What Is Content Marketing?
It’s a form of marketing wherein brands create and share online content. It could be in the form of blogs, videos, social media posts, reviews, descriptions, etc.
Content marketing does not explicitly promote a company/brand (although there can be promotional content). Instead, it aims to generate interest in a service/product via customer education and awareness.
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing holds immense importance for brands for myriad reasons. Some of those are:
- It educates people about your products/services and brand in general
- It answers the questions people may have about you
- You can build long-lasting relationships with people through content
- In the long run, it establishes you as an authority in the market
- It can improve conversion rates
- It’s the primary source of lead generation
When all else fails, the fact that most people expect high-quality content from their most favored brands is the reason for companies to churn out content regularly.
Does Content Marketing Work for Small Businesses?
The short answer to this question is – YES. It does work. Small businesses often feel at a loss as they don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on ads every month. But, with content marketing, they can secure top positions in SERPs for keywords with high search volume.
By investing a few hundred dollars in some quality blog posts, they can almost get the same traction as big companies often do by spending thousands.
Reasons Your Company Needs Content Marketing:
Better Social Media Traction:
Content creation is the basis of securing a huge following on social media. However, just having followers is not enough. To keep them interested and engaged as you progress, you present them with information that interests them.
If you’re having a hard time securing any traction on social media despite a big following; you may need to tweak your content strategy.
Establish Trust With Your Audience:
Through content, you can address people’s pain points in your arena. When customers see that you can help them out, it will inevitably establish a sense of trust with them.
Builds Authority:
By churning out quality pieces such as those around possible future trends in the industry and data analysis, a brand can establish itself as an authority in the niche. As people read and interact through your content, they will think highly of your brand. Brands that regularly publish quality and authoritative content tend to enjoy more customers and better sales.
Greater Return on a Smaller Investment:
Unlike traditional marketing that requires a ton of budget but can only reach a small number of prospects; with content marketing, you can reach a much wider audience with very little expenditure. If applied correctly, the return on investment from content marketing can be exponential.
This arrangement is particularly good for small businesses as they are mostly short on the marketing budget. For a tiny budget, they can secure a strong footing in the industry.
Expose Your Business to New Prospects and a Larger Audience:
By optimizing your content for location-specific keywords, you can widen your outreach. There’s no limitation to the amount of audience you can target with the help of your content marketing efforts.
It’s all about how creatively you find topics and promote them through a combination of strategies. Whether you’re a local business or a global one; content can keep on bringing new prospects and a bigger audience to you.
Boosts Organic Search Visibility:
Through the means of regular blogging and social media posts, you can make sure that more and more people can find you organically. Organic visibility is when a person can see you in the search results against queries related to your industry terms or your brand name.
Content marketing and SEO strategy will help you appear naturally in search engines like Google and Bing.
Content Can Be a Major Lead Magnet for Growing Businesses:
By crafting helpful content and placing CTAs strategically in that content, you can get quality leads. With the help of free content such as guides, how-tos, infographics you can prompt the desired user action. It could be getting them to a landing page and getting them to subscribe to a service.
Every lead magnet, in the end, must rely on quality content.
How to Score Your Content?
Often writers are unable to quantify what kind of content is best for their brand as well as the audience. With the help of content scoring, they can objectively look at their content process and identify the pieces that are proving to be the most valuable.
Based on this evaluation, they can replicate their best-performing content strategy to create similar traction in the future as well.
Here’s the content scoring process to stick with –
Decide on a metric –
For your scoring system to be effective, you must decide on an engagement metric. Based on the success of that engagement metric, you can see what type of content is creating the biggest impact. For some, this can mean page view. For others, it can be the number of shares on Facebook.
Devise a campaign –
After deciding on the metric, you need to draft a campaign that can meet the said metric threshold. For instance, if you feel 1,000 pageviews are good enough, start pouring in content assets that can meet those criteria.
Monitor the performance –
See how well each content piece is doing. Keep adding the pieces of content to your campaign that meets the criteria. You can use HubSpot Analytics to track performance.
Find out Patterns –
After you have the results from your analytics at hand, see if you can spot any patterns in your best-performing content. You can then take out those elements and replicate them across all the content pieces you write.
Repeat –
You should know that content is an ongoing process. With time you may notice new patterns emerging. Keep taking necessary action accordingly based on new insights.
Bottom Line:
No matter your niche or industry; if you’re a part of the online sphere you simply cannot do without an effective content marketing strategy at hand.
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