What do you need to do to achieve a large and regular flow of visitors to your blog or site? The solution lies in Content Marketing.
One has to focus on creating content that is required by your audience and make it available at all the places where they search or look for it.
Content marketing is the present and future of digital marketing. Let’s go deeper and understand content marketing.
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What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is a strategic marketing approach that is focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, as well as consistent content for attracting and retaining a clearly defined audience that leads to profitable customer action.
So, instead of pitching your products or services, Content Marketing focuses on providing truly relevant and valuable content to your prospects to help them in solving their issues.
Nowadays, a vast majority of marketers make use of content marketing. It is being used by small businesses, one-person shops, bloggers, internet marketers, as well as many prominent organizations in the world.
The reason is simple – “Content Marketing Works.”
The “three” key benefits for enterprises that make use of content marketing are as follows:
- Increased Sales
- Cost Savings
- Better customers that are more loyal
It’s the “relevant” and “valuable” aspect in content marketing that makes it different and effective from other informational garbage that you get from companies (can it be called spam?).
Quality content has become a part of all forms of marketing. For example, the search engine rewards businesses that go on to publish quality and consistent content.
A piece of content is said to be a part of the content marketing campaign if people want to seek it out if they want to consume it, rather than avoid it.
If a recipient received value from it, then that piece of content becomes part of content marketing. So, the focus of content marketing is to provide value to your target audience.
Here, we share with five content marketing examples that will help you to get started with it:
- Infographics: These are long, vertical graphics that are studded with statistics, charts, graphs, as well as other pieces of information. Infographics have been very popular around social media. They have been regularly posted on websites for years. Decent infographics can cost you somewhere around $1000. You can promote that infographics to bloggers and the media. You can even set up a board on Pinterest and curate infographics that are related to your business.
- WebPages: There is some difference between a normal webpage and a webpage that is content marketing. For instance, let’s take The Beginner’s Guide to SEO from Moz. This resource has been offered for free and has been viewed millions of times. It brings out the relevance of content marketing through a webpage.
- Podcasts: It is one of the best ways to give valuable information to your target audience – all for free. For example, Michael Hyatt (author of the bestselling book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World) came with a podcast, “This Is Your Life,” that was downloaded more than 250,000 times. A podcast offers visibility in a completely different world – primarily iTunes. Moreover, this podcast leads to more sales of his books and signups for his courses, as well as numerous requests for him as a speaker.
- Videos: Many YouTubers have become millionaires by doing content marketing using online video. However, videos are still an untapped form of content marketing because most people think it’s expensive and hard. However, as the cost of professional-grade equipment continues to fall, creating high-quality video and audio content has become easier than ever. Videos have the power to change your fortunes overnight.
- Books: They are a form of content marketing that offers you the opportunity to introduce yourself as “Author of…” With self-publishing, it has become easy to publish a book. Moreover, books are seen as selling themselves. They are being used as marketing tools.
These are just a few examples that ease your content marketing efforts. Some other examples of content marketing are – white papers, eBooks, apps, blogs, and presentations.
Why is Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing plays an important role in the buying cycle. Let’s first understand the four steps that are involved in the buying cycle. These are as enumerated below:
- Awareness: Before awareness, a customer is not aware that there is a solution to their needs.
- Research: Once a customer gets to know that there is a solution for his need, they undergo research and educate themselves. For instance, a car buyer will do research and find out what types of cars exist and which one fits their needs.
- Consideration: At this stage, the customer compares different products from different vendors and makes sure that they are getting a high-quality product at a fair price.
- Buy: It’s the final step wherein the customer makes the decision and moves forward with the transaction.
To let you know, traditional marketing works on the second two steps. However, content marketing caters to the first two stages of the buying process by raising awareness and educating consumers about a product that they never considered before.
With content marketing, you don’t need to engage yourself in high-pressure sales tactics. So, content marketing creates trust with potential clients.
Moreover, the return with content marketing is phenomenal when it is executed correctly. For example, you can taste success with a handful of articles. Plus, content marketing supports other digital marketing channels.
It offers additional content that is needed for social media marketing. Content marketing even contributes to SEO efforts by creating natural inbound links. It builds up quality content on your website that gets found in the search results.
Types of Content Marketing
Here, we share with you some of the top & high performing types of content marketing that you can use for your content marketing strategy.
Blogs
The blog is regarded as one of the most popular types of content marketing. They are very popular with small businesses. Blogging improve SEO and play an important role in driving more organic traffic to your website from the search engines. They can be used to supplement any advertising with inbound content.
Research conducted by Forbes indicates that a website with a blog has 434% more indexed pages than those that don’t have a blog. So, sites with blogs have a much greater chance of showing up on the first page of search engines when do search with relevant keywords. Blogs also help in search engine optimization.
You need to provide valuable content in your blog that your target audience will consider when they are ready to purchase. You can choose topics and address questions that might be relevant and needed by your target audience. So, you should create blog content addressing these topics.
eBooks
eBooks prove an effective type of long-form content that is used by businesses to dish out value for their leads as well as customers. The important thing to consider here is that this form of content should provide “value” to your customers. It should not look like a 5 to 10-page ad.
