Content marketing is more crucial than ever, especially in this new normal economy where most businesses have some form of online operations to keep thriving. But as a result of brands wanting to get your attention and do business with audiences, advertisements are becoming harder and harder to run away from.
Brands can turn away from relying on intrusive advertising, to step into opportunities of helpful content marketing. As said by Seth Godin, the godfather of modern marketing, that “Content marketing is the only marketing left.”
Table of Contents
What is content marketing?
Content marketing focuses on the creation and distribution of relevant content that attracts and retains a clearly defined audience, and ultimately drives profitable customer action.
Because it’s part of content marketing, it shares relevant, interesting, and useful content to its target audience. It can be in written, audio, video, or visual form. Even a good web design can improve content marketing.
The aim is to be useful by producing content that is relevant for your target market. You need to be adding value to your users, helping them improve their quality of life. Doing this establishes your brand as a thought leader — someone users can trust to guide them through the queries or problems they’re facing in your area of expertise, and content marketing is a great way to do that.
Ways that Content Marketing Can Help Your Brand
Content Marketing Fulfills What SEO Demands
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a technique to ensure that the website ranks high on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Search engines, such as Google, have key factors in their algorithm that search bots look for in websites accessible on the internet.
The aim of the algorithm is to find the best possible websites to match users’ different queries. Content marketing helps your brand and your website to rank because it fulfills what SEO demands.
Here are some of the major SEO requirements that content marketing can deliver:
- Content
Good content is needed to rank on SERP, which is also the goal of every good content marketing strategy. Whether it be a blog or white paper, social media post or email marketing, the aim of content marketing is to always produce a good copy. Good content marketing enables SEO demands to be met in an accurate and excellent way.
- Keywords
Search engine scans keywords based on users’ search queries. Search engine algorithms can tell how keywords are being used in a copy. SEO helps guide the content creation process, so that you can produce high-quality content that hits these keywords organically. The more organic you use the keywords, the better it will be ranked.
About 76% of marketers use organic traffic as a measure of content success. Organic traffic and constructive SEO are the key factors in content marketing success. Most marketers suggested that organic traffic is the primary metric they use to measure the quality of their content.
- Backlinks
Backlinks signal search engines that your content is credible, since it is being mentioned by others. The more backlinks to your content, the better. If you have high-quality content, well-researched articles, and valid sources, your site will have good search engine rankings. If the users deem your content as a valuable piece of resource, they will link back to your website, which encourages more sharing of your content and more backlinks. This organic growth is a more efficient way to content marketing success.
- Internal Links
High-quality content also uses internal links to link to other content on the site. It increases the site’s usability and makes more effective crawling to lead more visitors into it. Internal linking is critical for SEO success.
- UI/UX
UI/UX (User Experience/User Interface) uses SEO components like robots.txt, metadata, proper tags, and a strategic sitemap that give the user the best possible experience on a website. Excellent sitemaps make navigation easy for your users and provide better accessibility to your content. Optimized robots.txt allows search engines to crawl through your website so users can see the content. Metadata is for accurate indexing and search results. It all boils down to providing meaningful and enjoyable experiences to your users.
Content marketing drives more sales
Most customers are not ready to buy your business the first time they hear about it. People think about the purchase and make a decision.
Before buying something, people usually have a problem to solve (awareness). They try to research and understand their problem (consideration). Then, they choose which product is best for them (decision).
A good content marketing strategy helps users in these3 stages, bringing potential customers one step closer to converting (purchasing, downloading, subscribing, and the like). Build a relationship with your target audience as well, so they develop trust in you more than the competition.
Content Marketing Can Tell a Story
A brand story is an incredibly effective marketing tool. People enjoy stories, communicate through stories, and most importantly, build relationships with stories.
Your brand must have a close connection with your target audience. Provide content about the background of your company, what it does, and what its goals are.
TOMS Shoes do storytelling extremely well. The company has dedicated a whole page to the story behind their company on their site. TOMS understood that today’s consumers need brands to stand for something rather than offering products or services. The brand is building a movement people are happy to be part of.
Tell your story using content marketing. Show your target audience you share their values by providing relevant information, stunning images, and eye-catching videos.
Content Marketing Help Your Brand Stand Out
You can craft content that makes your brand unique and stand out among competitors. By adding your brand’s unique story to your content, you can turn anything you create from dull and boring into engaging pieces that your target audience will want to click on. It allows the story to be told, and adds an entertainment value as well.
Stories can also prompt action. Add a story to a dull paragraph, and it becomes content that instantly creates an emotional response in readers. They then won’t be able to resist acting in the way you had in mind, whether that’s to sign up for your email list or to click through to your online shop.
Content Marketing Amplifies Your Brand Awareness and Credibility
The more informative and valuable your content is, the more people will stumble upon your article and use it as reference. You position your brand through the right keywords on SERP If you get a million people discovering your website on SERP, around 25% of users will most will click on your content.
This is how you become a thought leader in that particular keyword or topic, and people will regard you as a credible source of information. People will also most likely share your content if you are considered a credible source for that content.
Content Marketing Leads to Increasing ROI
As your credibility increases through content marketing, you also gain more conversions through your webpages. Over time, especially if you keep ranking on SERP first page, you put your brand in front of more people.
Each of the additional articles you add to your site will significantly increase your qualified website visitors each month. There are a lot of websites that link to really useful sites. These links help drive more qualified website visitors to the linked page and the other pages on your site.
Content Marketing Grows your Social Media Following
Each potential customer that finds valuable content on your site becomes a potential advocate for your brand through social media. You get followers that want to stay updated on future content you publish. Many of your readers will also share your articles on social media, which is a good way to exponentially grow your follower base over time.
Focus on shareability, consistency, and engagement.
- Shareability
Since social media is a sharing platform, focus on making your content shareable. Readers may share your article with their friends and family on social media, which exponentially grows your following and engagement. Use compelling headlines, user-friendly visuals, and readable text. Make your content big, bright, and bold. Lastly, your content needs to be interesting. Social media requires that the content be ’emotionally charged’ to make people share it.
- Consistency
Consistency is vital no matter what type of content marketing strategies used. Train your audience on what to expect from you. Post at regular times, with content that has a consistent and specific style to you so they can immediately recognize it in their feed.
- Engagement
Social media is all about engagement. It’s an unbelievably powerful way to directly connect with your audience and build a community. Create content which your target customer wants to interact with, and then respond to each and every single comment you get. You create a closer community by engaging with your consumers.
Conclusion: Good Content Marketing Ensures Brand Longevity
Image Source
Even if you need to optimize different marketing strategies, content should not be secondary. Marketing efforts should revolve around the content and should be the core highlight of any digital marketing campaign. Good content is the key to this.
You can connect to your desired audience and start building trust. Communicate consistently, educating your audience on their queries, and giving them valuable solutions.
You can nurture your subscribers and customers and increase conversions through great content. Content marketing is a high priority in marketing campaigns and gets your website growing faster than you ever expected.
