How to use Content Marketing to grow your business
Growth is a priority for most businesses. Marketing your product or service and generating demand is one of the biggest challenges new businesses face. Resources are slim, budgets are low, and paid marketing channels are usually too expensive. That is where content marketing can prove to be the difference between a successful business and one that struggles to stay afloat. Putting out fresh and relevant content is a vital step for business success. It will also help you to engage customers, boost your search engine ranking and enhance your overall branding.
What is content marketing?
Content Marketing is one of the most popular modern marketing techniques today. The success behind this promotional strategy lies in a brand’s ability to provide true value to its audience. This can be provided through the content published online – both written (blogs) and visual – such as videos and infographics. Simply put, content marketing is all about creating and sharing online material that will grow your traffic through organic search – Google, Bing etc.
Why is it useful?
The reason content marketing has grown so much in prominence nowadays is the value organic search holds for your business vs other acquisition channels such as Social Media, Email Marketing or Paid Search. Providing that your content is well-written and valuable, customers are more likely to visit your site again. However, the more people that find your site useful and unique, the more people you can attract to your site over time.
Pro Tip: Don’t try to sell first. The needs and wants of your audience are at the front and centre of your content marketing strategy. Put down the wall between you and your clients and start building sincere and authentic relationships. Remember, it’s a two-way conversation.
Define your audience
For instance, you have to define your audience. This is the first and most important step you must take in order to create specific and relevant content that will help your business grow. They say knowledge is power. This certainly is the case if you’re looking to create powerful ad or content marketing campaigns. For doing this you need to understand
- who your target audience is
- what problems or needs that audience is facing
- how your audience consumes content (when, where, and how often)
You can gather this information quickly by analyzing both your site’s quantitative data – Google Analytics – and qualitative data – feedback, surveys etc. By pulling these two information sources together you can quite quickly build up an image of who your customers are. This should include the following:
- Demographics
- Psychographics
- Motivations
- Site Behaviour
- Purchase Propensity
- Average Order Value
- Lifetime Customer Value
Content marketing and search engine optimization work hand in hand
Although some people think that content marketing eliminates the need for SEO, that’s incorrect. SEO and content marketing go together like peanut butter and jam. SEO is all about content marketing and vice versa. In other words, there is no such thing as SEO without content. Keywords, for example, are a fundamental component of SEO. Use your keywords strategically throughout your content.
The first step of SEO relates to finding relevant keywords and using them on your website so they can rank higher in the search engine results pages. Take a look at your competitor’s websites and see what keywords they’re using. Moreover, you should be targeting the same or similar ones. Put these keywords in the headings, body text, and URL’s of your landing pages and blog content.
The more fresh and unique content you pump out related to these targeted keywords, the higher the chance you’ll have of people finding you online.
Frequently Used Content Marketing Strategies
You probably ask yourself: How should I start with content marketing and especially how content marketing can grow your business? Here are some of the most popular content marketing strategies that businesses use in order to distribute content to get the attention of people they believe will be interested in what they have to offer.
- Original Content – This may seem obvious, but before promoting any content, you need to create content. Your brand is unique and so is your expertise. Remember, your perspective is your own, share that through the lens that uses your own voice. No one likes a knock-off so give them the good stuff and establish a distribution cadence that your audience can count on.
- Blog Posts – It is highly recommended that any business have a blog on their website. The benefits of a blog are endless, and the results will keep popping up overnight. It adds value to your customers, helps you interact with them and better understand their needs and it also helps winning new customers over or generating leads.
- Social Media – We could give you endless reasons why your brand should be actively present on social media. Sharing is the name of the game on social media. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or LinkedIn, 45% of the total world’s population uses social media networks. The higher the quality of the content and the greater the interest it sparks in people, the greater the chances that it will “go viral,” which means massive numbers of people will end up seeing it. And who doesn’t want that?
- Video Content – Content marketing keeps evolving and blogging isn’t the only solution out there. Video is extremely powerful because it engages more of the viewer’s senses than words and still images on a page.
- Email Marketing Campaigns – like social media, emails are a fantastic channel to boost visibility to new content at a very low cost (depending on the level of sophistication you have set up and your existing audience size). They also allow you to coordinate all the different elements of your marketing, for example, by sending emails to announce a product launch, webinar or new blog post.
Content marketing done well is a slow and steady practice that can lead to great Return on Investment (ROI) and help your business enter a period of hyper-driven growth. You need to have a content marketing strategy where you have the right message. The message must resonates with your target audience.
We hope this article will help you make the best of content marketing in your strategy. If you still want to discover more about content marketing, you can always choose our online marketing course to get your ideas up to date.
