The Importance of Content Marketing
What is Content Marketing?
For starters, content marketing is not exclusive to the web, it can be any marketing platform. It’s includes the creation and sharing of media or publishing content whose purpose is to acquire more customers or conversions. There are many different ways you can display content, including text, photos, videos, e-books, case studies, white papers, infographics and more. While this is the general definition, something you also need to consider is the character your content carries. With Google’s algorithms changing constantly content has evolved greatly. People are searching more, asking more questions, what you need to ask yourself is, “Am I answering their questions?” Companies in every industry and size have various content strategies. From Fortune 500 companies to startups the proof is in the content, not the pudding. While there are many different ways to market, you’ll definitely be able to find a way to use it to your advantage and boost your online presence.
Starting off as a copywriter and working my way up to Head of Content I understand just how important a good content marketing strategy really is for your overall business. With websites carrying such an expensive price tag (for a good, quality one at least…) you want to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck. The last thing you want is to pay thousands of dollars for a site that is just filled with generic content lacking any sustenance or personality. Whether you are about to dive into a new web development project or you are just looking for new ways to improve your site’s traffic and conversions, rethinking your current content marketing strategy can help greatly. Here you’ll find tips on what to look out for, how to position your content and what to make sure you include in your site.
Why Is It So Important?
Let me put it this way, your content will definitely be one of the major determining factors in whether or not they convert, return, or even recommend your site to others. Keeping your target audience and visitors happy and engaged is your ultimate goal. Supplying them with the answers to their gnawing questions will be how you win them over.
What is It’s Purpose?
Though the main purpose is to gain new customers and conversions, you are also providing your customers with a direct connection. The best way to do this while you increase conversions, traffic and boost your reputation is to fulfill a need. Your website needs more than just an overwhelming amount of focus keywords crammed in each section. Become your community’s go to resource, answer their questions and keep them engaged, all with a strong strategy..
How Has it Changed Over the Last Few Years?
In the last few years as Google updated their algorithms, content creation has changed greatly. Rather than it just being the vehicle to cram SEO keywords and pitching your products you now have the opportunity to establish a connection with your consumers. Instead of just taking up space on the web, use it wisely and surprise yourself with how much your traffic and conversions improve.
Are You Utilizing Your Content the Right Way?
How does your content look right now? Are all of your pages extremely dense with keywords and no real material? Even if you have a good pagerank now, that won’t last long. Google’s geniuses know all about the loopholes that slipped past the last algorithm, so what may have worked for you months ago may not continue to work. So what’s the solution? Understanding the importance of your content marketing strategies and putting some serious thought into it!
What Are The Benefits of Content Marketing?
By using content marketing the correct way and taking the right amount of time to strategically position your pages, services and it’s continuity you can benefit more than just gaining more conversions. Your content can help you narrow down your audience, show what strategies are working, what areas need improvement and more. With the right content marketing strategy you can become a credible resource in your industry while staying ahead of the curve instead of constantly playing catch up with every new update.
What Can Your Content Tell You?
There’s a reason I keep saying its so important. With the right positioning and strategies you can identify various important components of your online presence and business. With the right analytics programs your content marketing can find your target audiences and narrow it down to specific areas. Working with your analytics program, you will also be able to see what pages are driving the traffic and which ones have the highest bounce rates. You can then pivot your content marketing strategy to address these weak points by finding what made your strong pages so visible. Was it the information available? The formating? The images? It could have even been for a long-tail keyword you were unaware of. All of these questions can be answered with the collaboration between your analytics and your content.
photo credit to: play.google.com
How Can You Track Your Efforts?
Tracking your content marketing campaign is one of the most important and underrated steps. Without collecting data there is no way to tell what is and what isn’t working. After you develop your content you need to start tracking its effectiveness right away. Set up goals for your content immediately and track how visitors interact with your content. In Google Analytics you can set goals, build a funnilization chart, track click through rates, and test different versions and variations of your content. There are also other great analytics dashboards such as Kissmetrics which track how users behave on your websites. Google Analytics tells you what happened. Additional analytics dashboards such as Kissmetrics can tell you who did what and why.
How to Increase Conversions
Another great thing about setting up your content and analytics correctly is the fact that you can identify your sales funnel. You can see all of the entry points to your site, see what pages visitors find the most information on or spend the most time on, and their basic pathway to from the time they come onto your site until they convert or exit. By utilizing these features you can correctly position certain pages and hone in on what your audience is looking for. What’s working for your website? How many entry points have you found? Is all the information they need right there waiting for them? How can you make your content better to create more conversions?
