Content marketing has been around forever but it has recently become a popular way to grow businesses. However, it can be hard to navigate. Keep reading to learn what content marketing is, how it impacts the sales process and three common content marketing strategies.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the creation and sharing of digital content that engages with and interests potential customers such as blogs, infographics, ebooks, videos, social posts, etc. The key is providing value through storytelling that creates strong relationships with potential customers. When creating content, it is important to keep your audience in mind and produce content relevant and useful to them. That way, when customers eventually make their purchase decision, they will purchase your product over a competitor’s.
How content marketing impacts the sales funnel
Most marketing strategies are targeted at a specific part of the sales funnel. With a content marketing strategy, your brand should:
- Help people become aware that your business can provide a solution to their problem (top of funnel, e.g. out of home),
- Convince customers to buy your solution over someone else’s (mid-funnel, e.g. incentive programs)
- Convince customers to buy a solution now (bottom of funnel, e.g. sales/discounts).
Content marketing is successful when the overall strategy focuses on what the content says and how it relates to your target audience.
For instance, you might use your blog to generate high SEO value and drive organic traffic to your website to promote top of funnel awareness. You might also create ebooks and longer guides to help inform people in the mid funnel. Lastly, you might use engaging content like mortgage calculators to drive purchasing behavior at the bottom.
As you can see, content marketing is so versatile that it can help solve any marketing challenge.
How to get started: Three proven content marketing strategies
Now that we’ve covered what content marketing is and how it helps with your marketing strategy, here are three strategies we recommend every brand deploys if they’re pursuing content marketing.
- Start blogging regularly:You should already know your customer’s pain points, so address them in a blog to drive more organic traffic to your site. This has a better conversion rate than any other kind of traffic because it is relative to your target audience. Plus, it builds over time so it’s the gift that keeps on giving!
- Build a content calendar: Content can feel intimidating because there’s never enough time to create it. If you’re DIY-ing, then you need to build a content calendar. It will keep your message consistent and ensure your content generation isn’t randomly generated.
- Identify where you’re weak — and build content to plug the gap: Finally, don’t generate content to play to your strengths — focus content creation on your weak spots. Identify where your funnel is most vulnerable and build content to shore it up. This is where you’ll see the best and fastest return on investment.
Summary
Content marketing might seem like a buzzword, but in reality, it’s just another marketing approach that companies should leverage to grow their business. Yes, it’s a lot of work and yes, it takes some time.
But if you give it enough effort, content marketing can drop your customer acquisition cost and provide you with customers who want to work with you for the long term.
Still thinking it is more than you would like to handle? Need help developing and implementing a content marketing strategy? Give us a call.
