Why Content Marketing is Important for Your Business
Content Marketing is the act of promoting your brand by sharing relevant and consistent information that will add value to the lives of your target audiences. The content can be in the form of blog posts, expert articles, social media posts, podcasts, videos, webinars, infographics, ebooks, and much more. The purpose of content marketing is to provide value and drive traffic to your website, in fact, a website with a blog can yield up to 55% more web traffic than one without a blog. Your content should be geared toward providing useful information and building your business as an authority in your industry. When content marketing is executed well, it will be tailored for your specific audience, will be engaging, and will lead the viewer to take action on your site.
Why Should You Use Content Marketing?
A successful content marketing campaign will establish trust with your business and brand, solidify your reputation and convert leads into paying customers. Incorporating a content marketing campaign into your marketing strategy is a must for any business looking to stay relevant in their market . Maintaining a blog and posting regularly with keyword-rich content will be great for your business and for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), keeping website high in relevant searches. When your content is engaging and useful, it will answer your visitor’s questions, establish trust in your company, and ultimately convert them into paying customers.
Why Should You Use Content Marketing?
A successful content marketing campaign will establish trust with your business and brand, solidify your reputation and convert leads into paying customers. Incorporating a content marketing campaign into your marketing strategy is a must for any business looking to stay relevant in their market . Maintaining a blog and posting regularly with keyword-rich content will be great for your business and for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), keeping website high in relevant searches. When your content is engaging and useful, it will answer your visitor’s questions, establish trust in your company, and ultimately convert them into paying customers.
Different Types of Content
What content works best for web and digital applications? The output and media you choose often depends on the industry and audience you’d like to reach, and there are a ton of options these days for publishing different types of content. Although posting regular blog articles is the most efficient and common form of content generation, here are a few more ideas to get your inspired:
Any of these can be easily published on your site or your business’s social media accounts to gain viewership and engage your core audience. Another tactic is to use multiple forms of content when covering a single subject for maximum reach. For example, you could do a podcast based on an existing blog article, or condense a particularly successful podcast into a short listicle.
What content works best for web and digital applications? The output and media you choose often depends on the industry and audience you’d like to reach, and there are a ton of options these days for publishing different types of content. Although posting regular blog articles is the most efficient and common form of content generation, here are a few more ideas to get your inspired:
- Listicles — easily-digestible lists (or checklists) of helpful information. Some good examples are “Five reasons to start brewing your own beer,” or “Ten reasons you should buy local.”
- Q&A Pages — are keyword rich and save you and your employees time and money by addressing the common questions you’re frequently answering on the phone and through email.
- Infographics — image-heavy, a great way to display statistics or charts. We’ve done some successful infographics to illustrate different types of programming methods and URL redirects.
- Videos — how-to videos or tutorials are a great way to engage your audience! Videos help to illustrate what your business has to offer in a more impactful way to visual learners, and search engines love them too! If your business produces a product, you can do a how-to video on how to use the product, much like one of our clients, Laundry Loops did.
- Podcasts — according to a trend report, 61% of people spend more time listening to Podcasts than they watch TV. Podcasts are good for educating people on a topics that has multiple parts, as they are often released in a series. One of our clients, Health in Focus Now keeps an updated podcast, which you can listen to here.
- Interviews — publish an interview with an industry peer or business partner and post it on your blog! This will form healthy business partnerships and establish you as a trusted industry resource.
Any of these can be easily published on your site or your business’s social media accounts to gain viewership and engage your core audience. Another tactic is to use multiple forms of content when covering a single subject for maximum reach. For example, you could do a podcast based on an existing blog article, or condense a particularly successful podcast into a short listicle.
How to Get Started
Once you settle on a content medium based on what will best reach your audience, before you start writing or recording, let’s go over some basics of how to get started.
Once you’ve answered the why, who and what, you’ll want to keep these helpful tips in mind:
Since SEO is focused on optimizing content with keywords and getting your content to appear in search results, it is only natural that SEO and content marketing are two efforts that go hand-in-hand. Long-form content in particular (2,000+ words) ranks well in Google and it should be a goal to produce content of this length as a part of your ongoing SEO plan. Although keywords are important to search engines, your content should not be overly keyword-stuffed. Instead, use a keyword strategy to optimize your overall content focusing only on the keywords that you want to rank high for. You’ll also want to put effort into acquiring links back to your high-quality content from other sources, an SEO strategy called link building.
Once you settle on a content medium based on what will best reach your audience, before you start writing or recording, let’s go over some basics of how to get started.
- Answer the WHY: Establish your goals and define the purpose for the content marketing.
- Answer the WHO: Define your target audiences that you are trying to attract and how your content can bring value to them.
- Answer the WHAT: Work out the details of what content you will create and how your branding and identity will be reflected in the content.
- Measure the EFFECTIVENESS: Create a measurement plan to track the performance of your content and how it is contributing to your organizational efforts.
