WHY CONTENT MARKETING IS IMPORTANT FOR ONLINE BUSINESSES

Spreading the word about a business used to be simple: rent a billboard, put an ad in the newspaper, or pay for a commercial on the internet or TV. Things aren’t as simple anymore, and paid advertising can be ineffective and costly in many cases. Today, online content marketing success plays a larger role than it ever has regarding whether a business succeeds or fails. From SEO to distribution tactics and content writing to experimentation, content marketing is nothing short of involved and complex.

If you want your content marketing strategy to yield desirable results, you must do thorough research on the questions and expectations that your target audience has as well as the solutions for the challenges they are facing. The right content marketing strategy can set your business apart by making you a thought leader in the industry that you operate in, and that is what will drive more traffic to your website. With the expertise of a reputable and successful marketing agency in Fort Collins, you can create an actionable marketing campaign trained for success in 2020 and beyond. Here are a number of ways content marketing can help your business and some tips on how to build a solid content marketing strategy.

How Content Marketing Can Help Build Your Business

Better ROI

Buying ads can be expensive, and there’s no real guarantee they will work. A growing number of people use ad blockers, which means it’s possible the online ads you’re paying for aren’t being seen by anyone. Content marketing is much less expensive and can have a much better return on investment. Inbound content marketing typically produces three times as many leads as traditional paid advertising and for a fraction of the cost.

Build Trust and Relationships

Customers tend to be wary of companies that are constantly selling them products and services. Studies have found that customers are much more likely to make a purchase when the company shows that it cares about customers and wants to build relationships with them. Content marketing starts the conversation with customers without an overly pushy sales pitch. A well-written blog or social media profile can turn your company into an expert in the field and someone customers know they can turn to for great information and advice. Instead of just becoming a company on the hunt for sales, you’re instead a valuable resource that is more likely to gain sales from customers when they’re ready to make a purchase. Building trust with customers nurtures leads and often leads to larger sales.

Increase Visibility to a New Audience

Customers aren’t likely to share a commercial or ad, but they’ll share content marketing if the information is useful and engaging. Shareable content opens the doors to an entirely new wave of potential customers. It’s not likely that a commercial you make will go viral, but even just a few customers sharing a blog post or website can spread and lead to greater sales. Content marketing also makes your company more visible and adds personality and resources to your brand. Instead of just being another company in the crowded sea of sales, you can become something that stands out and that customers can easily see and share.

Better Searchability

A business with SEO-optimized content marketing will show up higher in more searches than a company with a static website and no information. The more you put into content marketing, the bigger your online presence, and the more searchable your company becomes. More content means you have the potential to reach a larger group of potential customers, which increases your visibility, leads to more chances of getting shared, and further improves your searchability. Check out this Moz content marketing article to learn more about content marketing spreads and how they can attract multiple types of searches.

Shorter Sales Cycles

Today’s shoppers, both in B2B and B2C, are informed before they ever get in contact with a salesperson. They crave resources and do their research early in the process. The longer it takes for a prospect or potential customer to make a purchase, the more resources are drained from your company. Content marketing provides information to potential customers and can move them forward in the sales cycle. By connecting with customers early in the research stage, businesses can understand their customers and meet their needs quickly and effectively. Providing information through content marketing also frees sales representatives to follow up with customers close to making a purchase instead of wasting their time answering the same repetitive questions. A shorter sales cycle means you can gain more customers without burning through resources.

Tips for Developing a Successful Content marketing Plan

Prepare for The Unexpected

There is nothing like a perfect plan. Now and then, things get out of hand when you least expect, and having a contingency plan on such occasions is not an option. When you adopt a particular content marketing strategy, you should not be so rigid that you avoid embracing change when necessary. You should also appreciate the need to act promptly for the successful implementation of your online marketing efforts. Preparing for the unexpected as a content marketer will help you to find solutions on the fly when things take a different turn, which is critical because such eventualities are unavoidable.

