What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves creating, curating, distributing, sharing and promoting valuable and relevant content to your target customers and prospects. It is a soft tactic that helps you to attract, acquire and retain customers.
Content can be published in a variety of forms: white papers, videos, infographics, case studies, thought leadership articles and many more.
Why do you need a content marketing strategy? Well, today’s buyers are so much more tech-savvy. Many of them go online to get more information about the products or services they are interested in before making a buying decision. That’s where your content comes in – to meet that demand for information.
Content-driven experiences educate, entertain or engage your audience, without the traditional hard-sell tactics. Ultimately, your customers will feel connected to your brand and this will help to drive sales.
Quality content is the fuel for all channels of marketing:
- Search engine optimisation (SEO): You need to consistently publish useful content to rank well for search engines.
- Social media marketing: You need to have relatable content to share across social media channels.
- Inbound marketing: You need top-class content to draw audiences and drive inbound traffic.
- B2B marketing: You need informative content to demonstrate why your company is the best fit for your B2B customer.
What are the benefits of content marketing?
Content marketing needs to be part of your integrated marketing strategy. Content marketing can help you to:
- Generate leads and increase sales. Creating content that addresses your target audience’s pain points can pull in leads. This soft-sell approach will translate into sales, when your customers are finally ready to buy.
- Drive inbound traffic. The more quality content you have online, the more traffic this will bring to your website. Use blogs, videos and infographics to deliver useful online content to your audience.
- Improve SEO. Google rewards websites that regularly publish great content. Delivering helpful content that is relevant to search queries makes your website more attractive to search engines.
- Increase engagement. Use words, pictures and videos to tell your brand story and build customer engagement. Get your customers interacting with you to build meaningful relationships with them.
- Build brand awareness. How your content looks, sounds or feels is a reflection of your brand. Create a consistent brand image and tell good stories that compel your audience to reflect, engage and share to build up your brand.
- Position your business as a helpful resource by offering content which provides tips, tricks and ideas to help your customers to solve their problems. “How to” type of articles work best for this purpose.
- Establish you as a thought leader. Thought leadership can take your marketing to the next level. It helps you develop name recognition and exert your influence as a leader in your industry.
- Generate social media buzz. Social media marketing is a key aspect of your integrated marketing strategy. And content is the fuel that can light up your social media presence. After all, you first need to develop content that you can use to share and talk about on social media.
- Beat your competition. Done right, content marketing can help you to set you apart from your competition. How can you do that? By creating epic content that drives action.
- Improve ROI. Content marketing is definitely a much cheaper than traditional forms of marketing such as advertising. Content also creates more value because it can be repurposed and reused in many different ways and forms. This lowers your marketing costs while increasing your ROI.
How does a content marketing strategy work?
Here are the key steps to developing a content marketing strategy:
Define your buyer personas. Before you even start creating your content, you need to define your ideal target audience. What are their common characteristics, goals, needs, problems or issues? This important step will help you tailor your content strategy to appeal to your defined buyer personas.
Define your goals. Decide what are the goals of your content creation strategy. Is it to educate, inform, inspire or entertain? At which point of the buyer’s journey do you want to target?
Brainstorm. You need to come up with ideas for topics to write about. Conduct research. What are others doing? Can you do it better? Or can you come up with something new? What are people sharing? What topics are trending?
Develop your editorial calendar. Plan what type of content you are going develop. Can you also repurpose that white paper into an infographic or a video? How frequent are you going to publish? Do you want to have a weekly blog or perhaps a video tutorial every month? What channels are you going to use to distribute your content? Have a diversified content mix. Document all this in an editorial calendar.
Create your content. Once you’ve developed your editorial calendar, it’s time to start creating your content. Write the articles, blog posts, white papers, press releases or ebooks. Develop the presentations, infographics of videos. Remember to include calls to action.
Optimise your content. Planning and writing your content is only part of strategy. It is not complete without well-optimised content. People can only find your content online if you rank well in search engines. This is where SEO copywriting comes in.
Publish your content. Distribute your content on various channels to maximize your reach. Post it online and amplify it on social media. Email your content to clients. You can also use your content to pitch for interviews as part of your PR outreach.
Monitor and engage. Once you have published your content, monitor the response on social media. Interact with your audience. Get feedback from them. Evaluate which types of blog posts generate more buzz than others. Find out what works and what doesn’t.
Measure and evaluate. Use tracking metrics such as Google Analytics to measure the success of your content. Make improvements where necessary and apply them when you develop your new content.
Invest in content marketing
Everybody’s investing in content marketing. And if you don’t, you’ll only fall behind your competitors, lose brand traction and miss out on potential sales. Do you have what it takes to move forward with your content marketing strategy?
If not, it’s time to outsource your copywriting to a Singapore copywriter. Get your story heard with the right content. Let us research, plan and create your content for you.