How Using Content Marketing Correctly Makes You the Goto Resource
Your content can make all of the difference in your website’s performance. With the positioning you can become a goto resource in your industry. By providing your target audience with the specific answers they’re looking for you are positioning your company and site to be seen as a credible resource. They came to your site out of interest or looking for an answer to a specific question. Take a look at your analytics, are you providing them with the information and resources they were looking for? Have you made it as simple as possible for them to make their intelligent decision?
Different Methods Within Content Marketing
As I said before, content marketing is not exclusive to plain text on your website. It’s not even exclusive to your website! While you can utilize content marketing throughout your company’s various campaigns, we’ll focus on how you can use it to boost your online presence.
Types Besides Plain Text
Plain text is just one type of content marketing you can utilize. From images, MeMes, videos and even podcasts content marketing spans the far reaches of the media universe. There is only one way you can limit yourself in your content marketing strategy and that’s when you pigeon hole yourself to the idea that content marketing can only be conveyed through plain text. Any type of media you can produce that assists your target audience in finding their sought-out answers and invoke them to convert or return can be seen as a type of content marketing.
Call to Actions and Infographics
One of the most widely used types of content marketing are Call to Actions. These can be images or simply fixed bars that offer a type of incentive to encourage your target audience to convert into some type of revenue. You can see an example of a typical Call to Action bar below.
One of our recent clients – Nourish to Heal
Another type of content marketing are infographics. In case you’ve been oblivious to these informative and visually appealing pieces, an infographic is simply a collection of data organized through aesthetically pleasing images and facts. It’s a combination of proven statistics, vectored images, and engaging text. If you are looking to become a credible resource in your industry, infographics are a great way to gain some extra exposure and pique the interests of your target audience.
Photo credit to Attachmedia
The Proof is in the Content
Nothing hits home harder than proven facts. Mashable had posted a blog on how certain big name companies have used content marketing to increase their credibility, conversions, and overall brand. Take a look below to see how these three companies became leaders in content marketing with their simple and innovative strategies.
photo: Mint.com
Mint.com
Personal financing management website Mint.com emerged in the financing industry in 2006 competing with the likes of Quicken and other major players. By using a simple blogging content marketing strategy they were able to be bought out by Intuit three years later for $170 million. How did they do it? They consistently blogged about roundups, infographics, media, and more as they also took the time to share their blogs on news aggregators like Reddit.com and and Digg. After a while of frequently posting and sharing, readers began to recognize Mint as a credible resource and through re-posting and sharing those initial readers converted users.
photo: Hubspot.com
Hubspot
If you haven’t heard of Hubspot yet, you should check out what they have done so far for the content marketing industry. Not only do they blog consistently like Mint.com, but their entire platform is dedicated to helping others create high quality content in the places that matter the most. By positioning themselves as industry-leaders they have grown to over 4,000 customers in a short amount of time, while converting more readers into users with each post. Through their success they have also proven that by posting diverse topics and writing what your audience wants to read you can increase your conversion rates consistently.
photo: AmEx
American Express
Wait, isn’t American Express a credit card company? What do they know about content marketing? Well, as surprising at it maybe, they are one of the leading professionals. They first started by niching themselves with small businesses, pushing campaigns like Small Business Saturday, hitting pain points that all small business owners succumb to during the holiday season. They didn’t stop there, as they partnered with OpenForum.com to provide their customers with a specific community packed with business tips and resources for their utilization. American Express also allows trusted bloggers to publish guest blogs on OpenForum giving their users a variety of information. Even with their guest contributed content they balance it with their own authored content to keep their place as the host and industry professionals of their community.
How to Use Content Marketing For Future Endeavors
With the help of this blog, you are able to see the various ways you can use content marketing to your advantage. Here you have seen how it works hand in hand with your analytics, the various types of content marketing, and most importantly how content marketing can help if you use it the right way.
Moving Forward, How Will You Develop Your Content Marketing Strategy?
That’s a good question, isn’t it? Will it be through implementing Call to Actions? A mix of infographics, MeMes and images? Whatever way path you choose, keep this in mind. What sets you apart from the competition is the connection you establish with your audience while fulfilling a need or answering a certain question they had that brought them to your company’s site. If you keep this mindset while creating your content marketing strategy and use your analytics to see what’s working, you’ll find your edge against the competition in no time.
And if that doesn’t work, you could always drop us a line, we’d be more than happy to help you gain that edge, exposure, and increase in revenue.
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