You may have already heard about what content marketing is. Now, every owner of an Internet business or website owner: whether it's an online store, a personal blog, or just an informational site, already knows this notion.
If, however, you are hearing about the concept of content marketing for the first time just now, reading our article, let's figure out together what content marketing is, clarifying the following aspects: how it relates to website promotion and how it influences brand recognition.
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing digital resources, such as blog posts, videos, e-books, technical and solution presentations, and a variety of other types of digital content, to provide information to target audiences.
Content marketing is critical to your search engine optimization success. To rank high in online search results, you need to create interesting, high-quality, and detailed content about your niche.
What is Content Marketing?
This working technique aims to create only such content that both search engines and potential buyers/customers will need constantly. It's about:
- deep analysis;
- researches;
- case studies;
- well-documented information;
- interactive articles;
- very easy-to-understand schematics and diagrams;
- infographics;
- and so on.
- Digital content comes in various forms such as articles, blogs, case studies, charts, ebooks, freebies, games/quizzes, social media posts/mentions, infographics, courses, lists, music, news and opinions, podcasts, reviews, toolkits, user comments, videos, infographics, and drawings.
- Choosing the most effective types of content for your content marketing campaign will depend on your goals, audience, and distribution channels.
We can assume that content marketing is in no way related to the SEO promotion of the site. Nothing more fake.
You have no interest in creating content that no one will read. At the same time, very good content, but not ranked in the search results of search engines (such as Google) is not worth much. You need both to propel your business online.
So, there is a connection between these 2 notions. By creating a very simple website, with uninteresting, irrelevant information, or copied from other sources, one cannot hope for good visibility in search engines.
The content must be able to attract customers as well as solve their problems. One can certainly write quality content using relevant keywords. This is an essential factor, by which Google determines the importance of a page for a certain topic and ranks content.
Online content marketing - website activity
- A business website is more than just an online presence.
- To appear in front of Internet users on the first page of search engines (Google, Yandex) requires optimization.
- Both media materials (images, videos) and texts on home pages, blog texts, category and product descriptions, but also some more technical elements (e.g. meta titles and descriptions) are targeted.
- Attention is drawn to the loading speed of the site and how intuitive it is to use (here it is important to be clear how the potential customer will think, what he will search for, and in what order).
- The content is in clear form, for a wide audience (both experts and people who are just getting informed, comparing options, benefits, and prices).
- The content is organized to provide maximum benefit to the visitor.
- Content is always created with the portrait of the ideal customer in mind.
- Conversion from website optimization is 7 times higher than emails/cold calls.
The main advantages of content marketing:
- You climb search engine rankings and increase your organic traffic. The more unique and quality the content on your website, the higher the search engine ranking.
- Increases sales volume. If you are the owner of an online store or sell services on your website, you should know that, usually, the customer prefers to purchase a product or service from the website from which he regularly receives useful information.
- Reputation growth. You will certainly gain the trust of your readers if you regularly provide them with the fresh, interesting, and relevant information they need. For website texts (main pages, blog texts) expertise matters enormously. The texts must be detailed, and written for those interested in the field, from the perspective of a connoisseur.
- Comprehensive texts that accurately and comprehensively answer potential visitors' questions are appreciated. Medium and long texts are welcome. For example, on an optimized site meta tags (the descriptions that appear in Google results) are intended to attract visitors to the site and must be human-oriented (while titles, another important meta tag, must contain well-chosen keywords, to be a positive signal for the motors).
- Media materials must be technically optimized and easy to assimilate from a user experience point of view.
- Only an optimized site can appear on the first page of Google! Rarely does anyone navigate beyond the first results. 90.63% of pages receive no organic search traffic from Google (*data based on a study via Ahrefs Content Explorer). Ranking on the first page is necessary to get in front of people).
Disadvantages of content marketing
The only disadvantage of content marketing is the fact that the result cannot be seen from the first days of work, but it is a long-term and sometimes very long-term activity that requires increased attention, and day-by-day work.
