Content marketing is a business strategy that aims to maximise the use of digital publications and assets owned by the company. This mostly involves an inbound marketing strategy where interactive content, landing pages, videos, images, and the like are optimised to create engaging, educational, and informative content that brings value to consumers.
What is Content Strategy in Digital Marketing?
Content strategy is a measured approach to creating and distributing content across the web.
A successful content marketing strategy typically begins with the production of high-quality content. These contents are then posted or shared on the web, through the company website, social media, or via a content syndication platform. There are many variations to this, but the gist is that it observes the full cycle of content creation, distribution, and marketing.
On that note, Web9 is a content marketing agency with a focus on SEO. They offer a free assessment of your website and content strategy. Hiring a professional to kickstart your content marketing campaign can give you a leg up against the competition and provide you with the security of having a proven long-term strategy.
What are the 3 C’s of Content Marketing?
The 3 C’s of content marketing serve as a framework for developing an effective and efficient content marketing strategy. These 3 C’s are Customer, Content, and Channel.
Customers
A strong understanding of your customer base is integral to a successful content marketing campaign. In other words, you must learn and define your target audience.
Finding your potential customers requires a layered approach, but it’s primarily accomplished by using market research and existing data on your customers’ interests, age, gender, lifestyle, location, income, and a multitude of other factors.
Being able to define your audience can improve your personalisation and content marketing efforts. It also helps the brand become more relatable and rise above the competition. Further, you get to earn an opportunity to connect with your audience and boost the likelihood of a conversion.
Your target audience can have multiple classifications. For example, you can have a segment based on demographics acquired from registration and purchase data, while at the same time, creating another set with a focus on the users’ lifestyle and online behaviour. You can use these classifications to personalise your content and improve the efficiency of your advertising campaigns.
Content
More accurately, curated content. It’s not enough that the brand is able to become a content creation behemoth. Just purely creating content without much direction is not sustainable and frankly, a waste of valuable time and resources.
An excess of low-quality content that brings little to no value to your target audience’s interests will only hurt the campaign. Your content must always strive to be unique, persuasive, and a clear reflection of the values associated with the brand.
Channel
Content distribution can make or break any digital marketing strategy.
Most of the time, this becomes a problem when the brand message is being sent through channels that your target audience are barely using. Be more intentional in choosing the platforms that you will use to distribute your content.
If you have a younger demographic, then social media platforms are worth checking. But if you are offering services to a professional client base, then LinkedIn and email are perhaps reasonably better.
How is Content Marketing Effective?
An online content marketing strategy is most effective when you are creating content that is ideal for each step of the buyer’s journey. For example, educational content is more valuable early on, while incentives and consumer feedback are essential for buyers who are ready to make a purchase.
Awareness stage
Consumers can’t purchase products or services if your brand presence is unable to reach them. But don’t be discouraged just yet, because this awareness stage is where prospects begin their buyer’s journey.
As you may have learned, a buyer’s journey is a sales funnel, and on top of this funnel is where you should be putting your best effort into extending brand awareness. Overall, the awareness stage is where you create content that can help get your products or services get in front of those who want or need them but don’t know it yet.
Your content at this stage must be able to provide upfront value to the prospective customer’s pain points while needing as little commitment as possible. A focus on informative and educational content that reflects the values of your company is a good start.
To optimise your content for this stage, use “how-to” queries and other actionable keywords that potential customers might use in search.
Consideration stage
During the consideration stage, customers will look for helpful information that sells your product or service as the right solution for their problems. Customers tend to be more active in this stage as they do their due diligence to learn more about what you’re offering and how it compares to similar items.
The types of content that typically get the spotlight during this stage are product descriptions and spec sheets, reviews, case studies, and free samples. You can also share documentation and catalogs that a customer can download from product pages.
Your content strategy should be able to help a prospective buyer visualise how your service or product can be beneficial to them. At the same time, this is where you are expected to showcase and convince the customer why your brand is better than competitors.
Closing stage
The closing stage is where the consumer makes their decision. After generating awareness and assisting with the buyer’s evaluation process, the next stage is all about securing the conversion. The buying process itself can a be complex step for consumers due to the myriad of options available to them, so a simplified approach is more suitable.
During this stage, customers are likely to look for demos, free trials, or a direct line to your representative. On a personal level, they are gauging pros and cons and actively comparing deals and customer testimonials. Your content must supply answers to these queries in the most efficient way possible. This can mean highlighting reviews, pricing, and discounts.
What are the Advantages of Content Marketing?
