How to use content marketing to grow your business?
Content marketing is the process of creating, publishing, and sharing valuable content that resonates with the audience. The content can be in any form including blogs, articles, videos, infographics, images, etc. Content marketing is essential because of its immediate as well as lasting impacts on your brand.
7 reasons content marketing should not be overlooked
By now, you already know what content marketing is. But did you know why it is so relevant in today’s world? Here are seven reasons outlining the importance of content marketing:
- Content marketing will help you drive traffic to your apps and websites.
- Content marketing significantly contributes to lead generation and conversion.
- Content marketing helps you build a strong and loyal customer base without breaking the bank.
- Content marketing addresses customer pain points and empowers them with relevant information.
- Content marketing enables you to cut the noise and create a place for yourself.
- Content marketing enhances your SEO efforts.
- Content marketing is an inexpensive result-oriented strategy that reaps long-term benefits.
Read more about the importance of content writing in our blog ‘Why is content marketing relevant in today’s world?’ Now let’s take a look at what are the different formats of content you can use to leverage the power of content marketing.
What are the different formats of content you can leverage?
The type of format you choose depends on the content marketing aims and those that work best for your clients. Nevertheless, here is a glimpse of popular content formats you can leverage for content marketing.
- Blogs: It is the simplest yet most effective tool for content marketing. Blogs are written content that highlights the features of products, answers how-to questions, and more. SEO plays an important role in making blogs successful and these have a long shelf life. Once a blog is published it can drive traffic for several years.
- Podcasts: Podcasts are steadily making their way to the spotlight. These audio formats of content are often engaging and can keep the audience hooked for a long time.
- Educational videos: This is an audio-visual format of content, where the audience can see the product features while someone explains them in lucid language. The audience hardly has to crack their brain since it is simple to understand and retain.
- Email campaigns: Most small businesses thrive on cold emails and email marketing campaigns. While the conversion rate may not be jaw-dropping initially, however, email marketing remains a marketer’s favorite tool. These are often customized, and the content is narrowed down to a specific audience.
- Infographics: Everyone loves texts that are accompanied by images. Infographics are a fun and easy way to deliver value and information through content.
- Social media marketing: In the digital age, there is no way you escape this powerful tool. You may belong to any industry, and creating content on social media is for everyone. If you are an interior designer, you can always talk about the amazing ways one can decorate their house on a budget. On the other hand, if you are a dentist, sharing dental care tips is always a good idea to engage the audience.
Content marketing knows no bounds and if used correctly can drive insane results for everyone. But if you may wonder where to start? Read along because the answer is here.
How to start content marketing?
Content marketing goes beyond the idea of creating content and mindlessly publishing it. There has to be a goal that directs the efforts. Content marketing aims to navigate a content marketing plan, and you can build one in 5 steps.
- Identify the audience: The first step is to identify for whom you will make the content. Such research can include the demographic, behavioral, geographic, and other factors associated with the customer. Information about customer persona will greatly impact the content marketing strategy.
- Keyword research: Identifying the audience will help you understand what type of content will be useful and relevant for you and your customers. You can do this through keyword research. It will tell you what your customers want to know and how you can create value for them (and your brand). Today content is meaningless if it is not relevant. There is no point in making content that does not benefit your customer or they do not want to see. Keyword research unlocks the treasure trove in the customers’ minds. There are several paid and free tools that you can use for this purpose.
- Planning the content: Once you have answers to who and what, now you have to focus on how and where. Plan what type of content you want to produce and where you will publish it. If you produce fitness apparel and accessories, do you want to make podcasts and videos, or explore written content? Again, you need to decide who will create and manage the content – an in-house marketing team or a content marketing agency. In this step, you can also categorize the content into different buckets and prepare a content calendar.
- Lights.Camera.Content: Now that everything is figured out, you need to start making the content. Heads up, this is a time-consuming and lengthy process, that will not get immediate (desired) results. Content creation is a different ball game, and often a frustrating one. But sticking to the plan is the key to cracking the code. Do not forget to use the keywords you looked up in step 2, and integrate SEO mindfully, so your content reaches those who need to engage with it.
- Measure the success of the content marketing plan: No marketing plan is complete without measuring its success. For this, you can make a list of KPIs or key performance indicators that will help you track the performance. Some common ones include bounce rates, exit rates, page views, etc. If you are getting desired results then congratulations, your plan worked. However, in case there is dissonance you need to rework on the plan or look for expert support from content marketing agencies such as Dimensions.
Dimensions: #1 Content marketing agency in India
Content marketing can be a hard nut to crack, and it is where content marketing services come into the picture. Dimensions is a proliferating content marketing agency in India and have worked with several eminent clients across varied business domains. We boast a team of specialized content marketers and SEO experts who have vast industry experience working in different niches. We focus on creating bespoke content marketing plans targeted toward specific goals. To give your content marketing strategy a new dimension, get in touch with us, and let’s get started.