Assess Your Current Condition

Before you can develop a new approach, you first need to review where you currently stand with the marketing strategy you already have in place. Take time to thoroughly go over your successes and failures from recent years, so that you can make the necessary adjustments and identify the areas that need more attention. Evaluate analytics to pinpoint the techniques that worked and those that didn’t, giving you a clear representation of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Here are some tips from Moz on how to better get insight from Google Analytics data on the condition of your website.

Gauge the Strength of Your Site

In your assessment of your current marketing strategy, be sure not to overlook your website. Revisit your site in detail to ensure that it is prepared for the success of a new year. Start by making sure basics are in place, and essentials all check out. Test out titles, meta descriptions, and links to be certain they align with current algorithms. Correct any issues identified in Webmaster tools or Google search console. Once you’ve completed the task of some key, foundational upkeep, you should continue with a content audit. With a thorough examination of any content on your site, including blog posts and individual pages, you will be able to identify the content that is producing the greatest results. Likewise, you’ll know what content isn’t getting you results and give you a clear direction on areas to lean out.

Opt for a Competent Content Manager

The successful implementation of your content marketing strategy depends on the commitment you show toward it. When you decide to invest in content marketing, you should gather all the necessary resources that will promote successful implementation, and that includes hiring a competent content manager. If the person who will oversee your content marketing strategy has other responsibilities, they may not put much of their focus on this online marketing approach. Opting for a dedicated content manager is advisable if you want to achieve desirable results.

Consider Compatibility

Business operators who have online stores and are planning to adopt online content marketing as part of their marketing plans should understand that their audience accesses information through various devices. You cannot achieve success if the format of your online content is only compatible with one platform. Online shoppers appreciate websites that are compatible with both desktop and mobile devices. This is something worth considering if you want to widen the extent of your reach.

Set Your Targets in Advance

Every entrepreneur expects that their investment will yield profitability and the only way to test the result, in this case, is by setting your targets in advance. Setting your expectations before implementing a content marketing strategy gives you a better understanding of what you should be focusing on achieving. Testing your content marketing strategy after some time is paramount because it will help you align your plan with what you expect to accomplish.

Research

You cannot underrate the importance of research in content marketing because it sets the tone for the content you post online. Social platforms, among other online resources, can give you insight on what captures the attention of your audience and leveraging this information will promote successful implementation of your content marketing strategy.

Delegate and Prioritize Accountability

All individuals who are part of your content marketing team should be aware of their daily obligations, and you should also ensure that each of them sticks to your content creation calendar. Content marketing requires the contribution of various individuals, which suggests that delegation and making a follow-up after the allocation of different tasks will be critical in getting the outcome you desire.

Develop an Editorial Calendar

Working without a plan of action is a recipe for failure, and that is why you cannot adopt a content marketing strategy without prior planning. In order to reach your content marketing goals, you’ll need to bench your day-by-day approach to content creation. Become strategic in the content you put out by planning ahead and working towards your overall objective. At a minimum, set your sights on content creation for month or even quarter chunks.

The success of your content marketing strategy depends on the frequency of posting quality content online. Developing an editorial calendar for scheduling such posts can help you make sure you’re staying on track. With a content calendar, such as this one that Red Rocket has created for your convenience, content production is effectively outlined and efficiently organized to create a better connection with your customers and your industry, while keeping you on track for success.

Organize Brainstorming Sessions

The result of collaboration in brainstorming sessions for content marketers is the adoption of authentic ideas that will transform your business through your online marketing efforts. Entrepreneurs who invite the contribution of staff from various departments in the process of developing a content marketing strategy will realize better outcomes.

Make Provision for Social Sharing

Making it possible for those who read your online content to share it conveniently on social media by including Tweetable quotes or the use of a floating social sharing column will help promote success in content marketing. You can also ask readers to share your content on social platforms using an appropriate call-to-action.

Use Simple Language

As a content marketer, you should never assume that everyone understands the technical jargon that specific industries use, and for that reason, it’s best to use simple language. The ideal approach to content marketing is capturing the attention of your target customers, and that is possible by keeping the language you use conversational and understandable.

