What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing relevant, valuable, and consistent content to reach your target audience, prospects, and leads.
By providing relevant and valuable content to your audience and showing them how your product or service will effectively solve their challenges and pain points, this approach will help you:
- boost brand awareness
- educate your leads and prospects about the services you offer
- increase sales
- connect with your target audience and show them how you can solve their challenges
- save more!
Marketing is impossible without great content
No matter what marketing tactics you use, content marketing should be part and parcel of the process. With quality content, you can leverage all forms of marketing, including:
Social media marketing
Today, there are over 3.9 billion people globally using social media. Some of the popular platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tiktok, and Snapchat. Can you imagine the number of audiences you can reach if you share quality content on these platforms? Mind-blowing, right?
All these platforms will provide you with more than enough opportunities to connect with your audiences, leads, and prospects.
Let’s say you own a cannabis dispensary, for example, you’re using Instagram to reach your audience and possibly your leads whom you can turn into customers. The core aspect is the marketing content you share. You can highlight your product line, events, and what your audience needs to learn about cannabis.
As mentioned earlier, valuable and relevant content is vital for every content marketer.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a powerful way to drive traffic to your website through quality and consistent content. Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo rewards businesses that publish quality content that not only appeals to audiences, clients, prospects but also solves a particular problem.
In a nutshell, if you’re not visible on search engines, your customers will not find you. By improving your SEO content, search visibility will increase, driving more customers into your business. The higher your content ranks, the more website traffic, and possibly more conversions.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Content marketing and SEO are great ways to drive an impressive amount of traffic to your website. But, paid advertising, particularly pay per click (PPC), is another avenue to drive traffic. With PPC, you get the chance to reach your previously unreachable target audiences.
Perhaps you’re wondering what paid advertising is. Let’s get to the nitty-gritty of PPC.
Typically marketers use PPC to pay a network every time their ad is clicked.
No matter how your content ranks, not all will be seen by your searchers if all you use is traditional SEO.
While ads can be expensive, the end result is totally worth it.
Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is becoming increasingly popular among marketers when it comes to driving organic traffic and leads.
Inbound marketing is a great tactic marketers use to create compelling, valuable content and sharing on different online platforms.
This way, your business can be found online through search engines.
Content Strategy
Having a solid content strategy is the core of content marketing.
Whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve been using the same approach, it never hurts to revisit your content strategy.
Besides, competition will always be there. And all you need to outshine your competitors is to have a solid content marketing plan in place.
Content strategy is a marketing plan that involves the creation, publication, and governance of useful content. It shows who you’re and what expertise you bring to your industry.
Developing a content marketing strategy isn’t as hard as it sounds. Here are some tips to get started the right way:
- Define your goals: Are you creating content to generate leads, drive traffic, attract past customers, improve search ranking results, etc.? By knowing your goals beforehand, it will be pretty much easier to develop a content strategy.
- Know your target audience: To develop a successful content strategy, you need to know who your audience is. By knowing your target audience, you’ll produce relevant and valuable content that will be read to end and high chances of converting.
- Run a content audit: To create a sound content strategy, you need to run a content audit. For example, if you’ve been posting blog posts for a while, you need to try different formats to digest content, be it videos, infographics, podcasts, or ebooks.
- Brainstorm content ideas: As part of your strategy, you need to develop content ideas — in essence, the stories you want to tell your audience.
- Have a channel plan: This involves having a content management system (CMS) to help you manage, publish, and track your content analytics.
Now that you know the basics of content marketing, I hope it gives you an idea of what it takes to be a successful content marketer.
However, if you’re busy working on important stuff to elevate your brand, you may need a helping hand to leg up your competition. Greener Elements Marketing is ready to take your brand to another level through content marketing.