Many marketers could be excused for thinking content marketing is just the process of writing a blog post and publishing it to the company blog. Although that can become a large part of your content marketing strategy, there’s so much more to it! By determining a synergistic content marketing strategy, which forms part of your overall digital marketing strategy, your company can make a noticeable splash within its industry.
It can be a cheaper form of marketing
In comparison to other forms of marketing, such as outbound marketing, content marketing can be a very cost effective form of inbound marketing. Pulling your customers into your site via well-written, interesting content, helps open up the line of communication between your business and the customer. Starting a relationship with your customers through content marketing efforts is a more natural, less pressured way to slowly nurture your new leads until they’re ready to purchase. According to Demand Metric, content marketing can help you generate three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing tactics and can cost 62% less. Even though the cost of marketing is a big turn off for some businesses, patiently engaging in content marketing tactics is well worth investment in order to attract highly-relevant and obtainable leads.
It can help you understand your audience
For your content marketing to become a roaring success, you need to ensure you’ve honed in on your target market by creating buyer personas. Create succinct and reliable buyer personas, using data from primary research, perhaps through interviewing your current client base. These personas will then help your business understand the problems your customers are coming to your business with, what solutions they expect or hope for, and also the sales and marketing techniques that best worked with them, to ultimately converting them into a loyal customer. All this information gathering can seem daunting, but once you’ve created your personas, you can minimise wasted time by ensuring you’re outreaching your content to websites and resources you know your buyer personas visit and engage with and most importantly creating content that resonates with your customers.
As we’ve discussed, understanding your audience is paramount to a successful content marketing strategy, so why not have a go at creating your own using HubSpot’s Make My Persona.
It can help increase your referral traffic
Naturally, the more high-quality, relevant content you produce and distribute, the higher the chance you’ll see an increase in your referral traffic. Obtaining natural backlinks from industry authorities, is one of the objectives your content marketing should be aiming for. Receiving a higher volume of relevant referral traffic means your content is shareable and of interest to your audience, which is great! Writing for your audience should take president over writing keyword-heavy content for the search engines. Boosting your authority as a resource for your industry generates much more valuable traffic for your brand, rather than creating keyword-stuffed content that increases your page bounce rate and subsequently, decreases user time on site.
It can help you improve your business’ reputation
Even if your company hasn’t got a particularly negative reputation, content marketing can further enhance your reputation as a positive, interesting influencer in your field of work. It can be difficult to get your business heard amongst the chaos and volatile nature of most industries but continuous content marketing tactics and reactive and proactive campaign measurement will ensure you’re a consistent force to be reckoned with. Reputation Management is a service we offer here at Hit Search, but there are steps you can take to conquer and positively manage your company’s online reputation.
It can help you elevate and build your social community
You probably already use social media for your business, perhaps you’ve even trialled paid social media. If you feel like your social media channels lack direction and only attract a low level of engagement, includign retweets, shares and comments, then don’t worry! Content marketing can really help your business out here. After you’ve created your target buyer personas (as we mentioned earlier), you’ll be able to mirror the targeted content through your social channels. Promoting and distributing your content using your social channels is a low-cost and very effective way to notify your target market of your new and interesting content. LinkedIn Pulse is a great example of a free content distribution platform your business should really be taking advantage of! Make sure all your social posts are to the point and include a link, when you can, and if it’s possible, try adding an image! Conducting a bit of research around the most used hashtags surrounding your industry, can also play a big role in boosting the visibility of your social posts. Also, according to Forbes, including an image in your Tweet can increase retweets by 35% – so get those images ready!
If you wish to delve deeper into content marketing, head over to the Hit Search blog for more digital marketing advice!
