What is content marketing: The strategy that will lead you to success!

What is content marketing? Today, content marketing is vital for blogs, websites, and social media. It consists of offering informative texts to the public. However, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. On this blog, you will learn how to distribute this content efficiently. You will learn how to do it in such a way that you grab the attention of the audience and improve your visibility. Then, you will be able to measure the results.

You must take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves to attract an audience organically. Because of this, creating a content strategy isn’t as easy as it seems. This is a complex process that needs a lot of focus.

For your strategy to work, you need to fulfill some tasks and tactics. These will then become fundamental elements for your business. In the same way, these elements will work together with your content strategy, SEO, and other tools. All of which you will know how to use today.

For now, we will focus on the concept of content marketing. This way you will know what is it and how to use it correctly.

Content marketing and its importance in recent years

Content marketing belongs to the group of marketing strategies that focus on grabbing the attention of potential clients. This process must be natural, and for this to happen, one has to create relevant content. Once created, you must distribute the said content through the channels you use to promote your brand.

Before, marketing was part of the market’s strategies lives on the web. Now, it’s part of the investment that companies make to secure their online visibility.

But due to the great competition that exists on the Internet, grabbing the public’s attention isn’t as easy as it seems. Today, you must use modern strategies to get the clients you need.

Content marketing is one of the main content marketing strategies used for this. In this sense, most international marketing agencies recommend it. That’s why you need to know everything about it. Once you do, you will be able to apply it to your business.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the most effective means of engaging with your target audience. This way, you can grow your network and the number of your customers through relevant content. When you create high-quality content, it can create value for people. Thus creating a positive opinion of your brand.

How Can You Use Content Marketing Successfully?

You must understand how content marketing works and how you can get the most out of it:

 Achieve the engagement of your target audience 

Make no mistake, the public is the one who currently has the most power. That’s why you have to keep them satisfied.

They are the ones who choose, what to see, what to buy, and how to interact. As a result, you must focus on creating the content that your target audience wants.

Create valuable content

Many companies still follow the traditional rules of marketing, where they only describe their products. However, in today’s era, you must focus on what the audience wants to read. So if you want to achieve a good interaction, your content must be useful to be considered relevant.

Your content shouldn’t focus only on selling, it’s also important to highlight the benefit that the client can obtain when buying a certain product or service. The content should help the person who reads it, whether it be to resolve any doubts or to learn new information.

Your brand’s perception should be positive 

One of the main objectives when using content marketing is to get your audience to have a positive image of your brand. That’s why they should feel that through your content they can get help when they need it.

For the public, it’s easier to have sympathy and do business with brands they already know and provide a good customer experience.

Generate value for people

When you create content, in addition to being useful, you have the power to send a positive message to whoever needs it. This way you can exceed customer expectations. This is because they will find your content great and they will want to share it with other people who may also become your potential customers.

What is content marketing for?

Content marketing is part of digital marketing, and through its relevant content you can:

• Build a better bond with people.
• Increase sales.
• Position yourself in searches.
• Give solution to problems.
• Communicate values.

Marketing will always have one final goal: to obtain positive results for the company.

You can also make efficient use of content marketing to achieve this.

How can you use content marketing and inbound marketing at the same time?

When talking about digital marketing, it’s important to know that your main strategy is inbound marketing. By using this strategy in conjunction with content marketing, you can make a difference when displaying content to your target audience. Thus, to make good use of content marketing it’s essential to know how inbound works.

As said at the beginning, inbound marketing is part of marketing strategies, and it’s used to provide a good experience to the public. However, you must first grab their attention. For this, one of the objectives is to attract the public subtly, that is, leaving aside traditional strategies of aggressive advertising.

Besides, the time of the public that comes to your company must be respected. This means that you must wait for them to permit you to pass your message. This is what is known as inbound attraction marketing. A good idea is to be guided by the 4 pillars of inbound marketing.

The 4 pillars of inbound marketing

By following the inbound methodology through its 4 pillars, you will be able to make efficient use of content marketing:

Attract 

Inbound has the power to attract an audience that is really interested in your business, but first, it will be necessary to have relevant content.

Convert

The main intention is to turn visitors into leads to achieve brand awareness through content marketing.

