There is a handful of what you need to know about content marketing to get the best result out of it.
Content marketing is a type of marketing that has an allowance for digital marketing and traditional marketing. Yes, as much as it is a strategy in digital marketing to grow your business, it is also a strategy in traditional marketing.
If you have ever seen a video advertising products on your television or you heard an on-air personality advertising a product on the radio, that is content marketing in traditional marketing while the youtube videos, articles, emails, social media contents, and graphics illustrations/images are used in digital marketing.
One fact about content marketing is that, as a startup, you stand a good chance of securing a customer or client when you engage your audience with quality and relevant content through content marketing.
In the words of smallbizgenius, reports show that more than 90% of marketers use digital content to approach their customers, and also that small business with blogs generate 126% higher lead growth than those without blogs.
In recent times, it has been discovered that a good number of businesses have been using various forms of content marketing for years even before the advent of the digital age, and of course, with the digital age, it has exploded and not stopping there.
People are now consuming more information either deliberately or not, with this surge, the statistics have proved that it will keep going up like that.
In this article, we will be sharing insight on what you need to know about content marketing, the definition, the types, and how you can use content marketing to grow your business.
There is a possibility that you already have existing knowledge about content marketing, but you want to know more so you can leverage your knowledge to grow your business, you are in the right place, or you want to acquire knowledge to offer your best services to your clients.
Let’s move on to the definition of content marketing.
Before we get to that aspect, We want to briefly show you what one of our students has to say after he registered for our 90% practical digital marketing course.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHRmU1pY8HQ[/embedyt]
What is Content Marketing?
This is a type of marketing whose main focus is to create and distribute content to a target audience online or offline with a simple goal of satisfying the top and middle objectives of the sales funnel of a business which is awareness and interest.
Content marketing helps to create awareness for your business and also sparks the interest of your prospective customers as they will be able to see what you are doing and what you do.
Businesses use content marketing in various forms to create and spread awareness of their business to their target audience. They also use it to nurture and engage these leads to be converted to paying clients and customers.
For business or corporate organizations interested in venturing into this aspect of marketing, there are a lot of benefits from using content marketing for your day-to-day activities.
For businesses to be successful with content marketing, they must learn and understand the need to develop objectives, highly relevant content.
You also need a content marketing strategy, to outline what you want to achieve with content marketing and how you intend to achieve them.
You will wonder, what is this fuss about content marketing that is making everyone, business or personal brands invest so much in it, right?
In the other part of this article, you will get to know about it when you start seeing the things you can accomplish with content marketing and you never knew about.
Meanwhile, in our 90% practical digital marketing course, we teach our students how to leverage content marketing to grow their business or other people’s business. You should register.
Types of content marketing
Remember we said earlier in this article that content marketing is not limited to digital marketing, but also to traditional marketing but our focus is on digital marketing.
Let’s explore the types of content marketing that exist in digital marketing.
1.Blog content marketing
This is a type of content marketing that has to do with blogs. Over time, it has been discovered that blogs still account for the vast majority of content marketing that exists.
Considering the fact that blogging is extremely cost-effective because basically, all you have to do is to write, set up a blog, and publish your articles, very simple, right?
Actually, there is more to blogging than what we just shared, that was an introduction.
A blog is basically a journal that is available online. You write your opinion about the subject matter and you share it with internet users with the aim of:
- Share your knowledge and let other people learn from you.
- Promote visibility of your business or brand. You can drive traffic to your website with your blog and in turn, get internet users to notice your existence and patronize you.
[bctt tweet=”A blog post is most effective when used strictly for the good of your target audience.” username=”dmsinstitute”]
Instead of writing about how your next product will change and transform lives alone, you can write about topics related to your products or services.
This is one of the most important steps if you want to improve the SEO of your website. To fully maximize this particular strategy of content marketing, you have to
1. Be willing to start a blog
You need to understand and agree to start a blog, your mind is a good place to start as a business owner. When you see reasons for it, you will be willing to put in a lot of effort into making it work.
2. Pick a niche
You don’t have to write about everything, pick the one that relates to your brand and stick to it. You don’t have to be a generalist with blogging.
If you pick a niche unfamiliar with your brand, you might quickly run out of what to write about because you are clueless about what you are writing and you are also going far away from the goals of blogging which is to increase visibility for your brand.
