The digitalization of the business world, the idea of content marketing has emerged as a way to attract, engage, and convert consumers. Whether you are a large corporation or a small start-up or a marketing team or alone marketer, content marketing remains the core of the marketing wheel for creating awareness, generation of leads, and consumer engagement.
If you are new to content marketing, we’ve created this brief guide that outlines strategies, tools, services and example of successful content marketing campaigns that you can use in developing your campaign. By doing so, we’ll be diving into several fundamental concepts of inbound marketing, content creation, reaching a specific audience, and attracting leads in general as parts of effective content marketing strategies.
What is content marketing?
In its simplest terms, content marketing believe in creating valuable, relevant, and timely content to attract and persuade a target demographic. This is to make a customer do something that is in the best interest of the business of which may in turn be profitable. Unlike conventional forms of advertising, content marketing does not seek to get a direct sale for a product or service or event.
Some of the examples of content marketing that can be used in content include blog articles, social media posts, podcasts, videos, eBooks, and newsletter. This means that when you post information that can positively respond to your readers’ questions or the problems that they may be facing, they will believe you.
Major Aspects of Strategy of Content Marketing
The first thing you should do when thinking of engaging in content is to ensure that you have a set and strategic approach first. As such, something as simple as a lack of guidance can potentially see the efforts merely fade away. Here’s how to create one:
1. Understand Your Audience
A content creator is required to have the understanding of a target consumer for any project they are assigned or they are working on them on their own. Build up specific buyer persona as to who they are, what their interests are, what they do not like, and their activities. This will help you to tailor your content to be relevant to what they need in some form or another.
2. Set Clear Objectives
Every content creator ask himself several questions when going through the processes of developing content. They may include brand-building and traffic drivetrain generation, lead generation, or direct sales. It is important to set certain objectives that will help in the process of formulating your content marketing development and assessing your results.
3. Develop a Content Calendar
One thing to consider in content marketing development is having a calendar that would assist much in the organization and scheduling. Organize it in a manner that follows the sort by content, date of publishing and the channel it would be in (blog, social media or news letter). This will ensure that your content will reach the intended target at the right time and in the right medium.
4. Optimize for SEO
Before going any further, I would like to mention that content goes hand in hand with SEO. When it comes to the following items such as ; content marketing strategy, content marketing tool, and content marketing service, it is important to incorporate them so as to make your content searchable. One should always ensure that they use both primary and secondary keywords in a very natural way in the content.
Top Content Marketing Tools You Should Use
Effective content marketing tools are some of the wonderful invention in the content marketing circle, which everyone should embrace to improve marketing strategies.
Content is one of the most important components in any organisation’s strategy, and getting it right involves having the right tools. However, this can be a daunting task, here are some of the recommended content marketing tools.
1. HubSpot
As a freemium inbound marketing software, HubSpot allows businesses to build blogs, generate leads, and nurture customers all in one place. For those who need some of the more unique features, it’s ideal for a business that wants to handle all their content marketing from one application.
2. Canva
Visual content commonly is an important part of content marketing. Even if you’ve never created graphics before Cutter, Canva makes it possible for you to come up with great graphics, infographics, and social media posts.
3. SEMrush
SEMrush also comes as an SEO tool that enables the users to identify proper and relevant keywords and even audit the site and its competitors. There is nothing like it for fine-tuning your content marketing and measuring its effectiveness in terms of SEO.
4. Grammarly
So, to avoid such mistakes to be made in the content, use Grammarly. It generally prevents grammatical mistakes, misspelled words, wrong use of punctuation marks, and other things that can appear in the written content, ensuring that the content is perfect before being posted out to the public.
5. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is an online tool that can help you research the content that is most popular in the given industry. It can help in coming up with new topics that will be of interest to your target audience.
Content Marketing Services: When to Outsource
Thus, depending on the specifics of a certain business, some of them may be able to handle their content marketing plans alone, while others may need to collaborate with agencies or independent contractors. Content marketing services typically include:
• Content Strategy Development: It is the formulation of a distinct vision which is applicable as well as useful for the company and the target consumer base.
• Content Creation: Blogging, making of the graphic content, making of videos and the like.
• Content Distribution: Material posted on websites, Face book page, twitter accounts, listserv and other signature blocks.
• Analytics & Reporting: Analyzing the effectiveness of content and making analytical conclusions.
Outsourcing can offer an access to cost-effective experts and allow you to focus on the main core of your company.
Real-World Content Marketing Examples
To explain content marketing more effectively, let’s consider some examples to realize what content marketing means and how it works for a company.
1. HubSpot
It will be remiss not to mention that HubSpot is one of the best sources of inbound marketing. They employ blog, eBooks, and online courses to reach out for the audience and influence them. Like any good marketing platform, its services are also free, and it assists in converting a visitor into a lead.
2. Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” Campaign
The Share a Coke example meant that consumers could get bottles with names on them simply, tell their stories on the social webs and do more. This content marketing experiment generated a staggering amount of response and drive sales.
3. GoPro’s User-Generated Content
GoPro wants people to post entertaining action videos that have been shot using GoPro cameras. To this end, the brand is able to use such user-generated content to sell its products while at the same time, building a community of followers.
The various samples that we have looked at above demonstrate how businesses can devise proper contents that are able to elicit the enthusiasm of the users, and in essence grow their market.
Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing: How They Work Together
As for what it is inbound marketing is a strategy that employs the use of content that is both valuable and relevant to the customer. It is the basis for this content marketing strategy.
Inbound marketing involves the following strategy:
• Blogging, videography or other content sharing platforms such as social media.
• Internet marketing to enable the website to appear high in search engines.
• Leads nurturing by email or by providing content download
• Social media marketing area for reaching the audience.
When content marketing is integrated with inbound marketing, you get a complete system that brings traffic, captures leads, and drives them towards conversion.
Content Marketing and Lead Generation
Another objective of content marketing is to create leads. This is how, and how effectively content marketing really works as a lead generation technique:
• Lead Magnets: Free downloadable resources about your products such as eBooks, white whitepapers and other similar material in exchange for the customer information.
• Call-to-Actions (CTAs): Each content piece should contain a CTA that prompts the next step with a user, whether that be subscribing to a newsletter or downloading an eBook or getting a consultation.
• Email Marketing: What you can do is to nurture the leads with content that is built specifically, and they can fit into a certain stage of the buyer’s journey.
If you have a solid content marketing strategy in place, you can acquire way more leads and effectively turn them into consumers.
The Importance of Audience Engagement
The other important aspect that contributes to the success of the content marketing strategy is the audience. This involves content that get your audience interested and make them want to do something such as adding a comment, sharing a post, or subscribing to a newsletter.
Engagement can be measured by:
• Social Shares: The number of re-tweets on the content that you post on the social media platforms.
• Comments: Comments on your blog or your social media posts.
• Time on Page: How long visitors spend more time browsing through the rest of the site as per the content they clicked.
Through the timely delivery of quality content that is relevant to your audience, you will have a following of readers and seriousness of followers interested in your product or service.
Conclusion
Content Marketing through content can be paramount in any company as it forms a reliable way through which organizations can reach out to their readers and potential clients. It’s possible to create a proper content marketing plan, utilize the right tools in content marketing, and learn from the best examples of content marketing and achieve great results.
As has been stated, the content marketing involves much more than just the creation of content. It is about bringing value to your audience each time they interact with your organization or product. It doesn’t matter if you are using inbound marketing, content marketing, or attempting to increase your click-through rates – every piece of content should be aimed at the audience.
If you adhere to the mentioned best practices and ensure that your business churns out the best material possible for the web, your business will perform well in the current complex online business world.