To sell 

Your leads may be interested in your information or in the product you offer as a brand. Because of this, you must show them that your solution is better than the one offered by the competition. This way you can achieve the closing of sales.

Enchant

Don’t believe that the “Company-Client” relationship ends with the closing of the sale. The inbound methodology shows the importance of creating a lasting relationship. That’s why you must offer interesting content and personalized attention to each of them.

Goals of the inbound methodology

• Attract the public potential to build trust in them.
• Get followers who seal their loyalty to the brand.

What benefits can you get through content marketing?

Today, many companies use content marketing to reap its benefits. What are you waiting for? Your business can obtain many benefits through this tool, which is also very useful to generate value for your brand:

Traffic to your site

Every day, millions of people use the internet from their desktop computer or mobile device. This is part of the digital transformation. Because of this, the public feels more interested in looking for information through Google search results. That’s why your site becomes the main entrance for your new customers, and Google becomes the road.

When you create relevant content, you have a better chance of appearing in the first Google search results. That’s why companies use content marketing to have twice the number of visits as companies that still don’t use this tool.

Can you just imagine doing over 15 written content per month?

Brand awareness

Content production is one of the most essential elements for your website. This is the most useful means for others to get to know your brand. Also, it’s important so that the public can identify your brand as well as the products and services you offer.

A faithful reader of your blog will turn to your brand when they need a product or service to purchase. This is because they already know you, and know that you have already helped them before.

Note that it should never go unnoticed:

People have a preference for brands that are known and feel sympathy when buying. Thus the importance of “relevant content”.

Engagement 

Brand awareness can increase the number of people who have a positive concept of your brand.

Besides, engagement also allows you to build a much closer relationship with your target audience.

Through this benefit, you can create quality content as well as increase people’s interactions with your brand.

This way, the “Engagement” is created.

Market 

Most often than not, the public doesn’t really understand the type of market where you work. As a result, they often don’t know the purpose of your content or your company’s products.

To find a solution to this problem, you must create content that solves customer doubts. This way, they will decide to carry out their purchase or not. From this, they will also build a preference for your brand.

When you offer quality content, you are exceeding the expectations of customers. This is because it will allow them to know all the details and benefits of a certain product before buying it.

Sales 

All companies have a common goal: Generate sales!

However, during the content marketing process, this isn’t always the end goal.

Increasing sales has its meaning, and through this benefit, you must focus your content production to guide your leads during the purchase process. This way you will prepare them for their final decision making.

Also, business opportunities will come naturally as long as you use your content strategy efficiently. For this, you can create relevant content and add it to an editorial calendar.

This is a practice that allows you to attract your buyer persona to your website while practicing content marketing. The idea is that your potential audience finds you first instead of your competition.

How to get to the potential customer first?

To increase lead generation, you must develop content defined by the information that your buyer persona is looking for on Google. This is a good inbound marketing practice, as it will allow your potential customers to reach you in an easier way and without wasting time.

This is the easiest way to optimize the efficiency of the sales area of ​​your website.

Lead generation

Imagine that you already have a visitor on your site, but you don’t have their information yet.

Under this scenario, you won’t be able to submit the exact content to turn them into an opportunity and send it directly to a seller.

For this reason, lead generation very important. Because if it’s accompanied by a good content marketing strategy, you can get good long-term results.

Lifetime-value

The (LTV) is the total value that a client can spend in your company.

Business owners realized that it’s cheaper to sell to a current customer than to attract a new one.

Because of this, it’s very useful to use a good content strategy, since it’s the only way in which a client can remain committed to your company.

Cost reduction to acquire customers

The cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is a metric where you can detail the value of what you invest in the area of ​​marketing and sales in order to attract a new customer.

If it’s cheap to attract a new client, the income created by them will cover those expenses and also generate a percentage of profit. That’s why it’s vital for all companies to ensure that their CAC remains as low as possible.

Today, many companies have a great team in charge of the commercial area to get new sales.

Of course, these types of practices can give objective results but in most cases, a very high CAC is created. If advertising isn’t that cheap, add expensive staff, right?

Once you start to carry out a good content strategy, you can reduce your CAC. This way you can still provide quality materials to satisfy all your client’s questions before deciding on a purchase.

