Content Marketing Moving Forward

By Rahimah Sultan

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You can attract customers by creating valuable content and experiences rather than  reaching out to them. This digital inbound content marketing approach attracts users to your brand when you provide useful or entertaining information and experiences, usually in the form of text, video, or audio and makes it easier for prospects to find you.

Content marketing is valuable because it builds relationships and trust with your potential and existing customers.

So, it’s easier to sell your products faster.

Those who use content marketing, to build a following, see higher returns for each additional piece of content they publish.

This article is an overview of content marketing moving forward.



How does content marketing work?

Informative content marketing draws people to your brand.

If you publish a video, podcast episode, or a blog post and interested people use it they become acquainted with your brand.

Once you have their attention you can build a relationship and later sell them your products and/or services.


Content marketing can help your business by:

1. Reducing customer acquisition costs

Although quality content creation isn’t cheap, you’ll see a stronger ROI (return on investment) from each piece you produce because your audience will increase.

Your first blog post, video, or social media posting might not be seen by many people. As more prospects find your content and become followers, each addition al piece of content you publish will be seen by more people and produce a stronger ROI.

Unlike paid ads, where you and your competitors can earn roughly the same ROI for each dollar spent, your brand with a strong content marketing strategy and a larger following can earn much more for each piece of published content.

2. Improving the quality of leads

With content marketing you can categorize the kind of customers you attract based on your content production.

For example, if your target audience is exclusively gardeners, you can discuss only topics that a gardener would be interested in, like soil preparation or garden layouts. You might also offer access to exclusive reports on industry benchmarks that would interest them.

Contrast this with using paid ads where you have to depend on platforms to accurately identify your target audience. As privacy concerns are on the increase and there is less accurate audience targeting, paid ads are producing lower returns.

3. Building a stable lead pipeline

If you produce evergreen content (content that’s relevant for years) you get higher returns over time, because you can continue to generate returns from it for years after it’s published.

You’ll still probably have a steady pipeline of leads, due to your evergreen content, even if you stop producing content for a while.

4. Increasing customer loyalty and retention

Essentially, content marketing is a cheat protocol to build trust with your potential customers at scale.

The more familiar your potential customers become with your brand, viewpoints, and identity, the easier it is for them to trust your brand and the more likely they are to continue to buy from you.



How do you create a content marketing strategy?

You have to attract the right customers in order for content marketing to work.

1. Your Ideal Customer

Your first step is defining your ideal target customer. To do that, ask yourself these questions:

a) What’s the position of the person who buys your product or service?

b) What is the person’s job?

c) What pain points does the person need resolved?

What is the person’s knowledge of the subject? (This is important to know to avoid beginner-level keywords when you’re targeting advanced customers)

Answering these questions will give you an excellent sense of your ideal buyer persona, and that will make the rest of your content strategy clear.


2. Your Marketing Funnel and Choice of Content

Customers don’t generally buy the first time they visit your website, and that’s okay.

The aim of content marketing is building relationships and leading prospects to make a purchase.

This happens in several stages from awareness of a problem to be solved to learning about solutions, and then to a decision to purchase a product or service.

3. Content Ideas and Brand Voice

Next, you should generate content ideas and establish your brand.

An effective marketing content strategy requires more than just mapping out the types of content you will need to produce. In order to get prospects to pay attention, you need must to have something unique and interesting to say to get people to pay attention to your content.

So the next step is determining how to consistently generate content ideas that are unique and interesting to your ideal audience.


4. Content Calander and Work Flow

If you publish new content consistently your content marketing strategy will scale.

The formula for a great content marketing strategy is:

An outstanding content idea, plus
A high volume of content publishing, and
Consistency for a long time period


5. Measure Results

The final step is to test and measure your results.

Since content marketing is a long-term play, and you probably won’t see any immediate returns on your investment, this is tricky.

But, here are some content marketing metrics you can track to make sure your strategy is going in the right direction:

Your generating higher quality leads that close faster

Your general brand awareness has increased (more social media mentions, backlinks, brand queries, etc.)

Your website is driving more traffic

Your existing customers are staying longer and are generally happier


Some of the many benefits of having a digital marketing strategy include:

Improved efficiency

Insights

Boosted productivity

Knowing your audience

Increased ROI


You can use an action plan to set up goals, budgets, tactics, timelines, etc. With a strategy in place, you’ll have a great basis to work from and you can adapt your plans if things change. Use your strategy as a blueprint you can return to for guidance.

Following are some useful resources to stay on top of trends and developments in the area of digital marketing.



1. Newsletters

As consumers are being more vigilant about cookies for tracking, being able to connect with and influence your customer base via email marketing is vital. Here are a few popular ones.

The Daily Carnage

Neil Patel

Google Think

Search Engine Land

The Rundown AI


2. Online publications and blogs

Here are a few from the host of great online publications and blogs that offer a variety of content, from podcasts, articles, guides, and handy toolkits.

Econsultancy

Adweek

HubSpot

Search Engine Watch

CoSchedule


3. Social Media

Social media is an effective way for marketers to communicate, influence consumers, and engage. You can monitor conversations and trends, and keep an eye on your competitors.


Social media platforms are inclined to change. It could be the name or the look of the platform or the replacement of a feature.

Generally, these changes have little effect or impact on how you use them in your day-to-day activities as a social media marketer.


4. Google Trends

Google Trends and Alerts is a valuable free tool for you, as a marketer, to stay on top of the news and industry announcements. It allows you to check the web and notifies you through email when a new result matching your search query appears.


5. Podcasts and webinars

Podcasts about digital marketing and technology can be an outstanding source of news and information.


These are some thoughts and an overview of content marketing moving forward.

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