For those who have decided to take advantage of the advantages of content marketing, but do not know where to start, we have created a work plan.
Work plan for creating content marketing:
I. It is necessary to define the objective - the formulation of the objective will help you move clearly and deliberately towards the result, without straying at all from the goal/strategy.
II. Identify your target audience - before you start creating quality content to share, you need to decide who it will be addressed. Thus, you will determine how you will deal with your blog: what kind of articles to write, and what topics should be covered, to attract the reader.
III. Choosing the way to distribute the content – it is important to choose how the information will be communicated to the end user (via website, blog, newsletters, mass media, social networks, etc.)
IV. The frequency of publications - is also a very important point. It is necessary to define a reasonable period, which allows the reader to "digest" the information before publishing a new article.
V. Establish a person in charge - determine who will work on content creation. This can be any employee of the company, starting from the director, or you can hire a professional content-writing company.
What the content might include?
Information of any kind: be it text, audio, video, or images – all can be called content. The main purpose is to provide necessary information for website visitors, thereby bringing them closer to your brand and building brand authority, step by step.
Helpful tips on content creation:
1. Define your plans - it is necessary to systematize the content that will appear on the site so that it appears regularly.
2. The plan must be reviewed - determining the effectiveness of content marketing is quite a difficult task, because it is not a one-day project, but a long enough task, so goals must be constantly set. Let's say you want 500 unique visitors per day - if the traffic to your site is increasing every day - you are on the right track.
3. Accelerate your content creation, but without sacrificing quality - you can do more faster if you work smart, such as by using templates, for example, you have at hand what Canva.com has to offer.
4. Work in "packaged" mode - that is, you can create your content in advance for a month, thus, by working in molds, you manage to focus better on what you have to do, but also to make use of time more efficient.
We can conclude that content marketing is not just a tool of the future, but a necessity of the present! We advise you not to give up the other advertising channels - they all work together.
If you aim to maintain a strong competitive position in the search engines, you must constantly evolve, always offering customers much more than a competitor can offer!
Why does the business need content marketing?
- Marketing directs economic activity toward satisfying consumer needs and wants.
- Content created according to a marketing plan is homogeneous and delivers a central message.
- Putting the product or service offered in the foreground emphasizes the possible benefits for consumers (sales leads appear).
- A clear image of the business is created, and the brand is strengthened.
- It works multilaterally - both online and offline, covering a wider audience.
Content marketing strategy
- The marketing funnel is a map of your content marketing strategy.
- With the help of this funnel, you will be able to closely monitor the evolution of the target audience from the moment it is "cold", i.e. it does not know you yet until the same audience makes a purchase and becomes loyal to your brand, recommends the offer you to others or make multiple purchases.
The basis of coherent content marketing:
- The following key points are established, which will be in the sights of all content marketing, both online and offline:
- company/business values, goals, vision, and purpose on the market;
- product or service strengths (especially versus competitors);
- the portrait of the ideal client (to whom you want to address);
- portrait of the undesirable customer (whom you don't want to attract).
Important - customers and markets are different, and each requires an individual approach (the content is slightly reformulated):
- consumer markets, of those who buy goods and services for personal consumption or household use;
- the industrial markets where we find companies buying goods for productive use;
- resale markets – units that are bought and resold at a profit (commercial markets);
- governmental markets formed by institutions and agents that buy goods and services of public interest;
- non-profit markets, where the buyers are schools, universities, hospitals, prisons, foundations, non-governmental organizations, etc.;
- international markets, which include external buyers - consumers, producers, resellers, etc.
The link between online and offline content marketing
- In today's digital ecosystem, most of the existing promotion solutions are interdependent. Every existing service can deliver consistent results, but the best results are achieved when the promotion strategy integrates a mix of digital marketing services + traditional marketing.
- That's why when it comes to what content marketing means, although we talk a lot about online marketing, which can be implemented independently of the other promotion methods, the best results are obtained when it is integrated into the strategy and the benefits offered by the other services.