing relationship with your customer is the key of any business model. If they have a particular issue – you are the one who definitely need to have a good and useful article about. So for example you can target your email marketing campaign to this specific consumers.
It should be clearly understood that content marketing is about your clients needs, doubts and interests, just having no promotional staff, but yes, leading the customer along the right way.
Statistics suggest that in 2020 about 80% of large scale B2B companies are going to increase the amount of content marketing efforts. What means you also should.
We’ve written thousands of articles developing a land project, using our own non-professional photos. What brought the first fruits in a short time.
Being the exact opposite of paid advertising, content marketing stands out as a long term strategy, that brings a good organic traffic.
Combined with a proper SEO, this is what helps you stand out of millions Google results, striving for being on a first page, forming a 90% of traffic allocated to this query.
It makes no difference if you have a laptop repair business, or engaged in car importing, content marketing fits any needs. Provide a valuable content for every stage of the funnel journey guiding the lead to a final purchase.
Let’s speak about some types of content marketing.
1. Blogging.
Having a blog it’s a good opportunity for sharing a helpful knowledge and also receive a direct response of your audience. First of all it’s free, if we don’t consider man hours.
A high quality post will always bring a feedback so needed for understanding your public expectations. Think about the topics your readers find interesting and fill the gaps in those cases.
Blogging can also act as a lead generation platform.
2. Ebooks.
Are found on paid and freemium basis, and can serve for lead gathering purpose.
Its digital format is one of the significant advantages. No shipping, no storage.
First of all, this strategy refers to building a trust bridge between you and your client. What is the integral part of the pre-buying journey, or consideration stage of funnel.
3. SMM content.
Where does your audience spend more time and what is the most cozy platform in their opinion?
Keep in mind that audiences may vary a lot. Your Pinterest subscribers are a way different people that one you nurture on Facebook or Instagram, for example.
Social media also provide you a priceless freedom of exploring your potential buyers, inspecting their accounts and feeds.
Lot of tools are available for scheduling and activity tracking like Hootsuite, Zapier, Buffer or anything else. And one more rule – don’t stop posting. Choose a suitable approach scheme and post.
It’s easier to have all your media statistics in one place, comparing the data and drawing conclusions.
4. Email Marketing.
Imagine you have an assorted subscriber list, and plan the email campaign accordingly to subscriber actions and behavior. For example you managed to identify a sale-positive behavior of people who opened the third and second letter. Thereby you can adjust the hole chain depending on this data.
What is the open rate and bounce rate of your campaigns?
5. Video.
One of the greatest way to show something you can’t describe in a simple words. From all angles.
Remember what I said about different audience? So, here it is, the people who prefer viewing more than reading is actually another cast of folks.
6. Infographics.
Using of infographics in your content increases chances of being shared, and don’t forget to put a little watermark. Mentioning some useful tools will include Infogram and Piktochart.
Everything starts with a high quality content.
Research the market looking for the best topics, using tools like Buzzsumo for example.
It shows you the number of shares and backlinks also, very useful.
Let’s discuss some metrics you can measure in a road to achieving your audience attention.
+ Website traffic.
Are people actually reading your posts? What is the reason for traffic increase on a specific page?
Is this an organic search, social media source or does it coming from a email marketing campaign?
+ Leads.
The real reason we need any traffic is actual leads, that directly depend on the traffic quality.
From a simple user to a person who leave his contact, what only happens if your valuable content really deserves it.
+ Sales statistics.
How does your content influence the sales? At what stage of your sales funnel it happens?
Consider also checking the keywords/queries you rank for, what can be improved? Presence on the first page of search?
Some more metrics you should track down.
• Do you receive backlinks and what is the quality?
• The average time on page, bounce rate?
• Best traffic sources?
Almost all this data can be obtained from a free digital marketing tools like Google Analytics, showing the demographics also, so you can understand your buyer persona. Think about the experience users get when surfing your content during Awareness, Consideration and final Decision.