A Simple Guide on Nuts and Bolts of Content Marketing

Content marketing is and will be the face of marketing. With businesses generating revenue online, it is highly unlikely that you can survive if you are invisible online. Traditional marketing campaigns were the norm for a while, but content marketing has replaced traditional marketing with the surge in internet traffic and the establishment of the social media platforms we know today.

How do you define Content Marketing?

Content marketing refers to a process of creating, strategizing, publishing, and distributing content to make your brand visible to your target audience.

What makes Content Marketing Important in this day and age?

Here are some of the main reasons why you should invest in content marketing to further your brand:

• Content educates your target audience

There are many sources of information to look up within your niche, which means visitors will pit you against your competitors to see what works best for them. If you want to get your target audience to pay attention to you, create content to inform and educate your audience. And do it for free. The point of free, informative content is to provide value. The more value you provide, the more likely your visitors will return to your site or channel.

• Create and expand your brand

Content allows you to build your brand and reach audiences you did not know existed. Word of mouth and conventional marketing methods cannot seem to tap into markets you would find online, which is why content marketing works. Businesses of all sizes and marketing budgets rely on content marketing to expand their brand awareness.

Produce content on every platform you find, experiment with different kinds of content, and gauge the results and reactions you get. Your blogs might receive traction if they are optimized for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or your YouTube videos might do better. Ultimately, content creates value, which brings you attention.

• Save money on marketing

With traditional marketing strategies, you would have to invest in TV, radio advertisements, etc. Marketing campaigns were expensive, and the businesses that had marketing budgets would get ahead. Content marketing, however, has leveled the playing field for small and medium-sized businesses. In fact, big companies rely on content marketing to get ahead irrespective of their budget.

Content marketing reportedly costs about 62% less than traditional marketing and brings you three times as many leads. In other words, content marketing brings you a high Return-on-Investment (ROI) but doesn’t cost all that much. If you do not have much of a marketing budget, focus on creating more content to compensate.

Content Marketing helps you forge a relationship with your customers

Consistently putting out valuable content helps you increase your credibility and trustworthiness in your target audience’s eyes. As mentioned earlier, you can educate your audience through content. However, content marketing also involves engaging your audience, addressing their concerns, and taking their feedback to improve your content. You can do this by replying to the comments you receive on all your media platforms.

Which Content metrics should you track to gauge your progress?

Any content marketing agency or writer is aware of the metrics you should track to boost your progress. Some of them are:

• Traffic

Traffic refers to the number of visits to your website over a period. If your website gets a substantial amount of traffic, you have to narrow down the source of this traffic and focus on the type of posts that drive this traffic. There are several tools you can use to track your page or website traffic. You may adjust the content marketing strategy once you analyze your traffic carefully.

• Customer Retention

Quality leads only mean something if you can turn them into customers and retain them. If you find that you can create a lot of interest and intrigue and have tons of visitors to your site, you need to focus on converting them into customers and have them return. Once you know how to do this, you can maximize your marketing campaigns.

• Pages per visit

It is vital to maximize the number of pages your visitors open. To keep your visitors on your site for significant amounts of time, you need to deliver quality posts and use backlinks, and internal linking to direct them to other posts on your website. You need to give the visitor the impression that your other posts are as good or better than the one they are reading.

• Social sharing

It is no surprise that you need to track a metric like social sharing since brands use Facebook or Instagram for business along with other platforms. Since people communicate on social media, it should not surprise you that they also share content on social media. The pages they follow, the links they share on their timelines, and so on are a testament to this. If you want to further your brand, you need to keep track of social sharing and other metrics that you will find on Facebook Analytics and Instagram Insights.

How do you use Content Marketing to grow your brand?

Here are a few things you can do to build your brand through content marketing:

• Offer value

It is essential to promote your brand and let your audience know what you are up to using promotional material. However, it is far more important to put out content that your audience finds valuable. In other words, put out videos, blog posts, images, podcasts, and social media posts, that you think will help your audience. The more value your audience gets out of your content, the more likely they will return to your website.

• Study your competition

If you want to stay at the top of your game, you need to know how things are changing and how your competitors seem to be dealing with the changes in the market. Studying your competitors and acting accordingly help you progress.