Content marketing is an important but often overlooked part of your digital marketing strategy. Creating and publishing content on a regular basis is time-consuming, but it’s also extremely worthwhile as it will continue to pay off over the long term.
Content marketing is essential if you have an SEO strategy and want to get your brand seen online.
Content marketing generates around 3x as many leads as traditional marketing. It costs 62% less than other marketing channels, and content marketers who blog are 13x more likely to see positive ROI.
These are just some of the key reasons you should invest in content marketing. Let’s have a closer look at some of the benefits of creating a content marketing strategy.
Content marketing involves planning, creating, publishing and sharing content such as blogs, websites, press releases, whitepapers and more through a variety of channels. The main aim is to target your potential customers while they’re actively searching for your products or services and build brand awareness, sales and engagement.
Statistics show that businesses that engage in content marketing capture 7.8x more organic traffic than those that don’t. Investing in content marketing allows you to provide answers, advice and guidance for your customers at every stage of their journey - if you do it right!
By creating a full funnel content strategy, your brand will not only dominate the SERPs (search engine results pages), you will answer your customer’s questions, drive website traffic, build trust, build relationships and generate more leads for your business.
Content marketing helps you to start a conversation with potential customers, and it will help to keep your conversation going by providing helpful and engaging content over time and well after they have become a customer.
Good content marketing is more than just a quick interaction with your brand; it should lead to engagement and long-term relationships. Rather than interrupting customers in their day-to-day activities, like traditional marketing, content marketing is a welcome extension of the research they carry out online on a day-to-day basis.
As we have already mentioned, a content marketing strategy can provide a huge number of benefits, so we will look at them in more detail.
If you want your website to appear in the SERPs when potential customers actively search for your products and services, you must create content. Content is key to any SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy.
Planning, creating and optimising pieces of content around relevant keywords for your business is the best way to drive organic search traffic to your website. Search engines like to see content - it’s their job to provide searchers with the answers they’re looking for and content is the best way to provide this.
Regularly creating high-quality content that your audience finds useful and relevant will help you move into the SERPs' top positions. Producing content that answers searcher’s questions will mean that search engines reward you with higher rankings.
Organic search traffic is based on consumers who are searching for specific answers and solutions, so making sure your content is well-written, tailored for the best user experience and includes strong calls to action, it can also lead to prospects eventually becoming customers.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness and is what Google looks for when evaluating the overall quality of your webpages. This is one of the most important factors to consider when it comes to SEO and content is the best way to achieve it.
One of the key reasons for creating a content marketing strategy and regularly producing content that is relevant to your customers and that they will read and share is to help your website develop authority around the keywords and phrases you want your brand to be found for in the search results.
Creating authoritative content that links to relevant sources, showcases your expertise, is linked to by other sources and provides users with an answer is a core principle behind the way Google determines where your website ranks for certain keywords.
Establishing yourself as an authority in your industry can take time so it’s important to consistently create content to make sure you build your website’s authority and keep signalling to Google that you are an expert in your field.
Remember always to create content for your website visitors and not just solely for search engines. This is all to do with Google’s Helpful Content Update, which aims to rank content written for people rather than specifically for SEO purposes.
A good content strategy can put you in front of the right customers at the right time. If you do it properly, you should appear in multiple places at the same time.
Whether someone finds your content in the SERPs, an industry resource, a link from another site, a link from a friend or a link on social media, they still encounter your content. If it’s interesting and relevant enough, they will continue to engage with you and share your content too. This is a great way to build awareness with customers you might not otherwise reach and build awareness with a wider audience.
Your potential customers are not all the same. They all have different needs and prefer to consume content in different ways. Some people prefer to read and others prefer to watch a video. With this in mind, it’s important to make sure you publish your content in different formats to attract as many customers as possible to your business.
Content formats include:
Not all content has to be completely different. If you create a step-by-step guide that’s a video, you could also repurpose it into a blog or an infographic. Similarly, if you create an interview or live Q&A, create a video and a write-up to appeal to different audiences.
Content marketing and SEO allow you to reach and engage with your target audience at each conversion funnel stage: awareness, consideration and decision, through to advocacy and beyond.
Your keyword research should help you to identify the terms customers are using at different stages of their decision-making process and the information they want to know. It doesn’t matter where your customer is in their decision-making journey or what they’re looking for, you can produce content that will address their needs at the exact moment they need it.
By creating content for each stage of the customer journey, you’re able to pull customers through your conversion funnel and help them to complete each stage of their decision making process, through to purchase and after they’ve purchased to retain them as a repeat customer.
Different content works more effectively at each stage of the journey:
When you offer content to your customers at the exact moment they need something from you, you build a relationship with the customer. By helping customers with the answers to their queries and offering additional information in the process without asking for anything in return, you build trust before making the sale, making customers more likely to buy from you initially and in the future.
Offering valuable content at each stage of the decision making process provides customers with the tools they need to make a decision or to navigate their pain points. The more high quality content your customers see and interact with, the more likely they are to form a positive association with your brand.
Producing and sharing great content helps to build positive experiences for your potential and existing customers. For those customers who are not yet ready to buy, content can help to keep them engaged and informed until they’re ready to buy. For existing customers, content can help to reinforce the positive impression you’ve created and make sure they return as repeat customers.
Content can help to move a customer who is looking for a solution from awareness to purchase by providing them with the knowledge they need to decide on the solution they need and the brand they want to buy it from.
Top of the funnel content can capture customers early in their journey and help to move them down the sales funnel.
Relevant and useful content is one of the best lead nurturing tools available to help your sales process. It keeps customers engaged throughout the sales process and keeps them moving through the buyer’s journey.
When your audience views and engages with your content, they’re more likely to purchase from you in the future when they’re ready. Placing calls-to-action within your content can help you to capture information and keep providing content.
Driving traffic to your website is great but you also want to convert these visits into sales too. Most of the people who land on your website after finding out about you in search or on social media will not be ready to buy from you the first time they encounter your brand.
Using content to provide visitors with information about your brand, products and services will help your target audience to connect with your brand and make an educated decision about whether or not they want to buy from you.
Customers follow a particular journey before committing to a purchase. For smaller products, such as a pair of shoes, the buying process is fairly quick. However, with larger purchases, such as a car, this process takes much longer.
As customers move through your sales funnel, they will be looking for different types of information and a targeted content marketing strategy can help customers at every stage of their journey by educating them with the information they’re looking for.
Targeted customers who have built a relationship with you are much more likely to buy from you than the people who have been drawn in by a clickbait headline or a catchy offer. Customers prefer to buy from brands they trust and providing relevant and authoritative content can help you to develop trust over time.
Creating regular content will not only help you build authority online and with search engines, but with your potential customers too. Providing content that showcases your expertise will help you to build trust and ensure that customers come to you when they need your product or service.
If your website becomes established as a credible source of information, you’re more likely to rank highly in the search engines.
Content marketing can take time and resources to create, but putting the effort in can provide huge payoffs for your business growth. Not only does it help you to build trust and authority with your prospective customers, but it can also help to drive leads and sales over the long term.
Building relationships with your customers and providing them with answers and solutions to their problems helps you to connect with them and their needs so that they engage with your brand and are more likely to come back again.
If you want to know more about how content marketing could work for your business or how your current strategy is performing, request a free digital marketing audit.
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At Logica Digital, we take the time to understand your business and customers to create a bespoke marketing plan that will deliver the best return on investment for your business. We always get results.
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