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In a media landscape hyper-saturated with advertisements, it is crucial for brands to break through the clutter and stand out from their competition. But how can they accomplish such a daunting task?
Take a look at how executing a powerful content marketing strategy can help your brand get in front of both existing and potential customers.
An increasing number of companies have begun implementing content marketing plans. In a survey by SEMRush, 77 percent of respondents said that their company had a content marketing strategy but only 9 percent rated that strategy as “excellent.”
While traditional marketing efforts often have a singular aim to make sales, content marketing offers benefits to both your business and your customers.
It is all about building a relationship with your audience that inspires trust and loyalty, encourages interaction and offers information, as opposed to simply pushing products or services on them. Good content marketing can build your brand's image and convey personality without being aggressive or overly promotional.
Statistics from the Content Marketing Institute show that content marketing leaders experience 7.8 times more traffic to their site than non-leaders and generate 3 times as many leads. Sharing this content on social media, in email marketing, and via other platforms can give your website — and brand — more visibility.
On top of that, content marketing is highly cost-effective. We know that most companies cannot waste money on ineffective marketing efforts and must be conservative with their budgets.
Content marketing is effective and comparatively inexpensive to other marketing tactics, providing brands with more bang for their buck. You can also optimize both your content and SEO efforts by integrating them — get two benefits for the price of one!
Even if your blog posts or videos do not immediately lead to a sale, quality content builds warm traffic that you can remarket to later. Businesses with strong content efforts drive higher conversion rates over time — up to 6 times higher than non-content marketing competition.
So if your interest is piqued, you may be wondering where to start. No matter if this is the first time your brand is embarking on content marketing or you’re ready to revamp your current strategy, there are some key steps you should take.
The first step to creating valuable content is determining your brand’s audience, their needs and the solutions that you can provide them.
Once you know who they are, you can determine what to do to grab their attention as well as what platforms will be most effective. Will they be more likely to read a blog, watch a video or interact with you on Facebook Live?
Perhaps you could help them learn a new skill, one that requires the use of your product. You can also simply offer them entertainment, interesting new information or a relatable story.
Whatever it is, it should be focused less on selling to them and more on offering them value. Build their trust and, on occasion, offer them compelling reasons to spend their money on your products.
Perhaps just as useful as knowing what to do is knowing what not to do. Take a look at these examples of bad content marketing, and what you can do to avoid making common mistakes.
You may be hesitant to put in the effort of doing content marketing (or hiring an agency to support you) if you don’t know what you’re getting out of it.
Here are some common metrics used to measure content marketing success:
This is the biggie everyone wants to know about. Is my content actually leading to more dollars or more people in the door?
As we mentioned before, unlike traditional marketing efforts, the approach of content marketing is much subtler. But that doesn’t mean you should skimp out on the clear calls-to-action.
Incorporate trackable phone numbers and unique URLs to your content marketing to better track where conversions are coming from.
By looking at Google Analytics metrics like pageviews, sessions, users, time on page and bounce rate, we can get a better sense of how uses are interacting with your website content.
Each month or quarter, take a deep dive into how your audience behaved. Did they come from social? How long did they stay on the page? Take note of content that didn’t perform as you had hoped in order to optimize it better down the road.
Each social media platform has its own set of insights. Make sure you’re taking a look at these on a weekly or monthly basis. Did your audience grow? How many people engaged with your content? Is there a clear pattern of when people were more likely to engage with some content over others (i.e. posts with videos vs. text-only posts, etc.)?
There is a myriad of SEO tools available to you to see how your website is doing on search engines. Our preferred tool is SEMRush, which can give you insights on keyword rankings, content performance, site visibility, and more.
Tools like MailChimp include their own built-in reporting dashboards. After you send out an email, make sure to check the analytics! Look for subject line performance, click-through rate, open rate and unsubscribes. Paid versions of email marketing tools often offer heat mapping functionality where you can see just how users interacted with the email content and where they may have dropped off. Analytics like these should be taken into account the next time you share out an email.
This may be more difficult to measure but take note of what your customers and clients are saying. Ask them how they found you if they’re new to your company. Make sure that’s an option on your contact form as well.
Integrity has firsthand involvement in implementing successful content marketing strategies for brands in a wide range of industries — from insurance to retail, financial to hospitality.
Quality content creation can be difficult, but there are plenty of tools out there to help you on your way. And, as with any marketing effort, keep in mind that performing regular data analytics is necessary for tracking the success of your efforts. Check out our list of free tools that can aid in your efforts to generate and track content.
Now that you know the benefits content marketing can lend to your brand and how to approach it in the right way, you should be ready to integrate it into your marketing efforts!
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Want the benefits of content marketing but don’t have the time to put in the effort yourself? Get in touch today and let Integrity’s expert content marketing team handle it for you!