Through content marketing, you can also train your sales team to achieve a better conversion in your leads. Also, you can build authority in the marketplace and get many more benefits that your brand will appreciate.

How can you take advantage of all these benefits? 

By having a well-defined strategy, it’s that simple. Content marketing is not just writing a blog and voila. For your content to be relevant, it needs good planning, execution, and measurement.

How to start creating a Content Marketing Strategy?

Still, for many people, content marketing is all about writing, and writing is hard.

The reality is that this could be the smallest part of this strategy since other elements must be taken into account before creating it.

Before carrying out a content marketing strategy, you must first define the objectives. Then, you know what the strategies and metrics to evaluate will be. This planning goes a long way to get you started on the best part: content creation.

To create content, you need to put together a large number of elements. However, it must remain within the parameters of its objective, that is, what you want to obtain through your strategy. This is shaped by the path you will have to travel to reach your goals and measure your progress.

By creating content without planning, you are making a big mistake. This is because you have only wasted your time. That’s why you should know what the steps to follow so that your company uses content marketing efficiently are.

Define the goals of your Content marketing strategy

When you have clear objectives for your company, together with your team you can know what the metrics that must be accompanied by concrete actions to obtain good results are. Your strategies must focus on goals that, when achieved, bring real benefits.

Among the benefits of content marketing that may exist for your company are the following points:

• Generate brand awareness.
• Lead to the market.
• Cost per sale reduction.
• Lifetime-value increase.
• Produce sales.
• Increased engagement with your brand.

As a result, you must evaluate what are the results you must achieve while maintaining your well-defined objective. Then comes the next step in your content strategy:

Define your KPIs

A common problem that occurs among people. While some don’t know if their campaigns are performing well due to not having enough metrics, others focus too much on following the metrics. As long as the KPIs are well defined, this problem should not happen.

If you don’t measure your results, you will hardly know if you have taken the right steps to meet your goals. And if you decide to follow all metrics that exist, you will only create a lot of data information, and in the end, you won’t obtain any measurement of relevance.

To achieve a good KPI:

• There must be an important strategy.
• Make it easy to measure.
• Make it easy to understand.
• That can lead to positive action.

Then, after having set the objectives, you must define your KPI. This is because both are closely related. Let’s see some specific objectives and which KPIs can you use:

Brand awareness: 

• Visits to your website.
• The number of views on YouTube.

Market education 

• Followers on social media.
• The number of pages visited on your site.

Engagement

• Comments on the post.
• Shared on social media.

Sales generation 

• The number of sales.
• The number of leads.

Lead generation 

• Growth of base of users.
• Conversions

Lifetime-value

• Contract time per client.

Cost per sale 

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC).
• Time taken to make a sale.

As you can see, it’s important to keep your goals defined to determine the metrics that will show you if you are doing the right thing to achieve your goals.

Define your buyer persona to create your content marketing strategy

Content marketing goes hand in hand with very specific actions, among which you seek to attract specific people to your site. That is why, when carrying out your planning, it should be focused on the person you are targeting. And how is it done? Knowing the person of your interest will allow you to guide them towards the sales funnel.

You must first understand that the concept of person is very different from the concept of the target audience. The persona is the description of your ideal customer, while the target audience is the description of a demographic that you want to reach.

For the process of creating the ideal person, you must carry out interviews with your best clients. Thus, you will be able to identify which are the most common traits among them because it is certain that your new clients can have the same ones.

What should you look out for?

For the buyer persona:

• Habits.
• Needs
• Problems
• Create a character with identity.
• Definition of the ideal client.

For the target audience:

• Definition of who could be the future client.
• Characteristics.
• Consumption data.
• Description without having an identity.

Let’s see an example:

Suppose that the target audience of a certain brand of fashion lenses has made the description of women between 20 and 30 years old, who work, play sports, and like to use quality accessories to complement their outfits.

So far, this information doesn’t say much about what customers’ preferences are, or how they think and act. Because of this, the brand decides to interview one of its most loyal clients and that has the characteristics of the ideal person’s profile.

As a result of the ideal person, you can see Ashley, a 26-year-old girl who after finishing her workday, likes to run in the park, while wearing glasses to protect herself from the sun. Plus, she likes to save money and read fashion blogs to find out how to match trending fashion glasses with the comfortable clothes she already has in her closet.