Content marketing gives you an edge against competitors who are advertising blind. But more importantly, high-quality content can help build trust and connection between the brand and the customers.
Having a content strategy also lets you distribute content more efficiently across multiple social media platforms, search engines, and other touchpoints. In turn, this generates better leads and helps position the brand as an authority in its domain.
Overall, content marketing strategies can deliver immediate impact or facilitate long-term goals, often at the same time.
Why is Content Marketing Important in Digital Marketing?
Content is fundamental to any digital marketing strategy. After all, it is content that brings value to the interactive elements of a digital platform. Customers are looking for information all the time, and they do not like to settle for those forced upon them like pop-up ads. They want depth. They want to know what they are buying and why it’s a good deal.
Consumers prefer informational content over intrusive ads
According to research by Content Marketing Institute consumers overwhelmingly favour native advertising compared to intrusive ads. This means that buyers would rather read a blog post, video content, social media posts, and even user-generated content when deciding whether a service or a product is right for them.
On the other side of that, the way content is presented and organised continues to play a huge role in making content desirable and accessible. As shared by Dem and Gen Report, analysing the customer’s activities on a web page like mouse clicks, scrolling behaviour as well as how they engage with photos and other interactive elements helps brands’ experiment and make informed adjustments to their content map and presentation.
A more effective and cheaper lead generation method
One of the best things about content marketing is that it helps create a cycle that’s sustainable for attracting new customers. On balance, this means better and more cost-effective lead generation and customer retention techniques.
This is all in addition to the fact that marketers in the 2023 digital marketing survey via Content Marketing Institute touted content marketing as the most influential method for improving brand awareness, building trust, and educating consumers.
Increase online visibility
SEO and content marketing are key to increasing brand awareness and online visibility. This is mostly done through marketing strategies around blog posts, SEO, paid ads, social media marketing, and email marketing. Essentially, your goal is to get more eyes on your product by sharing content that gets links and shares online.
Builds relationships with customers
Content marketing is most successful if the brand is able to build relationships with the customers attracted by the campaign. More so if these new buyers can become loyal and repeat customers. In addition, these new patrons often become brand ambassadors themselves as they tend to promote a product that they trust to families and friends.
Improve authority
Content Marketing and SEO
On the surface, here’s a shocker—only 3.45% of content gets traffic from Google. According to Ahrefs, 96.55% out of 14 billion pages analysed by their Content Explorer tool get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.
The biggest takeaway here is the importance of keyword research in content marketing and SEO. As explained by the publisher, the websites that get zero traffic aren’t necessarily bad, it’s simply because no one is searching for the keywords they are ranking for even if they are #1 in that segment.
The dataset also highlighted the importance of building backlinks and matching your content with the search intent. Overall, it’s a strong reinforcement of why SEO and content marketing are needed by brands and content creators. Because churning out content is not going to magically solve their digital marketing woes.
How to Get Started with Content Marketing
Content marketing is often just a very simple concept. The challenge is usually in sustaining it and making adjustments in an ever-changing industry. For those who are just starting this journey, here’s a short summary of what we’ve discussed above.
Identify your audience
Learn as much as you can about your audience. Simply put, you will not be able to create relevant content unless you know who you’re creating it for.
Determine your goals
The sooner you have clearer goals and KPIs (key performance indicators) the more efficient your campaign will become.
Choose a content type
The types of content you should use must suit the platforms you’re publishing them in as well as the audience you are targeting. You don’t have to cover all types of content just for the sake of doing so.
Create a content calendar
Content calendar is not just a beginner tool, it’s a fixture in any content marketing strategy. This reliable tool will help you make sure that you’re delivering the right content to the right audience at the right opportunity.
Promote your content
Paid advertising is just one of the ways you can promote your content. The truth is there are plenty of other ways to increase your traffic without paid ads.
For one, you can improve the technical aspect of your content with SEO and then make it more appealing by offering free resources where applicable. You can also link up with other blogs or join webinars where there’s an overlap with your audience. The list goes on!
Engage Our Content Marketing Brisbane Team
If you found this roadmap helpful on how you can get started with your content marketing strategy, we encourage you to take it a step further and connect with our Web9 content marketing Brisbane team for an in-depth and personalised look at your brand and strategy.
Our team of content marketing experts and web specialists can help boost your online presence from the ground up. So, whether you’re just getting ready to create your own website or in the midst of putting together a full-on content marketing strategy, we encourage you to connect with us today to get an initial assessment free of charge.
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