For example, a fitness brand, owning a blog, and talking about everything in digital marketing. This is absolutely wrong and that is why you need to pick a niche and follow through.
3. Identify your target audience
Who do you want to write for? Who is your target audience? Who do you want to see your brand? If you want business owners to patronize your brand, you can’t be writing with a tone and language that can only be understood by professionals, you will not achieve your goals.
4. Do keyword research
Keyword research is the process of researching and identifying keywords that are most searched for on search engines in your niche of interest and write on them.
This helps you to know what your target audience is looking for and you can leverage this to meet their needs. You can do this with keyword research tools like Google keyword planner, Keyword tool, and many others.
5. Start writing
Having satisfied all these, you can move on to start writing. One thing you should take note of is that to write an amazing nd fantastic blog post, you should be ready and willing o read from other people.
Make research, hear what other people have to say, and add your knowledge to it and you are good to go.
Also, ensure that you don’t plagiarize. It’s good to read from other people and it is recommended that you do that but do not copy and paste what they wrote to your own blog.
Search engines can notice copied content and when it does, your site will be penalized and your ranking position will be taken from you.
If you are initially on the first page of search results, you can be moved to 10th or beyond and you wouldn’t want that if you want to make the best out of blog content marketing.
6. Setup a blog
There are many blogging platforms that you can start from, WordPress, Medium, Hashnode, Tumblr.
Register and follow the setup and you are good to go. If you already have a website for your business, you might want to add a blog feature to it so that visitors will see that you have a blog and also, you would eliminate having to set up a blog from scratch.
Your readers want to know what you know and how you can help solve their problem, not what everyone else has already said, be original and accurate. Do not ignore keywords, as user experience is far more valuable today and will always be.
2. Video content marketing
This involves creating videos with the aim of promoting your business and brand. It is specifically created and designed to increase audience engagement through videos.
If you are not creating video content, you are falling behind as the new normal is video marketing.
According to Hubspot, Video marketing is using videos to promote and market your product or service, increase engagement on your social and digital channels, educate your consumers and potential customers, and also reach your audience through a new medium.
There are several platforms where you can share your video content like YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, and many more.
Your videos can be in form of Demos, Brand videos, Event videos, Expert interviews, Do-It-Yourself videos, animation, and live videos as well.
3. Podcast content marketing
[bctt tweet=”The human voice has the ability to convey information through tones and emotions than through printed words.” username=”dmsinstitute”]
And that’s why millions of people are still glued to the age of radio and radio stations still exist despite being in a technologically advanced world.
People still listen to everything from adventure, comedy to music concerts, news, and other reports. Broadcast radio has given rise to a new platform for reaching your audience and marketing your business through audio recordings and not only through broadcast radio. and that is why we have what we call Podcasting.
Including podcasting into your content marketing strategy is powerful and if well utilized will get you more leads that would be converted.
Podcasting serves as a digital evolution of radio broadcasting, which involves creating one or more audio files that are released episodically and often downloaded through internet syndication.
According to smallbizgenius, 54% of podcast consumers say they think about buying advertised products. Podcasting provides a clear and concise way for marketers or brands to communicate and share their values to a captive audience.
A feature of podcasting is that it allows business and brands to tell their story anywhere and anytime, and this helps them to establish authority in their industry as well as creating brand advocates.
You may not necessarily attract a large audience immediately, but it still doesn’t rule out the fact that podcasting can be a powerful medium for communicating a range of ideas and information to your target audience.
4. Infographic content marketing
An infographic is a collection of imagery, charts, and minimal text that gives an easy-to-understand overview of a topic. Infographics use striking, engaging visuals to communicate information quickly and clearly.
They are also valuable tools for visual communication and visual marketing.
Out of the various forms of content marketing, this one is also another important strategy in content marketing. A good infographic can get a lot of attention in the form of shades establishing visibility and creating awareness.
You may say, it’s not possible to use infographics for everything, you are right and it’s not advisable that you should. But do not ignore this strategy completely.
[bctt tweet=”Infographics should be simple, impactful, meaningful, and straight to the point.” username=”dmsinstitute”]
The point is that you take a lot of complicated information from a study or research, and break it into simple and easy-to-understand points.
You can use them on your blogs as featured images or as standalone content for your blog and social media platforms.
To do this successfully, you need to have sound and applied knowledge of graphics design and everything design-related.