Once you’ve answered the why, who and what, you’ll want to keep these helpful tips in mind:
- Quality over quantity. Make sure your content plan consists of quality content. Don’t cut corners, and if you have the opportunity to do so, hire a professional copywriter. A copywriter will understand how to formulate an effective narrative for your brand and reach your desired audience.
- Incorporate calls to action (CTAs). Your content should call users to a desired action, such as “contact us” or “read more about our services.”
- Add share buttons. Ensure your users can easily share your content on social media platforms with a share button.
- Be their trusted guide, not an annoying salesperson. Don’t shamelessly promote your products or services throughout your content. Your calls to action should be organic and not overbearing, available to the reader once they’re ready.
- Create a content publishing schedule. Set a consistent content publication and distribution schedule and stick to it.
- Cross promote content. Promote your content through social media and your other available channels.
- Always create content with a specific audience in mind. Create content focused on topics relevant and popular to your target audience. Try to answer the question, is this messaging tailored for the audience I have in mind?
Since SEO is focused on optimizing content with keywords and getting your content to appear in search results, it is only natural that SEO and content marketing are two efforts that go hand-in-hand. Long-form content in particular (2,000+ words) ranks well in Google and it should be a goal to produce content of this length as a part of your ongoing SEO plan. Although keywords are important to search engines, your content should not be overly keyword-stuffed. Instead, use a keyword strategy to optimize your overall content focusing only on the keywords that you want to rank high for. You’ll also want to put effort into acquiring links back to your high-quality content from other sources, an SEO strategy called link building.
Developing an Effective Content Marketing Plan
Here’s our step-by-step plan for launching your next content marketing campaign.
Here’s our step-by-step plan for launching your next content marketing campaign.
- Define your goals. What do you hope to achieve through product marketing? Are you trying to drive users to purchase products on your site, sign up for your subscription service or sign up for your monthly newsletter? Increase SEO Rankings? Determining what action you want your user to take will help you make decisions on how best to promote your content.
- Establish your brand story. At this point, you’ll want to determine how your organization’s branding will be applied to your content marketing. What do you want to communicate about your company? How does your tone and company identity influence your content? How are you different than your competitors? What messages and ideas to you want to communicate to your audiences? Do you have a graphic style that can be utilized? Answering these questions will help to direct what direction your content will take as you execute your strategy.
- Define your audience. Defining your target audiences is crucial to understanding what their needs are so you can best reach them. Your research should result in a customer profile for each one of your target audiences.
- Establish content ideas. Now that you understand your audiences, what content has worked in the past, and how your brand will be applied to your content, you can begin to generate content ideas. This should be based upon your understanding of your target audience interests, previous content success, and an understanding of what content you are missing based off of this information.
- Create your new content strategy. For this stage it is most effective to create a spreadsheet including all of your new content ideas as well as your previous ones. For each idea you can then determine if each topic needs to be developed, combined with another topic, abandoned based on previous performance, or improved if it is a previous topic that showed some merit. You can then prioritize each topic based on suspected interest from your target audiences. Once this is done, you can establish further action items for each topic determining what type of content this topic will take and how it will be developed.
- Conduct a content audit. Uncovering this data will help you to understand what content has been most attractive to your audiences in the past. Start with your analytics platform (like Google Analytics). Look into the metrics of each of your previous pieces of content including: pageviews, unique pageviews, avg. time on page, entrances, and bounce-rate. If you have some relatively successful content, you may also want to track avg. search traffic per month and backlinks if your analytics platform allows.
Start Content Marketing Today!
Content marketing is one of the most powerful and effective ways you can reach and influence your target markets, which will increase your brand visibility while also improving your SEO standings. Producing regular blog posts, video, podcasts or any other form of content, and sharing them on your social outlets and regularly updating your site’s content are all ways you can stay in good standings with Google search ranking and genuinely engage your visitors. We hope you found this guide useful and if you have any questions about how you can be using the power of content to improve your bottom line, give us a call! We’d love to talk about ways your business can get a boost from a solid content strategy.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful and effective ways you can reach and influence your target markets, which will increase your brand visibility while also improving your SEO standings. Producing regular blog posts, video, podcasts or any other form of content, and sharing them on your social outlets and regularly updating your site’s content are all ways you can stay in good standings with Google search ranking and genuinely engage your visitors. We hope you found this guide useful and if you have any questions about how you can be using the power of content to improve your bottom line, give us a call! We’d love to talk about ways your business can get a boost from a solid content strategy.
About Mira Brody
Mira Brody is an editor, writer, and marketing expert with 12+ years of experience. She has worked as a local news reporter, a writer/editor, and as a leader in large-scale branding strategy. Mira worked at JTech as the staff writer and editor for internal and client projects from March 2015 to December 2019.
More articles by Mira: The Pastas of Programming | The Good, Bad and Ugly of Company Slogans | Note Taking Improves Workplace Skills
About Nicholas Jensen
Nicholas Jensen is a digital marketing professional specialist with 7+ years of experience in data analytics, SEO and PPC-driven digital marketing, and online merchandising. During his 4 years with JTech, Nick helped manage 25+ digital marketing clients, and he led marketing research across a wide variety of industries.