Marketing in 2022 is impossible without great content.
As a marketer, I see my clients struggling to identify where they should spend their energy (and budget) to get digital leads, especially if they have a B2B service.
Marketing is becoming increasingly complex, with an ever-increasing choice of platforms to engage with your audience.
You’ve been told that you should be posting regularly on social media, but what kind of content should you be posting, and on which platforms?
You keep your details up to date and post photos every now and again, but it never seems to generate any leads. You don’t have time to post every day, and it feels like a waste of time. As a forward-thinking entrepreneur, you know there has to be a better way.
Enter content marketing
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach. It focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, drive profitable customer action.
Content marketing aligns with the new ways people engage with brands and content and develop brand loyalty. It’s integrated, intelligent, and customer-centric.
With content marketing you’re not simply pitching your products or services in traditional marketing copy. You’re providing relevant and useful content to your prospects that not only helps them find solutions to their problems, but also positions you as a trusted source.
Done correctly, content marketing builds the respect and admiration of your audience, but this will take time. To earn that valuable trust, you need to prove you have the relevant knowledge and (even more importantly) that you have integrity.
It doesn’t cut the mustard to simply promote how great your product or service is. Your content needs to put your customer’s concerns first. This is especially important in light of the way Google serves any search query with the most relevant answers; your content needs to be accurately centring your customer’s questions if you want to appear on their Google search results.
The authority you gain then transfers to your products or services, making customers that much more likely to choose you over the competition.
Regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, content marketing should be part of your process, not something separate. Because of the complexities of the communication strategy required, I would recommend engaging a content marketing agency to do this for you, rather than attempting it on your own.
4 big benefits of good content marketing
Site traffic: Traffic may be the obvious benefit, but it's also one of the most important. Great content will bring people to your site where they'll also find out more about your company and your products/services.
Improved SEO: The SEO benefits of good content are endless. Great content attracts editorial links, which tells Google you're important and authoritative. Google can also crawl your content, getting a better idea of what your company is about, which allows it to return your site for more relevant queries (including a great many long-tail queries). The list goes on, but it can be boiled down to this: without content, what is there for search engines to optimise?
Social media marketing: Content marketing strategy comes before your social media strategy. The ideal mix for social media blends unique and curated content based on themes that relate to your audience interests. High quality content that informs your potential customers is ideal to share on social media. This can also provide great ‘lead magnets’ if you are creating a Facebook ad funnel for inbound inquires.
PR and brand awareness: Content marketing is all about championing the customer and solving their problems. It involves storytelling and providing useful and relevant customer-centred information. A flow-on effect from creating high-value content is that you can now position your brand as an authority on solving your customer problems. So, you can begin commenting on the ‘state of your industry’ and sharing this as an opinion piece to local media or your business networks to increase your brand authority.
If you're looking for help to market your business, get in touch with our content marketing team. We can help you to create a content strategy that will transform your sales and marketing activities. Contact us now.
