In 2008, Seth Godin stated that content marketing is the only form of marketing that is still effective.
Seemingly, Godin predicted the future and 14 years later his idea is still relevant.
What did Godin mean?
Instead of using traditional advertising methods, marketers should create content that is important to their target consumers.
A majority of marketers are heeding Godin’s advice by investing in content marketing, with 78% of major companies allocating 1-3 content marketing specialists on their team.
4 Major Reasons Why Content Marketing Is the Only Marketing Left
Content marketing is essential for any business, as it can increase sales, create strong relationships with customers, and importantly, today’s consumers will read several blog posts before considering investing in a product.
Here are 8 reasons why it is so important:
- Your competitors are already doing it
- It’s the most effective form of marketing
- You reach your target audience more effectively
- It doesn’t rely on interrupting people
- It can be very cost effective
- You build trust with your audience
- You establish thought leadership
- You can track your results
1. Content Marketing Helps Build Trust
If you are looking to expand your business and reach more customers, gaining their trust is key. Content marketing is a great way to build trust with your target audience. By creating helpful, informative, and engaging content, you can establish yourself as an expert in your field and build trust with potential customers.
What is the most important thing for creating brand trust? Quality content. Quality content is not only informative and useful for readers, but it can also be profitable for the person who creates it.
One way to create profitable content every time is something called the 3-bucket topic strategy. The three bucket topic strategy is when you focus on one broad topic and break it down into three subtopics, or buckets. Each bucket is then its own blog post. This is an effective way to produce quality content because it allows you to manage the amount of information in each post, making it easier for readers to digest.
Three main types of content and their main purposes are listed below:
#1: Blogs and web pages (Relationship, trust and SEO rankings)
#2: Ebooks in PDF format, infographics, and case studies are all effective means of marketing and boosting sales and connections.
#3: Viral/fun/entertaining, and seasonal blogs (brand awareness)
Bucket #3 is important when building brand trust because it is content that is “fun” and “viral” which entertains and informs your customers. In other words, it helps to build a relationship (and trust) with your audience.
The foundation of any good relationship is trust. Don’t ever underestimate how important it is.
2. Content Marketing Will Grow Your Ecommerce Brand Without Funding
The benefits of content marketing are particularly apparent in Ecommerce.
Ecommerce startups that don’t have large marketing budgets can’t compete with the bigger brands. Even if they have a great idea, awesome products, and a signature customer experience, they won’t be able to match the big brands’ marketing efforts.
If you don’t want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, you don’t have to give up. You can grow your ecommerce brand with content marketing. Content marketing is providing value before making a sale.
The number of people using ad blockers is increasing, which means that fewer people are seeing ads.
You’re doing well by producing quality and relevant content instead of advertisements.
3. Content Marketing Provides Different Ways of Connecting with Your Audience
Content marking may seem like a miracle solution, but it requires a plan (or strategy) to be effective.
There are several different ways to connect with your audience. You can connect with your audience by speaking to them, by writing to them, or by communicating with them through social media. You can also connect with your audience by interacting with them in person. Below are just a few ideas of how you can connect to your audience through content marketing:
- SEO Blogging: SEO brings 1000% more traffic than social media (BrightEdge). Google picks and chooses which websites to rank based on a lot of different factors — one of them is how often you’re updating your site. The best way to do this is through consistent blogging. Don’t neglect old content either. Republish and update your old blogs with new information or images and you could increase organic traffic by 106%.
- Video: The most common form of content marketing out there. 74% of marketers say video has a better return on investment (ROI) than a static image. Those numbers don’t lie. Keep in mind there are different types of videos you could be putting out there, from pre-recorded (best for YouTube) to live streams (Instagram and Facebook) and real-time (TikTok and Instagram).
- Email: Don’t underestimate the power of an email newsletter. Just make sure you’re bringing your unique perspective to your emails (as you should be in ALL your content) so that your audience actually opens and reads them. You want to watch out for sending too many emails as well. Email newsletters have a stellar ROI – $42 on every $1 spent.
Whichever route you decide to take (you should really make use of all of them), remember your strategy. It will take you straight to success.
4. Content Marketing Will Increase Leads
Content marketing can be an excellent lead generator, as it can bring in three times more leads than traditional, paid searches. A study showed that it also costs 62% less.
