Guide to Content Marketing: What is a good content strategy?

Table of Contents

Always to provide value to your audience.

Content marketing allows businesses to create valuable, relevant and timely content that’s tailored to their target audiences. Done well, your brand provides valuable information while building trust and piquing interest. Content marketing helps you increase your visibility in search engines, drive traffic to your website and generate leads. It’s a powerful way to reinforce your brand identity, establish a thought leadership position and leave a lasting impression on potential customers. By producing materials that customers find engaging and worthwhile, you can establish credibility, cultivate trust, and foster a lasting relationship with your consumers.

Content marketing is not just about creating content, but also about understanding your audience, your industry, and your competitors. You need to be able to conduct thorough and accurate research, using various sources and tools, to identify your target market, their pain points, their preferences, and their behavior.

To successfully create a content marketing strategy, follow these 3 golden rules.

Rule One: Deliver content through the correct medium.
Rule Two: Target the right audience through the right platform.
Rule Three: Publish quality content frequently to gain notice.

Why content marketing?

Brand awareness and engagement
Customer loyalty/ retention
Lead generation
Websites, Microsites, and Online Communities
Upsell
Thought leadership
Edge over the others

Besides the above mentioned benefits,content marketing offers brands the advantage of owning the media over just renting it. By owning we mean brands can continuously create, curate or alter its messages to influence its audience or change the consumer behaviour too.It leaves the scope to experiment, allowing brands to be intellectually innovative and of course create the ‘WOW’ effect.

What skills do you need for content marketing?

What skills should those content pros have? We know which skills frontline content marketers believe are important: SEO, data analytics, working with technologies, audience development, and writing and editing topped the list of desired training in another recent CMI study.

Why Content Marketing Is Important For Businesses

The importance of content marketing in digital marketing relates to its ability to increase the volume of quality traffic to your website. Content is king in creating awareness and generating quality leads which sustains healthy sales growth. Strategized and properly executed content has the power to pull your audience to your business’s website, which is ultimately the place where they will convert into leads, and then sales.

The most effective way to drive traffic to your website is through the content that you develop for your blog, for SEO and for your social media marketing. While there are plenty of important elements that live under these categories, it all boils down to the quality of your content.

The higher the quality of the content, the more valuable it is to your audience, and the more likely they are to engage with your business. The more they engage with your business and spend time on your website, the more likely they are to develop trust in your brand and become a prospect and client. Leaving you with a big return on your investment in content marketing.

Content marketing not only precedes traditional marketing tactics by a landslide, but it also pulls in significantly more website visitors and leads. The consistent production of content boosts website traffic, and as traffic increases, so do conversions. A good conversion strategy will bring in high-quality leads.

These conversions are valuable because they are a building block for your sales funnel. The website visitors who convert have chosen to actively engage with your content by accepting an offer you display on your website. The offer may be an infographic, a great explainer, a white paper, or a complimentary consultation. Content marketing is developed for the buyer journey, providing valuable information at each stage of the buying cycle. In this way, website visitors can convert to leads, and from there to new clients. It is a constant flow of content that nurtures prospects through each step.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) vs. Content Marketing

Search engines like Google perform crawls of each website’s content in order to determine what users they will bring to your website. Strong content will generate more website traffic because the search engines have a clear idea on the purpose of the business. Optimizing your web pages to better perform with search engine ranking is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

SEO is a more technical reason to create great content, but also a great one. It is how search engines use your content to connect you to your next customer!

People, including buyers of your products and services, go online and use the power of Google and search engines to find solutions using keyword strings. For example if you’re looking for wedding dresses in Toronto, you might search “wedding dresses Toronto” or “best bridal stores Toronto”. Google then reveals the top content for those keyword strings.

The businesses who have mastered how to get to the top of search are the big winners in organic search. They’re bringing qualified traffic to their websites. So, one of the best ways that you can build organic traffic to your website is with great content!

Employ content for strong user and search engine experience for a double win!

Google, and other search engines, work to find the most relevant information regarding the particular search query. This creates the need for expert content in order to continue to attract your ideal target consumers to your content and your website.

Keep in mind that search engine algorithms are always changing and improving. They are always improving their ability to deliver relevant content in response to specific queries. In recent years Google’s algorithm updates increasingly reward good quality content and punish poor quality content.

For that reason, up to date content is rewarded. This means your marketing plan must include not only creating new content, but also updating older content that has performed well.

Evaluate your content and make changes to stay relevant!

To stay relevant, you can repurpose existing content, update dates or statistics, and evaluate changes in keyword rankings so your content continues to perform well in searches. All of this helps you maintain a strong ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) and keeps qualified traffic coming to your site!

According to Neil Patel, content creation is the most effective SEO technique in increasing traffic to your website. Business websites that consistently post new blog content have an average of 434% more pages indexed by search engines than those that don’t publish at all.

The more content you have on your site, the more pages the search engine has to index and show to users in their search engine results.

Keep in mind that more pages of content on your website do not necessarily result in higher traffic. However it does give your business the opportunity to rank for more keywords, and this in turn can drive more traffic.

Creating blogs on various topics relevant to your target audience gives your website more opportunities to rank for the keywords that your target users are searching for.

A greater quantity of good content on your site also gives visitors more reasons to spend time on your site. The higher on-site time spent by visitors can also positively impact your search engine optimization. Google sees time spent on a site as an indication that your website provides valuable content.

Should You Still Choose Content Marketing?

Content marketing remains an important part of most brand marketing strategies. We think it’ll only become more useful because of how content supports so many other parts of the business — thought leadership, paid ads, events, thought leadership, to name just a few.

But no tactic is perfect, and we all know how content marketing campaigns can fall flat if you don’t execute them correctly. By understanding the disadvantages of content marketing, you can be more deliberate in when — and how — you use content marketing to elevate your brand and engage your audience.

Ready to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website?

Now that you have these tactics in your toolbox, you should be able to put together a simple strategy for getting more people to your site. Remember, though, that this isn’t a one-off exercise, nor do you have to try everything at once or use only one tactic at a time.

Try something. See if it works. If it fails, stick at it a little longer but bring something else into your roster. Most importantly, make sure the technical aspects of your site are running smoothly — if you need targeted audience, for example, we’ve got plans to suit any budget!

PRO TIP: We run Facebook/Instagram, Google/Youtube, Linkedin, and Native Ad traffic for lots of different businesses, and would love to help you! Click here to learn more!