By having a more detailed ideal person, you can take more concrete actions to create quality content that can be of great help to women like Ashley. Once you meet your ideal person, it will be easier for you to know the step by step that your client will follow until they make their final decision (buy).

Adapt content to the sales funnel in Content marketing strategy

Marketers have used the sales funnel for a long time. This is because it allows you to easily explain it, from the first contact made with the public until the sale is made.

Through the sales funnel, you can see that from all the people who will reach your brand, only some of them will reach the final process and become customers. Thus, you must classify in what part of the conversion you can find a future customer, and what extra efforts you need to make so that you can reach the purchase decision.

If we go the traditional way, the sales process is largely done by a sales team. But now, thanks to content marketing, this process can be more efficient because it shortens sales cycles.

Although content marketing has many bases, one of the most important is creating relevant content to engage your audience. Thus, if you want to use the content as a hook for a quality sales process, it must be made up of several stages leading directly to the funnel.

Distribution channels

After knowing how to build your ideal person and have a well-defined sales funnel, the time has come to choose the customer channel in which you want to invest. The best channel to choose from will be the one that your person uses the most and those to whom you can give more dedication.

Acquisition channels that are currently available:

Corporate blog

Those who dare to use a corporate blog have more opportunities to obtain a positive ROI for their inbound marketing.

We have already seen that inbound marketing is the foundation of content marketing. This is because it’s strong enough to create business opportunities and much more. When you use a corporate blog, all the traffic you get will be from you. This way you won’t lose your audience with traffic borrowed from another platform, as is often the case with social media.

With just one blog post, you are already driving traffic to your site.

Videos 

Including videos in your marketing strategy is one of the most powerful strategies right now. Through videos, you have the opportunity to educate your audience, while increasing your authority in the market.

Videos can bring many advantages to the initial objective that you have set for your company.

This is because they are easy to consume and can be viewed from any mobile device. Although it seems that making videos is expensive, the reality is that it can be cheaper than other strategies and will achieve a high perception of value.

Social media 

Today, most content marketing strategies are focused on social media. The main reason being that these platforms have a lot of power because they achieve audience engagement, brand awareness, sales opportunities, and much more.

Some surveys claim that the largest number of companies spend a fifth of their budget on social platforms. That’s why every year the demand for content on different social media platforms is increasing. And you have surely been able to notice that most of the companies that have worldwide recognition have a marked presence on social media.

E-mail 

For many, email marketing isn’t as important as it used to be, but this isn’t the case. In fact, it’s one of the channels with the most ROI when applying a content marketing strategy.

Like the other options, email marketing also offers many benefits for you.

Some of them being its low cost and predictability of its reach. With email marketing, you will need a tool and an analyst to know the number of people who received, opened, and clicked on your message.

Rich materials 

These are elements such as White papers, templates, and e-books, get this name thanks to their valuable content.

Through the production of rich materials, you can demonstrate the authority of your company in a specific matter. When you have the right knowledge to talk about a topic in-depth, you can show it through rich materials.

To achieve value in these materials, it’s up to you to increase your contact base and lead generation. The public does not mind overcoming some barriers, as long as it’s to get good content to which value is added.

When talking about barriers, reference is made to the registration forms as they will allow you to obtain information from your leads.

Interactive websites 

Innovation has become one of the key points of the internet. Because of this, the content has to be much more sophisticated and must live up to the expectations of users. Interactive content is a great option because it can offer a more pleasant experience to users who decide to visit your website.

Among the interactive content, you can use an e-book, an infographic, or a calculator. Through interactive websites you can enjoy several advantages:

• Higher conversion rates than those given by static websites.
• A longer time spent on the page to achieve higher SEO positioning.
• Relevant audience data for the development of more specific sales strategies.

Other options?

These are just some of the channels that you can use to take advantage of content marketing strategies.

Besides, some companies use other channels with great success so far. Webinars and SlideShare are other channels and great options, as well as offline formats such as newspapers and magazines.

Because of this, you must be, as a business owner, aware of the news that appears in the market. This way, you can discover new channels useful for your content marketing strategy to achieve success.

What is the most effective way to handle content marketing?

