What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is relevant to them and delivering it consistently. It also means tailoring your content depending on what stage of the buying journey your customer is at. For instance, if you’ve got a prospect seeking more information, a good content offering would be an eBook or cheat sheet.
What are Content Marketing Strategies?
Here are six universal steps that any business takes to organize their content marketing from a clean sheet into a structured strategy. Here’s what you should do:
- Define your goals. There are four most common goals that content marketing strategy may help you achieve. Increase brand awareness, nurture loyalty to your brand, educate the audience, and increase customer engagement. Ideally, you need to combine all these goals in your strategy since they fit different buyer journey stages.
- Develop your buyer persona. Find out what barriers may stand in your buyers’ way and how your product or service may help them overcome these issues. Also, analyze the age, gender, location, and other demographics of your customers. Once you develop your buyer person, it will give you insights into what types of content to produce and how to present them to your audience.
- Brainstorm content ideas. For ten minutes, write down as many content ideas as you can. Then read your ideas out loud and sort them into three groups: poor, okay, and great ideas. Finally, you can narrow down the list of the best ideas you came up with and choose the most relative ones.
- Define the best channels for sharing content. Find out which channels your target audience prefers for communication. It’s best to publish your content on the channels with the highest engagement level. If your audience is mostly young people, it’s best to communicate your ideas on Instagram. If your target audience is businessmen who rely on data, facts, infographics, etc., it’s best to post comprehensive articles and rationalize why and how your products can solve their problems.
- Choose a CMS. A content management system is a platform for creating, publishing, analyzing content on your website. The most popular CMS platforms are WordPress, Joomla, and Shopify.
- Create a content calendar. It’s better to have your content organized in a schedule then simply have a chaotic to-do list. This allows you and your team to keep an eye on deadlines, visualize your progress, and plan with ease. You can also start your calendar by optimizing your existing content if there’s any.
The Benefits of Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a long-term investment, that requires time and resources. So why even bother? Here are some of the benefits of a good content strategy:
- You win your users’ trust: Regularly publishing quality content lets users know they can trust your brand. After all, if you are willing to help them for free, what won’t you be willing to do when they’re paying you?
- You position yourself as an expert in your industry: If you can “be there” when a newspaper writes an article about your industry, or when someone wants some information on a specific topic, you will gain recognition and authority, turning yourself into an industry expert.
- It improves your long-term strategy: With a well-developed content plan, you can take comfort in knowing what direction your marketing is going in and what you will be doing, and when.
- It improves your: Search engine positioning. Regularly publishing content is a sure-fire way to get Google to love you. If you are able to get your content positioned among the first search engine results, you will have access to an incredible source of free traffic.
- It generates clients and sales: As a consequence of all of the above, your sales will grow, with more users visiting your website, and who trust you more. Nevertheless, if you want your strategy to actually work and be effective, do not forget about the next steps in the content marketing conversion funnel we mentioned earlier (lead generation, lead nurturing, client generation).
Why Content Marketing is Important?
To help you better understand the importance of content marketing. We’ve put together a list of the top advantages that it can provide your small business:
- Improve brand reputation by building trust through content marketing.
- Great content helps influence conversions.
- Optimized content helps improve your SEO efforts.
- Creating great content is a cost-effective way to bring in new leads.
- Content enables your brand to showcase your subject matter expertise.
- Want to build relationships with customers? Publish great content.
- Your leads and customers want great content!
- Content marketing helps you set yourself apart from competitors.
- Content is important during each step of the marketing funnel.
- Content helps support nearly every other digital marketing strategy.
Content Marketing Agencies?
A content marketing agency, also called a content agency, creates content marketing strategies to plan, produce, distribute, and measure the impacts of content for their clients. This content, which can include blog posts, videos, longform guides, podcasts, and much more, aims to provide value to a specific audience with the ultimate goal of building the company’s customer base and increasing revenue.
What Does a Content Marketing Agency Do?
A content marketing agency takes care of several tasks, including:
- Developing a content strategy
- Producing content
- Promoting or distributing content
- Measuring content performance
Deliverables do vary between content marketing companies, especially when it comes to producing content. Some content marketing firms will compile content ideas for your team to produce vs. compiling and producing the ideas.
Conclusion
With all the benefit of content marketing, it’s easy to see why is content marketing important for businesses of all sizes.
Not only does content marketing help you boost visibility. But it can also help you build stronger relationships with your leads and customers. If you really want to see the importance of content marketing in action, it’s time to get started.
Work on developing a content marketing strategy that has your target buyers at its core. Then, you can be on your way to creating valuable content that helps boost conversions and improve customer retention.
Learn more about how partnering with a content marketing agency like LYFE Marketing can help you drive more traffic and conversions.
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