Content is crucial for every element of digital marketing. It's a destination for your paid ad campaigns, a way to reach new consumers through search engines, and a tool for demonstrating your expertise. Let’s discuss what content marketing is and how you can get started.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing provides informational, educational, and entertaining content to audiences across various text, audio, and video channels. Businesses use content marketing to inform audiences about their products and services, convey authority and expertise, or strengthen the relationship between the company and a prospective customer.
Marketing teams often use content marketing to fulfill these objectives:
- Boost the reach across new audiences
- Educate audiences, so their products or services feel more approachable
- Increase visit duration on their website or other channels
- Grow brand recognition and familiarity by infusing content with personality
3 Benefits of Content You Can't Ignore
Content marketing is a highly advantageous approach, whether you generate content in-house or use various services. Some of the core benefits of content to consider are:
1. SEO Value
Content marketing often takes the form of a blog. By publishing regular content such as articles, newsletters, white papers, and videos, companies can provide value to people browsing the web. High-quality, long-form content will encourage visitors to linger longer on the website, which increases average visit duration and signals to search engines that the website is valuable. As a result, websites with strong content can rise through Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to get in front of bigger audiences.
2. Inbound Marketing Assets
Inbound marketing is a non-interruptive approach to marketing that relies heavily on preexisting content. Prospective customers regularly use search engines to find answers to questions at every stage of the buyer's journey.
For example, consumers may research different types of exercise, then focus their research on weight lifting, weight lifting equipment, and, eventually, the best weight sets for beginners. If you sell gym equipment, creating content that addresses every single one of those questions allows you to form a relationship with prospective customers from the very start. Consumers self-select the content they need and are far more likely to purchase from you than from stores they have no connection to.
3. Momentum
Whenever you create content, that asset belongs to you and your organization permanently. You can continue to receive online traffic months and even years after the original publish date (especially if you routinely update the content with fresh information). As a result, your pages gain more and more authority in SERPs. From that initial time investment in creating the content, you have a marketing asset that continues to work for you.
This is different from paid ad campaigns, which have a set lifespan and very few lingering effects. If you have paid ads on Google or social media platforms, those ads will only appear as long as the campaign is running; leads will stop coming from those sources if you terminate the campaign.
3 Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
While embarking on a content marketing journey can be exciting, it can also be overwhelming. Whether you're working alone, have a small team, or plan on working with third-party services, avoid these mistakes:
- Moving forward without a plan: You may already have a few content ideas ready to go, and that's great, but we recommend creating a plan first! Determine what goals you want to achieve with your content marketing and how you'll measure progress toward those goals. Also, consider making a content calendar to organize brainstorming, content generation, and publishing.
- Doing too much too quickly: If you try to take on too many content-related projects at once, you'll get bogged down. Start with one project at a time, such as a blog or a podcast. Also, set a consistent but undemanding schedule so you can routinely generate good content and have a plan you can stick to.
- Focusing on content marketing in isolation: Content marketing is an effective strategy that encompasses many moving parts, but many of those parts will coincide with other marketing initiatives you have underway. For example, content marketing and social media marketing go hand-in-hand. You can also create content that slots into customer experience projects, such as FAQ pages and user guides.
3 Ways to Integrate Content Into Your Marketing Mix
Let's focus on that last potential mistake. The more you interweave content into your total marketing approach, the better. You can use content to bolster existing goals and strategies, like your email marketing campaigns, and you can use those other marketing campaigns to guide content brainstorming. Try these quick strategies for smoothly adding content into your marketing mix:
- Use social media to generate interest in your blog posts and videos. This will increase click-throughs and engagement.
- Research keywords. You can achieve many of your SEO goals by creating content about keywords you want to rank for.
- Focus on links. Blog posts (both on your site and in guest posts) are a great place to link to your product and service pages to drive more traffic.
Strategize With Western Mass News Marketing to Start Content Marketing
Creating a content marketing strategy and creating content is a strong long-term strategy for growing your business. At Western Mass News Marketing, we're here to help. Our team of content experts and marketing gurus can start developing a plan that fits your business goals.
