Content marketing is an essential digital tool for small business owners looking to boost their business recognition and credibility online, drive website traffic, keep visitors on your website long enough to make a sales enquiry and, ultimately, purchase your products or services.
What Is The Idea Behind Content Writing?
The core idea behind content marketing is deceptively straightforward. By creating and publishing engaging content tailored to the pain points and purchase motivations of your target audience, you can ‘nurture’ casual visitors into loyal customers and advocates, improve your search engine visibility, and grow your sales revenues. The ‘how to’ of content marketing is also straightforward. Most content takes the form of written blog articles, web content, downloadable incentive content (e.g. guides/white papers), as well as some videos and infographics.
However, for content marketing to successfully elevate and grow your business, you’ll need a strategic approach that goes beyond simply typing out the occasional blog post here and there. In this short guide, we will explain how businesses can leverage content marketing in the right way to increase brand awareness and better engage their customers.
What Makes ‘Content’ Into Marketing Content?
As a writer, ‘content’ is a horrible, faceless term, essentially denoting any digital collateral used by a business as part of its digital marketing strategy. And unfortunately for many businesses, content is all that this material is – poorly thought-out filler used to fill space on the website and blog, with little more marketing value than lorem ipsum text.
Content marketing is a different proposition entirely. For written or visual content to have genuine use as a marketing tool, it must have real-world value and relevance to your target readers, in a way that encourages them to take action and engage more closely with your business. A content marketing strategy develops a portfolio of engaging and entertaining digital content assets, which are disseminated for free, to a tightly defined audience or ‘buyer persona’.
Why Bother With Content Marketing?
The purpose of sharing this content is to inform, educate, and eventually persuade your audience to progress their buyer journey from awareness through consideration to decision, via intermediary steps such as signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or connecting with your business on social media. In doing so, you’ll establish stronger brand authority in your sector, keep customers informed about industry trends, and showcase your business's unique value propositions.
However, no matter how much the end goal of content marketing is to achieve results for your business, the focus of all your marketing content should be the customer, not your business. Content marketing makes sales indirectly, not directly, by gradually developing a value proposition around your business and its service credentials. In fact, in an ideal content marketing scenario, your sales team won’t need to make any cold approaches at all. The customer will make all the moves, right up to contacting you to make the purchase.
Checklist For Developing A Successful Content Marketing Campaign
- Identify your target buyer personas and plan content that addresses their specific needs and desires at each stage of the buyer journey.
- Establish a content marketing calendar to plan and remain consistent with content production.
- Create a variety of written and visual content formats, such as SEO-optimised long-form and short-form articles, keyword-specific landing pages, social media updates, e-books, product demonstration videos etc.
- Incorporate storytelling elements and social proof into your content to engage readers and set your brand apart from your competitors. Personalise your content with real-world examples to give it human context.
- Keep your brand voice informative and persuasive, using industry-specific terms and structuring content with bullet points and H2 headings to make it quick and easy to read.
- Share your content across various social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
- Engage with your audience by responding to comments and messages, and by asking for feedback or user-generated content.
- Use key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic and leads generated to measure the effectiveness of each content asset and your overall strategy.
- Utilise web analytics tools to track user behaviour and identify content that performs well.
Next Steps
For further advice about content marketing and how to use your content assets successfully to drive sales for your business, please contact JDR Group today or download our free Content Marketing guide for more information.
Image Source: Canva
