No digital marketing campaign can ever be truly effective without a dedicated content marketing strategy. Content marketing impacts every other digital marketing practice, from search engine optimization to social media usage. A dedicated content marketing strategy is essential for your digital marketing campaign to make returns, grow brand awareness and improve your bottom line.
What is Content Marketing?
To truly comprehend the value of employing a dedicated content marketing strategy it is first necessary to understand what the practice involves. Content marketing is a technique that focuses on creating and distributing relevant, high quality and consistent content. The aim of this practice is to attract and acquire a target audience to drive business growth. Rather than simply advertising the products or services you are offering, content marketing offers genuinely useful or interesting content to your customer.
What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
Your content marketing strategy needs to be focused on delivering relevant content to your target audience. This content should entertain, educate, or inspire the website’s visitor to take positive action, such as making a purchase. Here are some key components of a content marketing strategy:
- Know your target audience
Having a clearly defined target audience is essential to the success of any marketing strategy, period. Your audience should guide the focus of your content and only subjects relevant to your target market should be used. To have this focus you need to have a deep and comprehensive understanding of your target market.
- Web Design
Web design alone plays a big part in the long-term success of digital marketing. For any content marketing strategy to bring returns, your web design must support content creation and a relevant purchase funnel.
- Set a Schedule
For your strategy to be truly effective you need to publish regular content. All of your content must be written in a similar tone to create a cohesive brand image. Alongside planning regular posting of relevant content, you must also devise where you are going to distribute.
- Track Progress
To ensure that your content marketing strategy is bringing returns, you need to chart your progress. Use analytics to see if your content is successful in bringing new visitors to the brand and if these users are converting into customers. It might take a little time for you to see results; if they are not as predicted, then you will need to refocus your content on your target audience.
The Importance of Content Marketing
Successfully employing a content marketing strategy will affect your business in many different ways. The examples below illustrate just some of the ways that content marketing can impact your business:
- Content Builds Trust
The more content you create, the more you show your audience that you are an authority in your field. Being perceived as an authority works to drive trust and confidence in your brand.
- Build Brand Awareness
Content marketing is not only a low-cost practice, it is also one of the most effective ways of driving new and relevant traffic to your site. Publishing content regularly will bring a sustained stream of traffic and inbound links to your site.
- Search Engine Optimization
Content marketing is essential to the success of any search engine optimization strategy. Relevant, keyword-focused content is the best way for search engines to view your site as a trustworthy authority on a topic and therefore reward it in rankings.
- Create New Leads
Content marketing helps businesses to take advantage of the large pool of potential customers using the internet. The leads that come from content marketing are particularly valuable because they are already interested in the subject matter. Unlike paid advertisements, content organically drives traffic, which means that visitors are much more likely to convert.
- Content is Easily Sharable
Useful, entertaining or informative content has a very high share value. When you distribute your content on social media you are not only offering it to your followers but potentially many more people.
- Build a Relationship with Customers
Your content helps you to offer something more to your customers. Rather than being exclusively a place of sales, you become a trusted resource people want to return to. By regularly engaging with your target audience you can form a community.
- Build Backlinks
It is not only your target audience that will pay attention to your informative content, other websites will reward your strategy too. When you produce expert content, other sites will link back to yours, helping you grow your customer base. Backlinking also has a big impact on search engine optimization. Search engine algorithms notice websites that have a large bank of backlinks, viewing it as a sign of a trustworthy authority.