An example of infographics from Digital Marketing Skill Institute
We also have other types of content marketing namely,
5. Social Media Content Marketing
6. Ebooks content marketing
7. Email Content Marketing
As you just read, content marketing comes in various forms depending on the industry you want to focus on and your target audience.
For example, if you want to focus on the Computer science industry, your target audience may consume all the content marketing types listed above which is fine, but imagine going into the food industry and the only thing you want to rely on is ebooks.
That won’t give you the desired result, for that area of specialization, you should include video marketing in your content marketing strategy so your target audience can see you do what you are sharing with them and see the evidence as well.
Identify your target audience and leverage it to give them solutions to their problems.
Just like we promised at the beginning of this article, let’s talk about what you need to know about content marketing.
7 Facts You Should Know About Content Marketing
1. Content marketing helps small scale businesses as well as large scale business
It does not only works for small-scale businesses. It works for every kind of business or corporate organization either profit-oriented or not.
The large-scale business started from being small-scale and grow to become what it is presently and the small scale will not always be a small-scale business, it will eventually grow and transform into a large-scale business.
Content marketing helps businesses and brands to rapidly grow in acquiring customers, nurturing leads, conversion, and relationships between brand owners or marketers.
2. Contents are not always created by content marketers
For a small-scale business, you may not be able to afford the cost of hiring a professional content marketer, you can actually do this on your own.
This is why in our 90% practical digital marketing course, we teach you and every other person who registers, how to be a content marketer as well as other digital marketing skills and knowledge you need to digitally grow your business.
3. Articles and write-ups with images are much more popular than the ones without them
People tend to relate more and be willing to read when an article has a visual display attached to it.
By adding images to your articles and blog post, and also accompanying them with catchy headlines, makes your content more effective and appealing to your target audience. Images work better at catching the attention of your target audience.
4. Content Marketers can use approximately 12 strategies
They are not boxed up into using a specific strategy. They have the opportunity to use whatever works well for them.
A content marketer can decide to stick to visual designs or decide to switch strategies depending on the effectiveness of a strategy.
5. In content marketing, you can create multi-purpose content
Having taken your time to do research, you can convert your research into different forms of content. You can multipurpose content into
- A guest post
- Podcast topic
- Conference talk
- Support article and many others.
The idea is that you can be as creative as you want with your content.
6. Control and protect your investment
In content marketing, your investment is the content you create, so control and protect it.
As much as blogging platforms such as Medium, Quora Posts, and LinkedIn Pulse are a good place to start from, and of course, it allows you to start writing and reach a large audience, right away, it also has a downside too.
One of the downsides is that you will have no control over them, you can’t control their existence.
They can choose to go off one day because they are moving in a different direction and then you lose access to your content or they can choose to start a premium subscription which will make it impossible for your readers to consume your content.
It is safe to say that you should invest in preserving your content.
7. Content marketing goes hand-in-hand with the sales funnel
A sales funnel is each step that a person has to take to become your customer.
To get the best as a content marketer, your success relies on the existence of your sales funnel. Your main goal for content marketing is to take someone from the point of knowing nothing to the point where they now know something and they become your customer.
Content marketing will definitely give you the traffic you want, but the traffic alone is not relevant until they convert to leads and get converted.
Creating a content marketing strategy is similar to creating a sales funnel. The steps and stages are close to being the same and their goals are the same. From identifying a target audience down to the point where they make a purchasing decision.
Creating a sales funnel is exactly like content marketing. You have to refine and tweak it until you get it just right. These are some tips for crafting the perfect sales funnel:
The content marketing campaign will filter through your target audience so only the most likely people to make a purchasing decision find themselves in your sales funnel.
Frequently asked questions
Content Marketing is a marketing approach that is focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and knowledgeable content to attract and retain a target audience and also drive profitable customer action.
It is quite different from similar forms of marketing like native advertising, branded content, and product marketing. It is useful and informative for your audience rather than random content that is sponsored or disguised as a news story.
Content marketing leads to increased sales, offers overall cost savings, and helps to attract better customers with more loyalty to the brand.
Conclusion
Content Marketing is a marketing strategy that allows you to create content for the purpose of marketing your products and services to your target audience.
As we have discussed, with the right knowledge, you can make the best out of content marketing to grow your business or other people’s business.
This is why in our 90% practical digital marketing course, we teach our students how to leverage content marketing either to grow their business or to start a career as a content marketer. You should register for the course.
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