Become more visible to potential leads and generate more traffic to your website by investing in a content marketing strategy for your business.
Content marketing has the potential to transform brands, with lower costs and higher returns than traditional marketing methods. According to DemandMetric, 78 percent of CMO’s believe custom content is the furture of marketing. By developing a solid content marketing strategy for your brand, your content can create brand awareness, increase audience engagement, and drive more customers to your website.
Why Your Brand Needs Content Marketing
Now is the time to make a content marketing strategy your top priority if you haven’t already. In fact, content marketing costs 62 percent less than outbound marketing but generates three times the leads. Together, websites and blogs reach 434 percent more search engine-indexed pages. By strategically spreading content across multiple platforms, you can drive more traffic to your site and boost lead generation even further.
As more consumers are turning to podcasts, social media, blogs, and search engines for their news and information, they are looking for content that is accessible, authentic, and reliable. Through content marketing, brands are able to fulfill this need as well as cultivate trust and relationships, driving conversion rates to be six times higher than traditional marketing.
How to Make Your Content Marketing Strategy Stand Out
Making your brand stand out in the crowd of content is critical. Delivering relevant, informative, and engaging content will keep your target audience coming back to your site. Here are our top tips for creating an effective content marketing strategy:
1. Start a Blog, Newsletter, or Podcast
Writing blog content or newsletters is a great way to increase your visibility and brand awareness. A blog is a low-cost strategy to position your brand as an authority in your industry and help customers work through pain points. When your brand is recognized as a thought leader, your customers are more likely to invest in your products or services.
We also recommend starting a monthly or quarterly newsletter to push out your relevant blog content to all of your sales leads. Sending out engaging ePromotions and eNewsletters regularly can help you build relationships with your subscribers and turn them into brand loyal customers.
In 2020, content strategy is all about meeting customers where they are, telling compelling stories on the platforms they’re already using, and inviting them to experience your brand in ways that are less direct than traditional advertising. A recent study showed that podcasts are more effective than digital ads. In fact, there were over 450 million podcasts in 2023, with 38% of Americans listening to a podcast within the last month. Try starting a podcast to connect with your audience and appeal to their interests.
2. Create Value-Added Content
Whether you’re creating blog posts, newsletters, or podcasts, make sure your content is designed to share your knowledge and serve a specific purpose. A great way to do so is through value-added content that is exclusive to your brand, meaning it is original and your customers can’t find it anywhere else.
We also recommend repurposing your cornerstone content and stretching it into multiple pieces of optimized content. For example, you can use a data-rich blog post to create an infographic for social media or bite-sized videos to create “highlight reels” for your monthly newsletters.
FAQ: What is cornerstone content? Cornerstone content should be the core of your website with the pages or posts that you want to rank highest on search engines. Cornerstone articles are usually long, informative articles that combine insights from different blog posts and cover everything important about a certain topic. By consistently updating your top blogs, you can keep your content fresh and relevant.
3. Take Advantage of Video
According to Wyzowl, 90 percent of marketers say that video has increased traffic to their website, while 87 percent claim that video has directly increased sales. Consumers might not make a buying decision when watching your first video, but consistently delivering compelling video marketing content will keep them coming back for more. Good content can always be optimized with video. Video summaries are a great way to complement your articles and blogs in order to expand your reach, gain social shares, improve your authority, and enhance SEO value.
4. Make it Visual
Content isn’t valuable if nobody remembers it. Integrating visual references, such as charts, graphs, and infographics, into your content marketing strategy will help your posts stand out to your readers. Visuals can be processed quickly and are found to appeal to the 65 percent of us who are visual learners. We recommend creating more infographics that provide valuable insights without having viewers read the entire content.
Tip: Try Venngage, a user-friendly, cost-effective developer tool we use to create outstanding infographics and visuals. By including infographics in your content marketing strategy, both new and repurposed content is more relevant, memorable, and engaging.
Creative and interactive images often speak louder than words by connecting your customers to your brands’ message. While browsing through different social media channels, users who come across a post with an attractive and intriguing image are more likely to click on the link.
5. Complement Your Content with a Distribution Strategy
Once the content is published online, the next step is creating an effective distribution strategy to increase the visibility of your content. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube are considered to be the most efficient channels to grab the attention of your customers.
Expand your reach by creating a sharing schedule and sticking to it. Make sure your content is optimized for each social network to maximize potential. Monitor your results to learn what works (and what doesn’t) and adjust your efforts accordingly.
6. Create Social Buzz
Consistency in publishing high-quality content across multiple channels creates buzz for your brand. Continue to spread the word about your brand by issuing press releases to get instant syndication of your content. Add recognizable social widgets to your posts to make social sharing easy. These shares can get your content in front of more potential customers.
Fine-tune your social strategy by applying collaborative feedback and improving content prior to publishing. Use a syndicating content service like Outbrain or Taboola that allow you to create A/B content funnels and offer substantial reach at a bargain price per click (PPC).
7. Measure Your Efforts
The only way to see your content marketing success is by measuring it. Metrics such as social shares, likes, and page views enable you to comprehensively visualize how your content marketing strategy is performing. Use Google’s Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes to track content specific URL performance metrics. We also recommend reviewing your analytics every quarter to identify what kind of content and headlines engage customers to spend more time on your website.
It’s important to understand what content attracts customers and keeps them on your site. Work to continually produce more of both so they move customers through the sales cycle and convert them. Also track the most popular shared content and use that type of content and subject matter to create more buzz about your brand.
