Wondering if you need content marketing for your business? Content used to be a luxury reserved for large organizations with budgets to allocate specifically to content creation and digital marketing. Fast forward to 2022, and any small business can implement an effective content strategy with some thorough keyword research, an understanding of its audience, and planning.
While creating content that ranks on google, resonates with your audience, and moves them to action still takes considerable time and effort, the pay-off can be a highly profitable business asset.
If you’re new to content marketing, it’s hard to see the benefits of committing time, money, and effort to create something without a direct impact on sales. But hold it right there; while it does take time to see the ROI in content, you’re building an invaluable customer relationship through giving value and building trust, a magic weapon for making sales in the long term.
Table of Contents
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is anything you put out to help your audience. Blog posts, YouTube videos, white papers, and social posts are all forms of content–anything providing your audience with something unique and informative. An excellent (10x style) blog post is your chance to shine, stand out in your niche, and establish yourself as the go-to source for information.
By giving your audience something truly valuable, your content increases your chances of turning website visitors and your audience into customers. Content is how you build a relationship with your customers and sets the foundation for sales later on. But start with content …
Why Is It Important For Your Business?
Search Engine Optimization
Content starts with SEO. Google-optimized content gives you a fantastic opportunity to reach a broad audience and answer specific questions your audience may have. Then, with the help of a well-designed landing page and tantalizing lead gen, you can transform those people into customers. Magic, huh?
Did you know customers are infinitely more likely to buy something from a business after consuming content first? According to The Content Marketing Institute, 82% of customers preferred businesses with a content presence. It’s that powerful. While it’s difficult to see the content benefits, it’s more than worth the wait in the short term.
Audience Retention
Imagine a blog including the most helpful information in your niche. A post so comprehensive people neededn’t go elsewhere for answers and wanted to share it with as many people as they could. How many return visitors to your website will you get? A bucket load. Providing something that keeps your audience returning is a potent recipe for trust and customer relationships.
Cost-Effective ROI
Did you know content creation has one of the highest ROI out of all digital marketing channels? Second to only email marketing, but that’s for another post. It also costs less than 62% of other forms of digital marketing. Essentially for the minimal cost of hiring a content strategist or freelance content writer, you tap into the infinite potential for finding leads and making conversions.
How To Start Implementing Content Marketing?
So how exactly do you get started with content marketing? What should you do to take advantage of all these fantastic benefits right now?
Help Your Audience
Firstly you need to establish how you can help your audience. Think about what questions they might have. What do your products do to solve these issues, and what questions might they search in Google related to what you offer?
Your main most thorough blog post should cover their most pressing issues. We call this cornerstone content. These are long, highly comprehensive, detailed blog posts that cover a broader topic in depth.
For example, for my copywriting blog content, I have a 2000-word cornerstone post called “How to write web copy that sells.” I then link to my other related blog posts from this cornerstone piece. I mention SEO, content marketing (the post you’re reading now), digital marketing, and how to write landing pages throughout that piece, which I can link to.
Essentially you’re trying to create a spider web of related content that helps your audience. So how do you find which topics to write about?
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the art of discovering keywords your audience is searching for. You can use online keyword tools such as Keywords Everywhere and Ubersuggest to find them. These tools will give you insights into monthly search volume, competition, and cost-per-click (CPC).
The broader the term, the more volume it will have, but the more specific the term (known as long tail keywords), it will have less search volume but significantly less competition – it is these long tails you should base your first blog posts around.
Long tails are usually questions; for example, “how to write SEO-friendly content” is one of my blog posts. But find some broader terms for your cornerstone content and more specific long tails to start. This gives you ideas of questions people are searching for and what’s already ranking. This leads us perfectly to our next point.
Competitor Analysis
Analyzing what’s already ranking on Google is vital before creating any content. Analyze the top 5 spots and see what the content includes. This way, you know what you’ll have to do to make a better resource. This is known as the skyscraper method, and while you can’t replicate existing competitor content, you now know precisely how to create something better.
Tip – Create 10x content to blow your competition out of the water!
Are you looking to sharpen up your copywriting for your business? Check out Grammarly, the free online tool that can help sharpen up spelling, grammar, and wording, to keep your words concise and professional.
Align With Your Visions & Products
Always create content primarily to help your reader and give them something truly valuable, unique, and, better still, actionable. Your content is also a chance to weave in your products and subtly suggest how a purchase can help the reader solve their problem or achieve their goal.
Marketing Power Tip – It’s easier to help someone solve a pain or avoid fear than to achieve a goal; it’s called the negative cognitive bias. Which is the brain’s way of focusing primarily on negative aspects of life and is something that helped us survive for thousands of years; you can now tap into this psychological phenomenon in your marketing.
Aligning your vision and products alongside emotional marketing techniques within a highly informative blog post is an extremely potent recipe for successful marketing sales!
How To Measure Content Success?
One of new content marketers’ most challenging elements is knowing how to measure if the content is booming. This remains a pressing issue even among well-established agencies and enterprises that must prove to executives whether or not a content strategy is worth the time and money. And to be honest, without documenting a process and measuring it, it’s impossible to know whether your content is working or not. To measure content success, use the following:
• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions
• SalesStart with impressions and clicks; this will tell you if your content ranks on Google and clicks if it aligns with search intent. Conversions will then tell you how good the content was and if it’s optimized or created to be informative but leave the reader wanting more, e.g., signing up to your email list or lead gen.
Eventually, your content becomes successful if it increases conversions and sales. That is the bottom line. But let’s face it, that’s not going to happen overnight. Instead, viewing your content as a tool for building a relationship with your audience is best, and if that leads to sales, then fantastic. If not, there’s not enough time, or you must work harder on your content.
Documenting Your Strategy
While content is important for 97% of marketers, most of it goes undocumented, which makes it extremely difficult to know what’s performing well and what isn’t.
Devise a content marketing strategy from everything, including how each piece aligns with your business goals and when it will be posted. Then track how it’s performing over the following weeks and months.
Content Marketing - Final Words
Undoubtedly, content is a lucrative business asset when created correctly. However, taking the leap and deciding whether the content marketing strategy is important can be scary, especially when you’ve got a business to run.
If you’re wondering if a content strategy is right for you, please get in touch today, I’m a freelance copywriter in Cornwall, UK, but I help create copy and content for businesses all over the globe.
