Content marketing is one of the pillars of inbound digital marketing, but what do we mean by content marketing and how can you use it to get more customers? This article explains everything you need to know to get started.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a set of marketing techniques that revolve around the creation and distribution of valuable and relevant content online. Through blog articles, ebooks, targeted web pages, infographics, and videos, you aim to inform, build trust, and generate engagement around your business and its products or services, without asking for anything in return (well, maybe a phone number or email address in the case of downloadable gated content!)
Content marketing is one of the best and most cost-effective digital marketing techniques you can use to give exposure to your brand and generate leads. For the best ROI, you’ll want to use several complementary techniques to support your content, including Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), social media marketing, and email marketing.
As an example of how different digital marketing approaches work in synergy to produce the best chance of attracting sales, creating a downloadable how-to guide would fall under content marketing. But simply uploading the guide to your site wouldn’t get much attention. Instead, you would need to use other inbound marketing techniques (like social media marketing, PPC, and on-page SEO) to draw people to download the guide from your site, tying the content into your email strategy by asking people to sign up for your e-list in exchange for the guide.
Content and inbound marketing go hand-in-hand when it comes to lead generation – with high-quality content being the fuel you need to persuade customers and drive online sales. Let’s look at the four main benefits of investing in content marketing to gain new customers.
1) Increased time on your website
Just as consumers are more likely to spend time in a shop with a diverse range of interesting products than one with empty shelves, a content-rich website full of useful articles and content will capture the attention of web visitors for longer. And the longer they stay and the more pages they visit, the more chances you have of securing their custom. Session duration is a metric that tells you how long website visitors stay on a given page. When you create relevant content for your target personas, your audience is likely to stick around for longer – because it strikes a chord with their business requirements. You can ensure content is relevant by:
- Writing content for a specific persona, or buyer type, not for a ‘general audience’
- Making sure your content answers the reader’s questions at a specific stage of the buyer journey (you’ll need content for all your personas and each of their journey stages).
- Optimising content for the right keywords and search phrases
- Solving a problem.
- Addressing a trending topic (popular topics and their related keywords usually attract higher-than-average web traffic, but only for short periods, so be sure to mix your news articles up with plenty of informative, ‘evergreen’ material, too.)
2) Improve your website ranking
The higher your content ranks on Google for your target keywords, the more visible it becomes, and the more traffic, leads, and sales it will attract. SEO is, therefore, an essential component of content marketing. Although there are different factors that contribute to website ranking, relevance and authority are two of the most important.
Remember that websites don’t rank, web pages do. Google’s results pages show individual web pages, not full websites. Relevant content is picked up by search engines in response to user queries and therefore improves your visibility. Relevance applies mainly to individual blog articles and web pages (which can rank higher or lower than other pages on your site). One high-ranking article, for example, won’t necessarily result in a high rank for other pages.
Authority, however, applies to your website as a whole and all constituent pages associated with the domain. The more people that click through to your website and the longer they stay on the page (and the more pages they visit), the more authority the domain will accrue. Domain authority boosts the ranking of individual pages and helps position your business where new customers can see it.
3) Become a leading voice in your industry
Consistently delivering original, factual, and relevant content online can help establish your business as a trusted voice. Trust is non-negotiable in online sales and must be cultivated in every interaction if you want to see the results reflected in your sales figures. In other words, trust and authority impact loyalty, which in turn can strengthen your recurring revenue.
4) Customers will be your best advocates
A solid content marketing strategy can turn prospects and loyal customers into your best advocates because people are social animals and enjoy sharing good content and business recommendations on social media that reflect well on them. If they are impressed with your content, people may spontaneously share your content with contacts on LinkedIn or Facebook, or link to it in their own blog articles, helping you reach an audience that perhaps you wouldn’t have reached using other marketing techniques.
Social media shares, likes, and positive comments are powerful because they have a major influence on purchasing decisions, especially if that person is trusted by their peer group. By attracting the attention of an ‘influencer’ in your market through your content, e.g. on LinkedIn, your business gains enormous credibility by association.
Find out more
To find out more about content marketing and how it can help you garner more sales online, please call our creative team today on 01332 343281.
Image Source: Pexels