If you’re not a fan of hard selling, content marketing may be a great option for your business. With this type of marketing, you focus on providing valuable content to your audience, rather than coming across as pushy.
Your goal when selling should be to show your customer that you understand their needs. You should never have to convince someone to make a purchase, as your product or service should already be of interest to them. Instead, focus on building a relationship with your customer and showing that you understand their specific needs. Here are just a few ideas of how to increase leads through your content:
- Figure out your customer’s questions, and create content around answering them
- Tailor your content to your ideal customer. What would they want to see?
- Nurture your relationship with your customers through your content and social channels to build trust
- Use content marketing tools like Canva, Yoast SEO, and ConvertKit
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy?
When planning your content marketing strategy, you should start by considering your desired outcome.
Three important questions to ask:
- Where are you now?
- Where do you want to go?
- Who do you want to address?
It’s important to take the time to brainstorm with colleagues or external consultants to get a clear idea of your target audience. The more precise you can be in your content strategy, the better.
1. Define Goals
Your content strategy should include goals such as what you want to achieve with your published content. Your goal could be launching a new product, strengthening brand identity, or increasing visibility on social media platforms.
2. Create Personas
One way to focus your marketing efforts is to create fictional people who represent a target group (personas) with their specific characteristics.
- Goals and Values – what are the goals and standards or judgment they stand on?
- Challenges- what are the challenges they want to tackle to simplify their daily lives?
3. Conduct Content Audit
It is a good idea to take a step back and review your top and lowest performing content before taking any further action. This will help you determine what your audience responds to the most and what actions and directions to follow in the future.
4. Write Down the Problems You Will Solve for Your Target Audience
The content of your product or service provides a solution to the problem of your target audience. In the same way, content also mentors and enlightens your prospects by providing a solution to their problem.
Your personas document and your business specification will help you identify your audience’s pain points. As a result, you will have a list of problems that will assist you in finding future content topics that your audience will be interested in.
5. Choose the Content Formats and Publishing Channels
You need to look at your personas document to see what content formats are popular among them in order to make sense of what to use.
Don’t be tempted to start a Tik-Tok account and upload videos unless you’re sure your audience is interested. Otherwise, you’ll just be creating content with no one to consume it.
For example, if your audience prefers long-form text content, you may opt for Whitepapers. If you have a younger audience that likes short-form content, you may start posting on LinkedIn.
SEO and Content Marketing Strategy
The best way to ensure that your content stays visible is to make it easy for your audience to find it. Use keywords and other search engine optimization strategies to make your pages more noticeable, and keep your content fresh, relevant, and strategic.
If you want to make the most of your inbound marketing, it’s best to pair content with SEO. This way you can create content that will attract search engines, and get more traffic to your site. Remember, SEO is an important part of content marketing, so don’t skimp on effort in this area.
Google pays close attention to how many users click on your link in the search results, which is reflected in the Click-through rate. The longer readers stay on your page and the more they follow your CTA, the higher your ranking will be.
Content Designed to Meet the Ideal Customer Journey
Your content strategy should include content for all five stages of the customer journey. You can use content to accompany prospects from the beginning (awareness) to the end (loyalty). So far, so good. Now, of course, the question arises, how do you effectively create material that engages your target group? The Hero-Hub-Hygiene model exists for just this.
When you first start, you’ll need to put in a lot of effort. But once you have everything set up, you’ll only need to make changes when your content marketing strategy changes.
Hygiene Content
The foundation of your content marketing strategy should be evergreen content – content that is relevant and fundamental, and won’t need to be updated frequently. This could include FAQ lists, social media posts, and how-to guides.
Hub Content
Core content is your bread and butter. It is what your audience expects to see from you.
- Manuals
- Step-by-step guides
- Worksheets
If you want to be successful in content marketing, you need to make sure you’re constantly updating your content, and that you’re sticking to your editorial calendar. The frequency of your content published can range from once a week to three times a week, depending on the company’s strategy and views.
The people who are most familiar with your company’s content are the ones who support you. You should not take them for granted and instead work to maintain that relationship.
Hero Content
Hero content does not happen often. When it does, it is very impactful. Hero content takes a lot of resources and cannot be created overnight. Without careful planning and development, it will never be published.
The content types can include
- Ultimate guides
- Whitepaper
- Courses
When creating hero and hub content for the first time, you should consider hiring professional writers. Providing high-quality hero and hub content on a regular basis requires commitment and expertise.
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