Set Your Foundation and Review Existing Strategies

In this article, Search Engine Watch suggests reviewing what content marketing strategies have worked well in the past. Here’s another important suggestion from the article:

“A closer look at your strategy can help you understand whether your plans are still relevant for the next 12 months. If you haven’t created a written content marketing strategy yet, then you can start drafting your plan to make it easier to communicate them across different teams.”

CMI states in a recent report that only 39% of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. This means that many marketers are still not able to discuss their plans and make a case about the value of content marketing success to the rest of their company.

Improve Distribution Tactics

Creating content will prove totally ineffective if it is not shown to the most appropriate audience. Reaching your target audience will involve taking a hard look at your data to discover your best acquisition channels and exploring the habits of your audience when it comes to content consumption. As a marketer, you should answer the following questions:

Which acquisition channels perform best?
Do visitors take a journey to get to your site?
What devices does your audience use to consume content?
When is the best time to reach your audience?
Which messaging works better for content promotion?
What’s the ideal frequency in terms of content promotion?

By answering these questions, you can adjust your content marketing strategies to meet your audience’s needs, and improve your content distribution tactics to ensure that you stay as relevant and efficient as possible.

Focus on Your Best Performing Channel

As content marketing is changing in today’s digital age, there is no need to be on as many channels as possible. It’s now more important to explore ways to strategically use your best-performing channels instead. Taking what you learned from the past few years, begin using the right channels at the right time. If a channel is not yielding the desired results, don’t use it. But what do we mean by “channels“? Well, it depends on your marketing. There is a difference between marketing channels, channels of distribution, and channel management. The 12 most important digital marketing channels include:

Organic
Blogging
Email Marketing
Pay-per-Click Advertising
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Display Advertising/Paid Search
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Twitter
- Pinterest
- Instagram
Content Marketing
Affiliate Marketing/Referrals
Online Public Relations
Google Search Network
Direct Traffic

In order to effectively determine what marketing channels to use, you must identify your goals. Goals could include things such as:

Brand Awareness
Sales Generation
Lead Generation
Potential Customer Education
Traffic Generation

Defining your budget and identifying your available talent will assist you in marketing channel decision-making.

Narrow Down a Target Audience

Content marketing success is not about reaching as many people as possible; it is about reaching the right people. So it’s time to establish concrete objectives and content tactics to increase your success. Take the time to research your customers, your competitors, and the trends in your industry that will help you identify the core channel to focus your energy on.

Don’t be afraid to focus on a niche audience if it means that you can improve your engagement and/or conversion rate. In fact, niche marketing can be the key to your success. It can prove that you are intimate with your audience and improve your chances of having a great ROI — or return on investment — as a result of your marketing efforts.

Once you have selected your audience, remain repetitive in reaching that ONE channel in order to put your brand where your customers are. Keep in mind that it’s far better to funnel your efforts into the audience that is most likely to give you conversions than to waste time attempting to get your brand noticed where it isn’t needed or wanted. Build out your personas properly from that point, keeping your strategies set on your greatest assets: paying customers.

Think About Your Content

Search Engine Watch makes a good point when they say that we’ve come to a point where there’s too much content out there, but there isn’t enough time to consume it all. They suggest before creating your next piece of content to think about the objectives that you want to achieve from it.

Does it fit with your marketing goals?
Is it relevant for your targeted audience?
Does it offer something new and useful to your audience?

A good way to maintain a good SEO strategy is to update your best-performing content in addition to writing new content. This way, you’re maintaining a good SEO performance while adding it to your new schedule of promoted content. Evergreen content still takes time to stay fresh and successful, so include it as part of your strategy instead of just creating new content. Are you giving thought to content scoring? Here is how Search Engine Journal defines content scoring:

“the process of assessing and quantifying the true potential of content by tracking how individual content pieces perform in generating and converting leads. Different types of content provide a different value for the customer. Therefore, they should be distributed at different stages of your funnel.”

