Your Go-To Content Marketing Crash Course

If you want to build your business’s authority, you must deliver value in advance. This means implementing a content marketing strategy. You must reach audience members in an organic way and provides genuine value in advance.

By using high-yield content strategies, you’ll be able to spread your brand’s message and existing prospects. As a result, you’ll improve establish yourself as a thought leader.

In this post, we’ll provide you the fundamentals of effective content marketing. You’ll also learn about the best types of content marketing and how to get started. Plus, you’ll understand how to measure the success of content marketing.

1. What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is transparent, valuable, engaging, and educational and is tailored to and appeals to an ideal buyer persona.

This strategy involves the process of planning, creating, publishing, and promoting content to reach your target audience. Content marketing can help your business in the following areas:

• Become a trusted source of information to consumers
• Educate your audience about the products and service your provide
• Drive qualified organic website traffic
• Increase qualified lead generation
• Empower the sales team to close happy customers
• Increase customer loyalty
• Develop a sense of community around your brand

Now let’s look at why content marketing is important.

2. Why Is Content Marketing Important?

In today’s digital market, consumers are automatically wary and distrusting of brands, as well as salespeople/advertising in general. They’re over being misled, given the runaround, and flat out lied to by those brands that are only promoting or selling them products/services.

So, in turn, they are going to the internet and educating themselves from third parties on the information they need in order to make an informed decision on the products and services they need and/or want. They’re scouring the internet for blog posts, videos, podcasts, webinars, guides, etc. that are aimed at teaching rather than selling. Consumers want to buy from brands they trust.

And if your brand is producing educational content with the goal of helping prospects improve their lives and make informed purchases, well then they’ll likely make that purchase through you.

Now on to the most common types of content marketing that will help you attract more business.

3. Top Content Marketing Types

There are many types of content marketing that you can utilize within your strategy and we’ve outlined the most common, effective ones to grow your customer base.

• Blog Posts & Articles: Great content marketing starts with developing out of this world blog articles that help address the questions or concerns your target audience is asking. Develop blog posts that solve their problems, satisfy their desires, and address their industry questions. In doing so, you’ll become their #1 source, and eventually, they’ll want to learn more about you.
• Video: According to HubSpot research, over 50% of consumers say they want to see videos from the brands they interact with. You need to meet what is in demand, and that demand is video marketing! Whether you produce high-end videos or use your smartphone, we guarantee in the end you’ll build better relationships with audience members and boost conversions.
• Podcasts: In a 2020 survey, it was found that 37% of U.S. adults listened to a podcast within the last month. For this reason, we recommend your brand begin creating and sharing their own podcasts. This medium is a great way for consumers to learn-on-the-go or multitask.
• Premium Content: Free premium pieces of content like eBooks, guides, checklists, etc. provide a high enough value that prospects will provide some information about themselves for the download in return. This tool is a great way to turn your qualified website visitors into contacts that you can continue to nurture and direct through the funnel faster.
• Visual Content: Visual content entails items like pictures, infographics, webinars, memes, GIFs, etc. which can be used as a stand-alone piece of information or implemented within another medium like a blog post. These types of content marketing are easy for prospects to consume and retain information.

4. How To Develop A Content Marketing Strategy

• Set SMART Goals: These should be unique to your brand and will likely assist your overall marketing and company goals. For example: Improve brand awareness, increase conversions, increase customer engagement, build trust among prospects, etc.
• Implement KPIs With SMART Goals: Determine how you will measure your actual performance against your goal. For example, Brand Awareness (Goal) = KPIs: Website traffic, social media followers, shares, newsletter sign-ups.
• Determine The Type Of Content: In order to choose the type of content you’ll develop, you need to think about who you’re targeting and where they are in the buyer’s journey. For example, buyers in the awareness stage will appeal to types of content like blogs (What, How To, 101) or premium content like guides.
• Decide Where You’ll Share The Content: Decide where the content will be hosted and shared for optimal reach and engagement.
• Create & Publish The Content: We recommend using a content editorial calendar in order to consistently create and share content.
• Important Metrics To Measure Success: While there are tons of ones you can measure, here are some of the most important: website traffic, leads, sales, keywords ranking for in Google, content engagement, sources bringing the most traffic, bounce rates, and time spent on-page.

5. Need Help With Content Marketing?

Content marketing can definitely be overwhelming. You wonder how you’ll have the time or resources to develop everything we just went through.

Well, don’t worry, this marketing plan doesn’t have to be as daunting as you might think. marketing advertising agencies like Envision Creative are here to help brands reach the top of the content marketing game with professional guidance.

We’re here to help you with all aspects of content marketing, so you can experience success! Contact us today to get your free content marketing consultation and get started on developing a content marketing strategy that boosts your bottom line.

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