There are many business plans that, when executed, do not achieve the expected objective.

This is why you must stay in tune with your initial planning, as well as the frequency of creation, and most importantly, the distribution of content. During the execution process, you should, in case the need arises, make a few changes during the journey to reach your final goal.

Although it may seem a bit confusing, as long as you follow the right steps, you can efficiently use content production.

Content production

Production is the essential part to carry out a content marketing strategy. Although all companies want to have quality content, it isn’t as easy as it seems and to get good results you must invest a lot of time. Dedication is also part of this task and to make it easier, you must take into account:

Correct keywords 

Keywords, as their name says, can be words or phrases that people place when searching in Google. Because of this, they are a very important element to do SEO and appear positioned in search engines. To be successful with this step, you must search for those keywords that are most relevant to your business.

Value to the reader 

To accomplish this step, you need a content size and format that may vary on different sites. For you to keep your production-oriented, you should avoid texts that are too short or empty. Also, you should avoid unnecessarily long texts.

You can start with a 500-word text where you can answer all of your personal questions. This is long enough for you to take advantage of the benefits of Google. In this sense, it’s important to vary in terms of formats so that your audience remains interested in your content. Try podcasts, infographics, or other elements to determine which of them is most widely accepted by them.

Review 

If you have been in a constant struggle for authority, you can lose it in an instant if you display a text full of wrong spellings. That’s why it’s so important that once your content is ready, you review it as many times as necessary to make sure it is free of errors.

After writing, it’s best to wait a reasonable time to do the review.

If you do this review as soon as you type your text, many errors may go unnoticed.

Scan

Through content marketing scanning you can format your text. This way you can make it attractive on the first impression. Lists, bold, and images are just some of the items you can use to increase your scan.

Each of these resources is different. That’s why they grab attention because they tell the user that these are important points.

Thus, they need to read them. Investing in them is a great advantage, as well as synthetic paragraphs and short sentences because very large blocks of text don’t achieve a good compression.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) belongs to the main strategies of inbound marketing. Once your content is ready, to publish it, it needs to be optimized. This is the most viable way for it to be found by people.

Search engines like Google use algorithms to classify the indexed content.

Thanks to these algorithms, search engines can define which are the most relevant articles compared to others.

Content promotion 

Google is characterized by being a very efficient search engine, but it isn’t the only tool you must have so that your content can be found.

Bring your content to your target audience by encouraging them to read the text you have so dedicatedly created.

When you do a useful content promotion, you can be sure that it will influence the results of your strategy.

Social media 

Social media is considered the best acquisition channel for customers.

So apart from posting a link you need to be on a social media platform that your target audience follows.

If for example, if your audience isn’t on Instagram, why would you waste your time posting content on that platform?

Lead generation

On the subject of the sales funnel, you could see that most people who reach the content is very high.

However, you must place these people inside the funnel to work them. This way you can turn them into opportunities.

This is how the generation of leads happens. Because they show interest in your content until they provide their data such as their contact number or their email.

E-mail marketing 

This is a very powerful channel for promoting content because you can send it directly to the user through newsletters.

Take the opportunity to send content produced by your company in a space determined by you.

To get hooked on email marketing, take the opportunity to submit content that can contribute to the funnel. These supplemental materials will be helpful for your business promotion process.

Lead nurturing 

As leads are very important to your goal, you need to work on them to get through the funnel stage. That’s why we mentioned lead nutrition.

You must feed your leads interesting content to get more information from them.

You can do this by sending scheduled emails to achieve a better perception of your brand. But before you can be successful, you will need to run several tests that will determine how efficient the results can be.

Does content marketing catch your eye?

Now that you know what content marketing is and how it works, you must keep in mind that you won’t achieve good results overnight. This is a job that requires a lot of time and dedication. Understanding each of the points is also essential for you to carry out good strategies that offer you a successful result in your sales.

Did you like this post?

If you found this content very interesting, we invite you to review our blog where you will get a lot of valuable information to increase sales in your company. If you need to know more reasons to use marketing, you can contact us to help you implement a strategy that will reach you successfully.

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BluCactus will accompany you every step that your brand takes. This goes from the creation of the branding of your business to the creation of content. Our focus is on supporting you with the development of your website or the administration of your accounts on social media.

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