How Your Business Can Benefit From a Content Marketer

Almost every brand doing business today, particularly those marketing in the digital space, can benefit from a well-tailored content marketing strategy. With most of us spending hours each day on our phones and computers, there are countless opportunities for brands to position themselves more effectively to both their existing and aspirational audiences.

But, let’s be clear: It would get annoying if we saw ads all day, right? Content marketing is a softer and more intuitive approach to communicating what you need to in order to support genuine conversions and build invaluable long-term brand advocacy.

What is Content Marketing?

You may already be creating content and not know it. But, are you doing it effectively with a holistic strategy behind it? Content marketing is essentially a way to serve your customers without directly selling to them. A good content marketer tells a compelling brand story.  

Over the past few years, content marketing has integrated into cross-departmental strategies including digital, creative and social media marketing. Rather than thinking of content as a silo, marketing teams now think about content marketing as an important piece of campaign planning.

Content marketing is not one thing. It’s not just a blog or a Facebook post. It’s a collective story with many touch points across a brand’s digital presence. Content marketing relies heavily on a well-defined brand, including tone of voice, core values, identity and more.

Types of Content Marketing

There are several types of content marketing. Depending on your strategy and where you see getting the most out of your marketing, some of these tactics may work better for you than others.

• Video
• Photography
• Blogs
• Infographics
• Listicles
• Social media posts
• User-generated digital content
• Quizzes
• Emails
• Case studies
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• White papers
• Ebooks
• Testimonials
• Interviews

Why Content Marketing Matters to a Business

Every good business has a business plan, which usually includes a well-defined set of objectives. Beyond making money, the answer to the question, “Why does your business exist?” is an important data point for a solid content marketing strategy. The reason for serving your customers (beyond a product or service) is what molds your content story.

Content marketing exists to amplify your “why.”  It also exists to develop brand loyalists and keep customers interested and interacting with your brand even when they’re not actively purchasing. When your customer is ready to purchase in your category, you’ll be top-of-mind because you’ve put in the work to build that relationship.

Content marketing serves to entertain and build trust, but ultimately it should generate a sales lead. Even if you’re not directly featuring a product or service, a piece of content should provide something of value to the reader that relates to whatever you’re selling.

Positioning your brand as the go-to expert on a certain topic, providing inspiration, or answering a question are just a few ways you could frame your content to serve your audience.

How to Get Started

Strategize

Every good marketer knows you have to ask a lot of tough questions before a campaign can be developed.

• What does the customer want right now?
• How can we serve them better?
• What questions might they have about a product/service?
• What adversity is our audience facing?
• How can we generate more leads?
• Is anything going on in the world that our brand needs to address or avoid?

These kinds of questions are what a strategy meeting might look like. It’s an important first step in content planning.

 Create

After strategizing your content, it’s time to plan it out and make it happen. This step includes the bulk of the work like timelines, deadlines, assigning work, client presentations and then there’s the star of the show…creating the content!

Typically, many different creators come together to work on a single piece of content including writers, designers, creative directors and content specialists.

Creating the content is the fun part of content marketing. Some may think content marketers churn out a bunch of content every day. The reality is that a lot of time is spent on one piece of content. It has to be perfect. It has to be helpful. And it has to be rich enough to be promoted and promoted again and again without becoming stale too quickly.

Taking your time with one piece of content should be done when there’s a budget to back it up. Good content marketers aren’t in the business of publishing a bunch of stuff and seeing what sticks.

Execute

The execution phase typically involves the digital arm of a marketing team. Implementing your new content across your brand’s digital and social media channels takes a focused plan. You want your message to be cohesive from one channel to the next, but you also want your story to build.

Analyze

A great step that often gets overlooked. You must look at the analytics of every content marketing campaign. This is where you determine what worked and what didn’t. Using social media insights and Google Analytics, you can see who is interacting with your content and how well your audience is engaged. Web traffic, click-through rate and bounce rate are just some of the metrics to analyze.

Repeat and Repurpose

Now it’s time to do it all over again. You might find that a piece of content can be repurposed. Whether it be weeks or years later, pulling apart your content like a puzzle and then putting it back together to create a new puzzle is something marketers often do. It’s a quicker (not necessarily easier) way to refresh a campaign without going back to the drawing board. When you’re ready for the next campaign, jump back up to step number one!

One Content Marketing Strategy: Keyword Research

If you aren’t doing in-depth keyword research in collaboration with your content writing, it may not be serving you well. Using tools like Semrush or Google Trends, look for terms that relate to your business. Further, look for terms that you could rank for. Think about how your written content could answer those micro questions that people are searching for and then build your content from there.

Finding a keyword is sometimes as simple as typing a phrase into the Google search bar and seeing what populates in the “People also ask” section. Then answer those questions in your content. After researching keywords, create a content outline that includes these topics in a natural and helpful way and form your content around it.

Long-Form Blogs

When it comes to blogs, your strategy is likely driven by what Google is up to. Does Google like long blogs? Short blogs? Happy blogs? Sad blogs? Because Google is Google, its algorithm decides what to serve to users on page one of a search result.

In order to be seen by the algorithm, a blog should contain keywords that are relevant to your content. It should also be formatted in a way that the algorithm approves. Long-form “helpful” content is going to get the green light. Answering a question or solving a problem are two effective ways your content can be helpful.

Your blog page on your site is where blog posts are published, but it’s often hard to locate a blog page unless you land there from a Google search. Blogs exist mainly for SEO rather than as just another pretty page on your website.

Reviews and user-generated content

Testimonials are still used as a data point for content. Especially on a sales landing page, it’s a great way to “lawyer up” and prove to your audience that your product or service is worthy of their hard-earned money. In fact, reviews and other user-generated content seem to be an underrated form of content marketing. Letting your customers do the bragging for you in a world where so many of us rely on the testimonials of others is a no-brainer when done right.

Want to learn more about content marketing and a strategy that makes sense for you and your business? Reach out to us at Commit Agency today.