Give Yourself Time and Budget for Experimentation

If you don’t give yourself time and budget for experimentation, how will you know if another strategy might work better and/or be more effective? In short: you won’t. One of the best ways to ensure content marketing success is having a chance to allow time and money to try out new ideas. Find the new channels and promotion tactics that might be your strategy’s next big boost. While there will be successes and failures in trial and error, it is also an opportunity to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to tomorrow’s technologies. Today’s technologies, after all, will one day become obsolete.

Schedule Testing Time Into Your Budget

Experimentation is not the only thing you need to take time to do. You also need to be mindful of the time it takes to implement a new strategy and see results. Allow enough time within your budget to give yourself a fair opportunity to experiment with different marketing segments. Money is a factor when it comes to business, so the need to set a timer is understandable, but keep in mind that the success of a new venture will be greatly dependent on the time you allot for it. You must give a new strategy enough time to prove its value through proper implementation and testing. If you are considering a new method, set aside the time and money needed for a thoroughly scientific approach. Create a hypothesis, outline how this strategy is to be completed, implement, and execute, then measure results to determine value.

Put Your Audience First

By meeting the needs of your audience with your content, it proves you’re listening to what they’re saying. If your target audience and/or your objectives changed over the past year, then you need to reflect this in your content marketing strategies. Dive deeper into your data to better understand the behavior of your audience and what they need from you. People change, and we may be surprised, so stay current on emerging technologies, new products, and even new behavior. Forbes states:

“…developing your company’s marketing content takes a special skill that builds trust and positions your brand as an authority while avoiding a sales pitch. Your company blog is often the flagship of your marketing content efforts. And as the fifth most trusted source of information on the internet, blog posts can influence a consumer to buy your products or services without inherently persuading them that they need it. By informing your customers about the problems your company solves and creating stories that are authentic in nature. You can provide consumers value without going over the top to sell your audience on your products or services.”

The ABC’s to Putting Your Customer First

A. Answer the Top Questions Your Target Audience May Have.
B. Build Engagement.
C. Consider Sharing Authentic Case Studies.
D. Develop the Right Marketing Technology.
E. Establish Thought Leadership.
F. Focus on Your Blog.
G. Give a Good Story.
H. Have a Customer-Focused Mindset.
I. Identify Opportunities.
J. Jump into Action.
K. Know Your Audience Persona(s).
L. Listen to your audience.
M. Move to Empower Multiple Teams to Make Better Decisions with Customer Data.
N. Negate Interrupting what Customers are Interested in and Be What Customers are Interested In.
O. Organize Your Company’s Strategies and Objectives.
P. Problem Solve.
Q. Question Your Content: “Would I Want to Read That?”
R. Remember to Treat Content as Branding, Not Sales.
S. Scrap the Jargon.
T. Talk About Trends.
U. Use the Authority Principle.
V. Value is what Customers Want and What Content Marketing Should Provide.
W. Write About What Your Consumers Want to Read.
X. X-amples: Share Your Content Marketing Success.
Y. You: Just Be Yourself.
Z. Zero Unavailability: Provide Support 24/7 through Your Customer’s Whole Purchase Process.

Focus on Hard-Earned, High-Quality Links

Curata states:

“… link building is no longer about submitting your site to directories or asking other webmasters to include a link to your site. Instead, marketers should focus on building relationships and earning high-quality links via methods including:

Guest Blogging on High-Quality Sites

Creating Amazing Resources that Will Naturally Attract Social Shares and Inbound Links

Syndicating Your Content on Popular Sites in Your Niche

Reaching Out to Influential Bloggers to Form Mutually-Beneficial Relationship”

Optimize Your On-Page Content

Reveal the most valuable information first. If you want to get the conversion, you need to keep your reader on the page. Start your content off strong and write for the average internet user’s attention span. Curata suggests:

“choosing a variety of long-tail key phrases that focus on conversation queries… To optimize your on-page content, incorporate your key phrases into your:

URLs

Title Tag

Heading Tags (H1, H2, etc.)

