The Complete Guide on Why Content Marketing is Still a Valuable Marketing Strategy for Businesses
What is Content Marketing and Why Should I Care?
Content marketing is a strategy that businesses use to promote their products and services by producing and distributing content to attract a specific audience. It is one of the most effective types of marketing for small businesses. Content marketing has been around for a while, but it has become more popular in recent years because people are looking for more information before they make purchasing decisions or researching before interacting with a brand.
There are many benefits of content marketing, but the most important one is that it helps you build your reputation as an expert in your industry and connects to your audience. It also helps you build trust with your customers which can lead to increased sales or traffic.
What are the Benefits of Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the use of content to attract, engage, and retain customers. It is a way of promoting products or services using content to create awareness, interest, and engagement.
Content marketing benefits are immense. It helps businesses increase their reach by being published on various platforms such as blogs, social media channels, videos etc. without paying for advertising. Content marketing also helps in customer retention by providing them with valuable information about products, services or topics they are interested in. The best part about content marketing is that it can be done at any time and cost-effectively too! When done right, content marketing is extremely time and cost-effective and can have long term benefits.
How Does Content Marketing Work?
Content marketing is a form of marketing that has been around for decades. It is the process of creating and distributing valuable content to attract customers, leads, and prospects, with the most common being blogs. The most common way to create content for your blog is to write posts that are directly related to your business or niche as well as their lateral interests to garner a new audience. However, there are other ways you can create content for your blog as well. You could create videos, printables, podcasts, infographics, eBooks, etc. The possibilities are endless!
3 High Performing Types of Content Marketing
Content marketing relies on creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience. When it comes to getting your website discovered by search engines and seen by your target audience, content marketing is the way to go. Even the world’s most well-known brands spend more money on content marketing than on television commercials. With well-known and established companies changing to keep up with the times, the internet is quickly displacing traditional forms of marketing. It’s clear that developing a content marketing plan is the way to go, but how should you go about doing so? There are many ways to generate content for this type of marketing (as mentioned above), but the three we will discuss in detail are the 3 best and high performing types of content marketing.
Blog Marketing
When it comes to efficient content development, blogs are at the absolute top of the list. They increase traffic and conversions for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that they provide many opportunities for relevant and related keywords to be included in their text. The precise terms and phrases that someone searches for while looking for a specific topic are very certainly included in blog entries. Even if the person isn’t interested in reading a full-length article, it makes keywords more likely to be picked up by search engines. The average blog post length was 1,050 words in 2021, but the longer the better, with longform articles delivering higher google rankings and traffic to your website. Blogs are also one of the most effective strategies to boost SEO and increase organic search traffic to your website. You will find most search engine optimisation agencies (not us!) will utilise ‘on-page’ content to help SEO; the downfall is they aren’t highly skilled in copywriting, or writing for different audiences (that’s why you should always go with content marketers who specialise in communicating to different audiences – like us!). As a business you can complement any advertising with inbound marketing such as content to make the best of your limited budget, as well as to bring in your target audience. According to Forbes, websites with a blog typically have 434% more indexed pages than ones without one.
Check out our case study helping Auski Australia smash their content marketing!
Check out the full article at auski.com.au
Video Content Marketing
The second type of high performing content for content marketing is video – which is no surprise in this day and age. Consumers are watching more video content than they have in the past. In fact, video material accounts for one-third of all online activity. Because of this, video is one of the most effective forms of content marketing for reaching and engaging your target audience, regardless of industry. Receiving information via video is the quickest and most convenient option in today’s environment. It’s critical to create high-quality video material if you want your product or service to appeal to a wide range of people. There are numerous platforms for displaying videos, whether they are a few seconds or minutes long, the main priority is ensuring they are optimised for mobile, and your audience. You’ll find high-quality videos from all of your favourite businesses on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms. If you want to stay competitive in today’s crowded digital economy, start planning your video content and get on those platforms for some research. It’s critical that you find a way to quickly capture and engage your target audience’s attention.
Social Media Marketing
You might be confused wondering why social media is on this list, but do you create photos or videos to engage an audience? Yep that’s what content marketing is! Social media is a popular form of content marketing that is becoming more relevant and popular by the day. As more businesses realise that social media is an important tool for marketing, more companies are hiring social media managers – again there is a difference between someone to manage the tasks involved, versus the creative and strategy needed. The most tempting aspect of social media is that they are free to run and follow for businesses and the general public. This, combined with the fact that social media posts can instantly communicate a message, makes them crucial to the business. A well-planned social media post can quickly capture anyone’s attention, whether it’s through a photo with a well-thought-out text or a minute-long video. Furthermore, social sharing and engagement (social proof)are one of the most effective strategies to raise brand recognition.
