The term content marketing is pretty hard to escape these days. However, with that being said, many people are still unsure about what it is.
Put in its basic form, content marketing is a form of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of materials online.
This is done through:
- Social media
- Blogs
- Emails
- Paid social
- Digital PR
- Videos
- And so on…
These don’t have to explicitly promote the brand but is intended to help create interest in the business to create leads and convert them into sales.
Below, we take a look at why it’s important, alongside tips on content marketing to help you build great content.
Why content marketing is important
In a world dominated by the digital sphere, more often than not, your audience will be online. Therefore, whatever your business does or sells will benefit from content marketing in one way or another, as it:
- Can bring customers to your website
- Can create new leads
- Improve brand awareness
- Establish your brand as an authority in your field
- Increase customer engagement with your brand to build trust
In recent years it’s been found that a large number of marketers spend around 40% of their budget on their content marketing strategy. Meanwhile, 89% of businesses have been found to believe that their content marketing has a direct link to other parts of their business.
As you can see, there’s never been a better time to build great content. However, despite the need for it, many companies just aren’t building great content, which can be bad for business as bad content can:
- Waste time
- Waste money
- Create stress for the team
That’s why we’ve highlighted five key tips on content marketing below to help you make great content for your business.
Your content Marketing Strategy
So, you know you need to be creating content, but don’t just jump in headfirst and start posting on all social media channels and throwing emails out left, right, and centre.
Instead, what you need to do is sit back, think, and create a content strategy, asking yourself:
- What is the purpose of my product or service?
- What problems does it solve?
- Who would benefit from my product or service?
Once you’ve done this, you need to look at the data you have to determine:
- Who your audience is
- What they’re engaging with
- What’s been working so far
This will help you to better understand what you need to be doing with your content strategy. Too often companies just throw lots of things at the wall hoping for something to stick, and while you shouldn’t spend months crafting a plan, you should spend a few days brainstorming with the team to come up with ideas that would benefit your business and appeal to your audience.
These can then be acted on and adapted as you go along, as you’ll begin to acquire more data to help you adapt your strategy, which is something many businesses do.
Testing your content marketing
We mentioned the data above, which is key to creating a killer content marketing strategy and great content overall.
However, if you’re not testing your content marketing, you’re not learning what’s working and what’s not working.
This means you should constantly monitor all your content marketing channels, from email and social media to your blog to see what’s performing well and not so well, as you can then tailor the plan moving forward, focusing more on the content that’s working.
Doing this will also help you to see where your content is performing best, and where your content isn’t performing. For example, if you’re posting on Facebook constantly, but find it’s providing little engagement or return, you could be wasting valuable time and money that could be assigned to another channel that is performing well.
Overall, without testing, you won’t stand a chance in the world of content marketing and will stay at stage one, despite making excellent content.
Is your content marketing too generic?
Next up; do your channels sound like a robot or read like an instruction manual?
If they do, this needs to be changed immediately.
Generic content is boring, and if the consumer is bored, they won’t engage with you. You may be putting this content out to create a placeholder; however, it could be doing more harm than good, in which case, you should step back, look at your tone of voice documents and push that into what you’re sharing.
Much like a journalist, you need to find an angle or a hook that’ll bring your audience in, this is the wow factor that’ll help separate you from the waves of generic content currently flooding the online world.
SEO and your content marketing
The most important thing for any online business is web traffic. More traffic means more people see your product and the more people that see it mean there’s a better chance of your product or service generating leads and sales.
To do this, you need search engine optimisation, known more commonly as SEO.
For many small businesses, this tends to be a weak point, with roughly only 28% focusing on their SEO. Meanwhile, for content marketers, 61% considered it a top concern.
So, when it comes to your web content and your blog, you need to implement SEO to help those out there who would benefit from your product to find it.
Without killer SEO implementation, your content marketing can’t live its best life, but with it, alongside a killer content marketing strategy, it could help reach that huge audience you’ve been chasing.
Give your content marketing time
Finally, give it time. Content marketing isn’t for the impatient and can take a while to generate results.
It can take up to six months to provide you with the results you’ve been looking for, while the best returns often appear after 12 months. So, getting that strategy right from the get-go, using the data, and constantly reviewing your content marketing is key to providing those long-term results.
If you’d like to know more about content marketing or would like to find out what we can do for your business, get in touch with the Relative Marketing ream today.
