Introduction

No matter what niche your business is, you always search for different and effective ways to reach users and generate leads. And in this digital world, these techniques are turning more digital. This is because of the increased rate of users consuming content online. With all this, content marketing has turned into an essential marketing strategy for reaching users.

The phrase “content is king” is not overrated. You are digitally absent in the market without content. There are few businesses which solely depend on content such as entertainment, online news and blogging. Along with these, you can observe other industries like education, finance, and software services entering into the content marketing world to reach users. 

Simply put, businesses need to leverage the power of creating and distributing content to stand out and develop an online presence. In this article, let’s discuss the importance and benefits of content marketing to your business.

What is Content Marketing

Content marketing is a simple and effective strategy used to attract, engage and retain audiences with valuable content. The process of content creation, publishing and distributing to the target audiences are three significant stages of content marketing. This can be in the form of articles, e-books, case studies, videos, infographics, podcasts and others. 

It is considered the most efficient way to drive traffic, improve SEO, generating leads or conversions. All these depend on maintaining consistency and high-quality content. It takes a good amount of time and effort in the initial stages but delivers benefits in the long run.

Why Content Marketing Works?

Yes, content marketing works!! It doesn’t just mean a strategy to reach customers but a way to have a connection with the users with meaningful and engaging content.

Let’s think you are searching for some technical information and found an interesting and informative blog. Next time, when you search for more content on the topic you will first reach the same website because of the previous experience. But to make your content reach more users you need to implement strategies.

A survey states that 90% of organizations are including content marketing in their strategies and are having high ROI. Also, websites investing in content marketing are experiencing more organic traffic which is turning into fans of content and brand. 

We all know that generating content ideas and writing is brainstorming sessions. But you can’t expect to receive high traffic, leads or views for content by publishing on your website. Use content marketing strategies to have visitors and observe differences in your numbers. 

Steps to Plan Perfect Content Marketing Campaign

Without the proper knowledge of the process, you can’t expect productive outcomes. Check these below steps before approaching content marketing.

Know about content marketing

First and foremost you need to know everything about content marketing. You may have an overview which led you to read this article. But to implement you need to have a deeper knowledge of every stage. Try to learn about every step before planning and creating a campaign. Like, as what content attracts users, what platforms to publish, how to increase content lifespan and KPIs to measure results.

Identify your audience

This is an essential part of any marketing strategy. All the techniques we implement are to draw the audiences, and how can we ignore their preference in the process? 

You can attract readers with content that is relevant or addresses the problems of users or customers. For this, you need to learn the user priorities and challenges. Create a user persona for the customers which gives you a clear understanding of the customers and assists in writing content. Take a considerable amount of time to know about users before starting content marketing.

Research your competitors

In this digital world, you can’t blindly move forward without an eye on your competitors. Before writing content or planning a content marketing strategy check what strategies your competitors are implementing, content formats, article concepts and targeting audience. You can take inspiration, learn from their mistakes and analyze the results of a particular campaign. 

Check our blog for trending content marketing tips for eCommerce websites.

Set your goals and channels

You will be aimless without goals to reach. Setup your goals and plan accordingly.

Content marketing can have multiple tasks. You can add content on multiple channels like blogs, and YouTube, start groups in social media groups and more. So, write down these goals to track them regularly and optimize the strategy to reach them. This is a necessary step for writing content because the tone of content changes for every platform. 

These goals can be different for every channel like frequency of blog publishing, impressions or views for content, stats numbers for the next 6 months, leads or sales numbers, website traffic and others. You can change these goals in the process but in the early stages, they help you to have a vision in planning the strategy.

Have editorial plan

Content is the heart of your content marketing strategy. Try to create a content calendar for 6 months and have a clear idea of publishing content and channels to market. This process takes a few hours but is a necessary one to get beneficial outcomes. Prioritize your content ideas according to the most searched keywords, timely events, updates or releases of products or services. This planning saves a lot of time and effort at every stage from content creation to publishing. 

Use free tools with inbuilt content calendar templates for discovering content ideas, writing and sharing on relevant platforms. 