Moreover, it should provide useful information and insights that address the needs and challenges of your target audience. So, eBook is all about building relationships with your target consumers. It builds trust for your brand, and they come to you to make a purchase.
This form of content marketing also aids in collecting lead information. They are typically gated. So, visitors need to provide some information about them for downloading the eBook.
However, eBooks involve a lot of time investment. They are longer and require a substantial amount of time to create. That said, this should not act as a deterrent to scare you off from creating an effective eBook. It provides an attractive return on investment by allowing you to collect a lot of leads.
Case Studies
Case Study is another valuable form of content marketing. They are customer stories that tell how your business has proved helpful for a client (customer) to become successful.
They are useful for businesses as they can highlight special applications or uses for their services or products. Consumers also like case studies as it allows them to understand how your brand can be useful in their lives or businesses. Case studies put out real-life examples before consumers and help in building trust with new leads.
For crafting a case study, you should choose those customers that have been benefited by using your products or services. You can showcase the case studies on your company website, blogs, eBooks, social posts, as well as in other types of content.
Interviews
Interviews are another high-performing type of content marketing. It allows you to position your company as an expert in the industry. Herein, you take interviews with industry experts or even of your customers. The content in an interview allows your site visitors to understand their challenges and needs.
Here’s how you can use interviews as part of your digital marketing campaigns:
- Host a live interview using a webinar or live stream with Facebook Live
- Record an interview and showcase it on your site and through YouTube
- Create written interview content and showcase it on your blog
- Seek out opportunities and be interviewed by third-party sources
You should make sure that the interview content provides some value to your target audience. So, you need to choose topics for the interviews that provide useful information to your leads and customers.
Social Media Posts
Social Media Posts is another useful form of content marketing that allows your company to engage with new leads and existing customers. It play an important role in reaching your target audiences.
Some of the most popular social media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They help reach new audiences and further relationships with customers.
Social media posts enable your customers to discover your products. It provides additional information about your products and alerts consumers to sales and promotions.
Social media can be used to influence a purchase as well as for nurturing leads directly. It allows you to engage your target audience and start a conversation with them. So, you need to post promotional as well as informational content across the social media channels.
How to do Content Marketing?
Here, we list down important Content Marketing techniques so that you can generate a large and constant flow of visitors to your site.
First and foremost, you have to channelize your efforts in creating distinct and unique content for your blog. You have to realize that the content you create is the keystone that can differentiate your blog from the rest of the bloggers.
So, your content storyline should be as distinct as you are. As a content marketer or blogger should always try to experiment and concentrate on developing your point of view on the subject of the content.
Then you should always bear in mind that you create content for your audience and not for yourself. So select such subjects or topics which interest your audience. You have to be aware of what they want or would like to read.
Secondly, you have to make efforts to develop social media channels for promoting and sharing your content with a vast group of the audience as well as for generating traffic and leads.
Social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn can be very effective in promoting your content and can generate thousands of visitors each day for your site or blog. You would get a highly relevant and highly engaged audience from such online social media channels.
For example, if you’re content to happen to achieve front-page trending prominence on LinkedIn; this alone can serve your site with thousands of visitors per day.
So your content required to be shared on such social media marketing channels. Moreover, to facilitate sharing on the social media channels, you need to place social triggers at strategic locations in your blog’s content or emails or even in the PDF files. Users then effortlessly share your content on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram or other online social media channels.
Then another very useful content marketing technique is to coordinate and build a relationship with influencers to spread the reach of your content. Influencers help to co-create engaging content. They share your content with their audience to increase their reach.
So, you need to identify ten to twenty influencers. Build your relationship by engaging with them on social media networks and co-ordinate with them to create success for your blog.
Next, content marketing requires you to be consistent. Consistency leads you to the path of success in blogging. You need to be consistent not only in the quality of your content but also in the frequency of publishing your content, its voice, and as well as its tone.
To achieve this, you need to develop your writing skills. To make it easy and interesting, you can begin by choosing to write on your niche or on subjects that interest you. All these steps will help you to become a facile writer and ultimately develop consistency too.
And that’s not all as you can follow many other Content Marketing techniques too.
Another way of spreading your content marketing affords to write for other blogs or websites in your niche. This will help you to reach another website audience and spread your brand or solutions. This is one of the most popular ways of content marketing.
It has been seen that repetition is beneficial for Content Marketing. Not in the sense that you duplicate the content, but you should approach the topic of your content from various perspectives. So you end up enriching your readers with a wide variety of useful information or rather provide them multiple solution options.
Then you can choose to show video tours (along with the content) to your visitors. Offer them free rather than making them undergo a signing or form filling process. This would generate their interest as almost everyone prefers watching before they begin to read any content.
Then you can also offer more information once visitors do registration or form filling. You can have the video tours on every of your blog posts or every page of your site. You should focus on creating content that is beneficial, inspiring, and entertaining for your visitors or readers.
As a blogger or website promoter, you should remember that Content Marketing is highly essential if you want to make it big in the blogging world. The above techniques on Content Marketing show you the way to achieve a large and constant flow of visitors to your site or blog and thus become a successful blogger or website promoter.
Well, that’s all in this post. We hope that you found it useful. Thanks for visiting. We welcome your comments and suggestions.