Alt Image Tag and Image Captions (where appropriate)

Long-form content stands a far better chance of ranking highly in the search engines; however, this needs to be balanced with the fact that shorter, ‘catchier’ content may perform better for your mobile visitors. Focus on creating content that can act as a definitive source on a topic, rather than simply targeting one or two keywords.”

Ensure Social Media is a Key Component Alongside Your SEO Strategy

Search rankings tend to increase from articles with a high amount of social shares (directly and indirectly through increased reach and visibility). Present and active social media activity could show itself as a “brand signal” to search engines, telling them that your content is credible and trustworthy. As a result, a strong social media presence is no longer “nice to have,” but a “must have.”

Automate as Much as Possible

Adding weight to your automation efforts will increase overall productivity while allowing you the freedom to focus on engaging your audience and other more challenging tasks. Through the innovation of automation software, you can produce and execute necessary (and profitable) marketing tasks without over-exerting staff or tying up time better spent on other efforts. Let automation take over repetitive tasks, so that you can tackle tasks that require more creativity and human ingenuity.

Focus on Incremental Progress

You can’t walk into a new year expecting the first few months to carry more weight than you did in all of the previous year or years past. Focus instead on making small gains, small changes that will build on each other to reach the ultimate goal. Remember, search engines reward sites for showing improvement, so there is no need to completely revamp your site. Attempting to make all necessary changes without allowing for the incremental progress needed to fully support those changes could end up hurting you more than helping. Small, continual improvements add up, increasing usability and conversions in the process.

Avoid Processed Content

For years now, content marketing has shifted focus from creating content processed primarily for quick search engine detection to content that is carefully curated for the people behind the search engine. Simply put, write content for people, not for search engines. Fill your content with wholesome components and trustworthy authenticity that will provide value to the people reading. Write from a position of expertise, authority, and trust with the needs of your audience in mind, whether that is to answer a question, offer an explanation, solve a problem, or simply entertain their interests.

Quality, Not Quantity

Content marketing has changed. Google has changed. Gone are the days in which the amount of content you put out is more important than the quality of that content. Fresh content is always beneficial, but if you’re still focused on simply getting more posted, you could be generating negative results. You’ll want to focus first on ensuring that any content you put forth is written to accurately reflect your brand’s purpose, voice, and personality. Quality of work is what produces the lasting results that will get you better ranked on search engines. When content is comprehensively created to provide value and cleverly crafted to meet the demands and trends of the up-and-coming digital atmosphere, your marketing strategy will have the muscle needed to stay ahead of the competition.

Recondition Old Blogs

Don’t be afraid to refresh old blogs, particularly those that have produced results or contain lasting authoritative links. Don’t let the success, or traffic, generated by older posts weaken after a one-time profitable record. Take valuable blog posts and recondition them for success by adding images, audio, or even video.

Don’t Be Afraid of Joining a Group

You can take your brand farther by simply getting involved with your community. Taking part in opportunities for local speaking events or connecting with your city’s Chamber of Commerce or other community-focused groups will give you relevant exposure and push you to work your brand in new ways. Sign up for events that will encourage you to connect and you’ll not only notice an impact on local awareness of your brand but also a more determined motivation on your part to keep pace with relevant content marketing.

Take Progress Pictures

The most effective way to measure progress and results is by circling back to the first tip on this list and assess your current condition. Only this time, take your current place and compare it to where you were months ago. Frequent side-by-side comparisons of analytics will help you to better see the areas where you have improved, and the areas where you need a better definition. A thorough review of analytics can also give you valuable insight into who is using your site and how they are using it.

Be Committed to Content Marketing

Successful progress in any venture comes from commitment, careful planning, and strategic determination. If you have resolved to redefine your content marketing, begin by developing a personalized and calculated marketing strategy that will grow your business. Content marketing is an inexpensive and effective way for businesses of all sizes to increase their reach and gain a larger following and more customers. Content truly is king, and it’s the future of online marketing. No matter the size or type of your business, it can benefit from content marketing.

Contact us at Red Rocket Web Specialists for the expertise needed to work out an effective marketing strategy that will help take your business to another level.