Measure results of content marketing

Track and measure your performance metrics and optimize your steps towards the goals. Look at the analysis after completion of creating, publishing and marketing the content. Here are the KPIs you need to check

  • Pageviews
  • Bounce rate
  • Shares, likes & comments
  • Mentions & Reposts
  • Dwell time
  • New user visits

You can use some effective tools to reduce your efforts and time consumption. Check with Google Analytics to know the performance of content. Setup goals for desired actions and track the results. It will help you to analyze the success of each effort and analyze the areas to improve.

Improvise your strategies

Follow up on previous techniques to know the touch points and optimize your strategies. Learn and improve constantly and bring out the best content and strategies to reach the readers. Keep experimenting with new content marketing strategies and get desired results. 

Benefits of Content Marketing

Boosts your search engine traffic

It is the best strategy to increase your search engine traffic. Stats says that business blogging on user search topics sees 55% more website visitors. We can say that content creation is the base for organic search and website traffic.

You can’t sit back and wait for the results on addressing technical SEO issues like crawling and indexing. To appear in top search results you need to continuously generate quality content and market to reach audiences. But the key here is to be consistent in writing unique, researched content that inspires, informative and entertains the user. The type of content completely depends on the niche of your website and the audience you want to target.

It also creates room for you to add new keywords and tell more about your website to search engines. For example,  if you own an electronics eCommerce website and you would like to optimize for specific keywords to show in the search results. Now, instead of stuffing your content with only those keywords, you can make use of long tail keywords like “Best online store to buy speakers”. 

Now integrate content marketing strategies to take your engaging content to the audiences. Remember content is always king. You can’t see fruitful results even after using effective strategies if your content is not engaging and is of low quality.

Improve brand reputation

With many options around, a customer always makes sure to purchase a product or service from a reputed company. And there is no other better option than content marketing to build your brand awareness. Most of the users check for blogs and case studies to know more about the product.

Now marketing this content in various channels increases the visibility and user consuming the content. This in no time will increase your brand awareness and reputation among niche consumers.  

For instance, you have a gifting website and wrote an article about gifting options for the season. Now, the article has reached the top position and received likes, shares and comments with effective content marketing strategies. So, your users know about your website and the service you provide which is a positive sign for your brand revenues.

Better conversions

Qualified leads increase your conversion rate. Content marketing is the best way to reach users, nurture, engage and boost brand value. All these activities lead to boost conversions. Business can compel their users to read content and increase brand interest by creating valuable, engaging and relevant content.

For instance, consider you have come across an interesting blog from an online website on updates and the latest technology in smartphones. Impressed by the content quality you have shared with mutually interested members. This increases the brand value, recognition and potential leads to the website. There are high chances that you visit the same website when buying a smartphone or other electronic products. 

Enhance social media reach

If you are having a website then you need to have an active social media presence in the present digital world. As customers are mostly depending upon these platforms to know and reach a brand. It is the best source to reach new users or attract existing ones. Content marketing and social media promote each other. You can implement strategies through social media and increase your reach.

For example, you can share all types of content like articles, videos, images, and tweets about your website on these platforms. When you can able to create content that connects your users there are high chances of sharing them with other potential and interested users. Now, this increases the number of quality leads, engagement and conversions.

Cost-effective strategy & high ROI

Content marketing is a cost-effective strategy to market your products or services. Also, it provides long-term benefits when compared with other marketing strategies. You can find tools that can make your job of creating content, publishing, analysing and optimising easy. The only investment here is engaging and relevant content. You can update the existing content with new updates after a time and use new content marketing strategies to reach your users. So, it is the best and most effective option for both small and large organizations.

The Return on Investment(ROI) is a considerable KPI to look out for when choosing a marketing strategy. Content marketing provides high ROI compared with other strategies.

Conclusion

With all the benefits it’s hard to leave content marketing behind to reach users, form relationships, boost visibility, generate leads and make conversions. It fits all business sizes and is efficient to target audiences. 

Be on your way to creating valuable and high-quality content for your users which is core for all content marketing strategies.