Best Content Marketing Strategies
Want to earn new leads and revenue for your business?
What is content marketing? Simply put, content marketing is the creation and distribution of valuable content to a targeted audience, with the goal of securing conversions and ultimately, sales.
Depending on the format, purpose and delivery channel, content marketing can be broken into these subsets:
- Web content
- Blogs
- Email marketing
- Digital PR
- Video marketing
- eBooks
- Webinars
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Checklists
- Social media marketing
- Quizzes
- Lead magnets
Benefits of content marketing
1. Increases your visibility.
More content = more chances to be seen. With more content, you’ll naturally be able to cover a greater number of keywords and topics relevant to your business. This translates into more opportunities for you to rank in search results for a variety of related search terms.
In fact, research from HubSpot found that companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got nearly 3.5x more traffic than companies that published posts four times a month or less. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to steadily grow an audience through your content.
The takeaway should be that businesses need content to be found in search. Performing SEO tactics without a content plan is ineffective. Additionally, even though these statistics say to blog more, writing about the same think can result in keyword cannibalization and not improve your rank in search. The solution is a content strategy that defines varied content your ideal buyer seeks.
2. Builds your brand authority.
You know that you’re an expert in your industry. Content marketing is your opportunity to prove that to your audience.
Authoritative content positions you as a leader. It makes customers confident that you know what you’re doing, and more importantly, that you won’t steer them in the wrong direction—and waste their dollars in the process.
3. Boost Your Website Traffic
Anyone serious about their digital marketing efforts knows that it is impossible to win at SEO without a good content strategy. Effective content is the foundation of organic search and the best way to drive more traffic to your website. When you continuously create good and useful content that answers search queries, Google will reward you with high rankings on the search engine results page (SERP). If you continue to generate unique and valuable content, you will also get requests from high-authority websites and blogs for backlinks.
5. Drives More Sales
Many people think that boosting website traffic (especially inorganic traffic) will drive more sales. However, this is not always the case. But content marketing ultimately helps you with both – more traffic plus more sales. Before making any purchase, a customer needs to realize that they have a problem that needs to be solved (awareness), research about their problem and its solutions (consideration), and make a decision on which solution to opt for (decision). Content marketing helps solve all three of these stages by helping out potential customers with what they are searching for and building a relationship with them.
6. Increase Your Social Media Following
One of the most important benefits of content marketing is that it helps to increase your followers on social media. While this may not be your initial goal while developing good content, it is something that will surely happen as your readers garner more interest in your brand. They would like to follow you on social media to make sure that they stay updated with your future articles. Many of your readers will also share these blog posts and articles with their own followers, which helps to exponentially build your brand over time.
7. Better Customer Service
How many times does your customer service team need to answer the same questions every day? Whether it is how to sign up for a new service or how to use your product, an informative blog can answer those questions. Also, most people prefer to find these answers through an online search instead of reaching out to customer service. This gives your team more time to deal with other customer problems instead of regular questions.
8. Multiple Learning Formats
Each customer has very own requirement and there is no universal format that can cater to all their needs at once. While some people like to read, others may prefer a video or listen to a podcast instead. One of the best advantages is that you can use multiple learning formats to meet different customer needs while keeping your voice and values consistent. Here are some of the most common formats in content marketing that you can use to your advantage:
- Blog posts
- White papers
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Interviews
- Live Q&As
Top 4 content marketing strategies
1. Web Content Strategy
There are multiple kinds of web content that can be used as a marketing strategy, but in this particular segment, we will focus on the one with the biggest potential – web copy.
Great web content helps marketers build relationships, nurture leads and influence potential buyers.
Web content motivates your audience to engage with your business by answering their needs or desires.
Marketers should focus on creating various types of content for the different stages of the sales funnel.
Users have different needs depending on their stage of the journey. They also have distinct expectations and levels of knowledge. They should get the kind of content that helps them move to the next stage and nearer the conversion point.
From awareness to consideration and conversion, web copy across the sales funnel helps marketers educate the audience about their client’s services, share the right message and influence the prospects to make a final purchasing decision.
2. Blog Content Strategy
Blogging as a content marketing strategy has multiple benefits:
- It helps website’s SEO
- It attracts more leads through organic search results and providing solutions to users’ requirements
- It nurtures leads by providing quality content they’ve grown to trust
- It helps them make well-informed decisions about your brand and its products
- Shapes brand reputation by positioning the business as domain authority/thought leader
There are several types of company blogs:
- Thought leadership & industry insights
- Newsroom
- Instructional (product use and other how-to’s)
- Inspirational
- Recruitment
Thought leadership content created by industry experts is, in particular, one of the most effective ways for generating leads.
3. Email Marketing Strategy
The global email user pool is set to rise to 4.3 billion by 2023 which shows with utmost certainty that email is by no means an outdated method of communication.
Further research confirms that email marketing done right can bring an average return of $42 for every $1 spent.
Moreover, B2B emails have an average open rate of about 15.1% (across various industries) with a 3.2% CTR. The good overall average is down to brands’ specialized services and offers and a much more interested audience that is invested.
B2C segment sees a reverse of this: higher average open rates of 19.7% and lower CTRS of 2.1% – due to usual customer behavior and typical offerings of broadly general products.
4. Stock content: White Papers, ebooks, articles, research
We discussed stock content a little earlier, but it’s so important that it deserves its own section. Remember, stock content refers to the educational content pieces that you can make available for download on your website and, potentially, elsewhere. At Hinge, we often turn our best digital stock content into paperback books, distributing them freely to clients, prospects, and industry peers.
These pieces of content (whitepapers, ebooks, guides, research studies, books, etc.) are longer and more substantial than blog posts, and tend to delve into more detail. While blog posts are great for bringing new consumers to your website, the weightier stock content makes up the core of your content library, enhancing your reputation as a thought leader.
Companies will often require consumers to register their emails in exchange for these stock content pieces, as many people are willing to trade a little personal information for a more valuable piece of content. As we noted earlier, this can be a great strategy for building an email list for marketing and lead generation purposes.
Looking for a professional content marketing agency?
We offer custom content marketing plans to help your business rank higher in search results, attract new leads, and earn more revenue.
Whether you want to create infographics, branded blog posts, or ebooks, we can help!
Our content marketing team includes members from every department of Optimum DMA, including an SEO strategist, copywriting manager, and graphic designer. And we’ll go above and beyond to help you get the most out of your content marketing strategy.
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