Do you know businesses with blogs get 67% more leads than others? 47% of buyers check out 3 to 5 content pieces before engaging with a sales representative?
Content is the king for a reason, as brands that use content marketing have a 30% growth rate over the rest. So, if you do not use content marketing till now, it is time to start making business growth strategies that include content marketing.
In the current times, where mostly everyone depends upon online search engines, even for a small piece of information, you can expand your visibility by marking your presence on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) through content that will further help grow your business.
So, if you want to know about content marketing, here is everything you need to know.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a business growth marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain a relevant audience by creating and sharing content in the form of informative and relevant articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, newsletters, white papers, social media posts, emails, and more.
The idea is to provide users with relevant information and, convey your expertise, promote brand awareness with the ultimate motive of selling your services and products.
The key is to share content consistently to build trust in users and establish a strong business customer or business-to-business relationship.
How Can Content Help Grow Your Business?
Content marketing can help grow your business by attracting leads, promoting your product and convincing the users to buy your product, and closing the sales.
There are three stages of sales where you can use content marketing for effective results, namely:
- Awareness stage: In this initial stage to begin your sales process, the focus should be on what your audience is looking for and what their concerns are. Therefore, address their issues, challenges, and questions to engage them in a conversation. Make sure the content at this stage is educational and how-to advice. The ideal forms of content at this stage are articles, blog posts, e-books, videos, and newsletters.
- Consideration Stage:In this stage, your approach should be to provide helpful information and promote your business. Along with educating users about the features they should look for to address their needs, introduce your services and products. You can use case studies, how-to articles, how-to videos, checklists, and worksheets.
- Closing Stage:After you address the problems and make people aware of what they should look for, now comes the closing stage, which plays an important role in converting the users into your customers. Talk about your expertise, knowledge, and superiority of your products and services to convince the users to buy. You can use case studies, user-generated content, buyer’s guide, product video, and research report.
Now that you have understood the importance of content marketing, here are some of the must-have tips that will help you create relevant, attractive, and engaging content for both search engines and users.
- Create a Content Calendar:The first and foremost part that begins with your content marketing strategy is to create a content calendar to stay organized and fulfill the criteria for providing content for the above-mentioned three stages of sales.
The other reason to create a calendar is the budget because some content takes more time and money than others. Therefore, plan your content calendar a few months in advance with a space for resourceful content that may be required at any stage. The calendar will also help you post your content regularly to keep your audience engaged and earn their trust as a reliable brand.
- Understand Your Audience: Since you are creating content for a specific audience, you need to consider their mindset and what they are looking for. For instance, if you are a legal firm, your content should be more formal, and you can use jargon. But if you are creating content for a general audience, you should use not use jargon but more comprehensive, easy, and simple language.
- Add Entertainment Value to Your Content: Entertainment is one of the greatest ingredients you can add to your content to keep your audience engaged. It will influence the users to share your content with other users and help to increase your brand awareness. Entertainment also helps your users remember your brand for future reference when they require your services.
- Write Educational Content:As we discussed, the first stage to attract your customer is to spread awareness. Adding educational information to your content will add credibility and make you a reliable source of information even in the future. Furthermore, it will help to convince them to buy your products and services.
- Use Conversational Tone: No matter how informative your content is, if it fails to engage your audience, the bounce back rate will become high, which is bad for our online reputation. Therefore, along with entertainment and education, add a conversational tone to your content to make a perfect meal for your user. You have to create a balance between informational and promotional content. Therefore, provide a persuasive and enthusiastic call to action along with the information.
- Incorporate High ranking Keywords: Your content is reflected on the search engine result pages (SERPs), and to be in the top ranking, your content should contain relevant and high-ranking keywords to optimize your content according to the SEO requirement that your content is shown in the top ranking. But you should avoid keyword stuffing and use the keywords while maintaining the flow of the content. You can use various tools and software to find out high-ranking and relevant keywords for your business.
- Publish on Relevant Platforms: Once you are ready with your content, it is time to publish so that it reaches a relevant audience. For instance, if you are a legal firm, you can promote your content on websites and other platforms related to crime where people look out for your services and products.
- Promote Your Content on Multiple Platforms: You are not done with your job just by publishing your content because to expand its viewership, you need to promote it on multiple platforms. The best way to increase your viewership is to promote your content on social media. For instance, you can add links for your website to your Instagram and Facebook posts. You can also add links to your articles and blogs with your posts on different social media platforms. You can target specific demographics such as age, gender, income, and more and post your content on various community channels and groups. You can also promote your business through lucrative business listings, classified ads, and social bookmarking.
- Analyze the Results: To know whether your content is producing the desired result or not; you need to keep track of the impact of content marketing on your business. The analysis will help you form your business growth strategies and write the next content accordingly. Analyze the engagement rates of your content, its performance on various platforms, and more. Once you analyze the results, you can make changes in your strategies according to the requirement.
You can hire an expert content creator who has in-depth knowledge of SEO writing and can help create engaging, informative, and relevant content.
Thus, content marketing is an effective tool to attract an audience, engage them in a conversation, and influence them to buy your products and services.