3 Reasons Why Content Marketing Works!
Genuine Connection with Target Audiences
Great tales travel far; let go of the pressure to generate material that appeals to everyone and deliver ultimate entertainment in every piece of content.
Rather, just be yourself. Focus on delivering engaging and consumable content, whether it’s informative, educational etc. but do it in your own voice, your way. Beef up your content marketing output with material that highlights you, your team, the services you provide, and the how and why of your company. Authentic content is frequently the easiest to create. It’s also more likely to engage with and ignite the curiosity of your ideal customer, as well as generate consistent leads for your company. And, just as a strong tale relies on a few common rules, there are content strategy principles you can follow to ensure you get the most bang for your buck when it comes to writing. You can engage your audience and cut through the daily sea of content they are bombarded with by following a solid approach, consistently.
Content Marketing Saves Money and is Better than Paid Advertising
Content marketing vs. paid advertising can be compared in a variety of ways, and yes paid advertising delivers great results in the short term, yet content marketing wins in terms of long-term return on investment. Hands-down. This is because paid ads such as Facebook ads or Google Ads only pay off for as long as you have them running, and you need to have money coming out to keep them running.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is timeless. It can stay on your website for free as long as you want it to, bringing in a new audience time and time again.
Not only that, but content marketing increases brand trust and engagement. Your audience does not perceive you as someone who is simply promoting ad after ad in order to make a profit. Instead, people discover your brand and look to you for helpful information, relevant material, and continuous value. The added bonus is that once you have attracted and engaged an audience, they will continue to discover your business and keep coming back to you in the future.
2 Birds, 1 Stone – It’s Strategically Compatible & Beneficial
If you want to attract more visitors to your website, you must ideally rank first on Google searches, although this is extremely difficult, but you want your primary keywords to be on the first 1-2 pages of google results. Yes SEO can help you increase Google ranking, but so can content marketing – they are inextricably linked. As mentioned above, most SEO companies will do ‘on page-content’ as part of their delivery, but this doesn’t cover content marketing. The quality and quantity of visits to your site are maximised when content and SEO are in sync, as well as when content and paid advertising are in sync.
With content marketing, you’re not only drawing a large number of visitors; they’re also the correct kind of visitors — people who are interested, engaged, and eager to connect with you as they are searching for your content.
To accomplish this, try to keep in mind your material should:
- Meet your audience where they are – the terms and phrases in your content should correspond to what they’re looking for on the internet and be helpful, informative, educational, engaging etc.
- Address your company’s needs, brand and story – the words on your website should tell your story in an interesting and SEO-friendly style, and they should correspond to the services you provide, as well as communicating who you are to your audience
- Emphasize your point of difference – the tone of your material should be consistent with your brand and help you stand out from the crowd. You’ll appeal to your audience more powerfully if you highlight your unique ideals and capabilities.
Why You Should Stop Thinking about Your Blog as a Self-Exclusive Platform and Start Treating it as Part of Your Digital Strategy!
A blog is a powerful tool to communicate with your audience and build your brand. But many bloggers and businesses make the mistake of treating their blog like an exclusive platform. Blogs are often seen as an extension of the content marketing strategy for businesses, but they can be far more than that. Blogs can act as a digital hub for the company’s content marketing efforts, acting as a central place to publish all content. They also provide a great opportunity for brands to connect with their customers on a more personal level by providing insights into who they are and what they do. The key is to start thinking about your blog as part of your digital strategy and not just another outlet for self-promotion.
Conclusion & Next Steps: Consider Using A Content Marketing Specialist To Cut Through the Noise
Most small businesses either struggle with limited budget or they assume they have hired a digital manager or social media manager to already complete the work needed. But, is that person a unicorn? Trust us, no unicorns exist sadly. There is so much work for a Social Manager or a Digital Manager to do, that they don’t have enough time to manage creating all the actual content marketing themselves. Even with limited budget and resources you can outsource effective blog copywriting or social media advertising to help your business succeed. Did you know 1/2 our of Pink Lemonade clients get us to do their content marketing, and all of them have a social and/or digital manager working already working full time!
What about those AI blog writing software programs I see? We should not think of these AI writers as a replacement for human copywriters. They just provide assistance by getting rid of writer’s block and generating content ideas at scale.
Have any other questions about content marketing? Get in touch, we’re happy to answer any and all of your questions!
Pink Lemonade is located on the traditional lands of the palawa people, the Traditional Owners of lutruwita (Tasmania). We pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.
Pink Lemonade Social is a proudly inclusive organisation and an ally of LGBTIQ+ community and the movement toward equality.
This has made me more determined to incorporate blogs into our marketing. Cheers!
Anytime, best of luck!
I thought I only had to worry about social haha thanks for this post!
You’re welcome!
100% agree, content marketing is so valuable!