Someone has rightly said, “Good content is not storytelling. It is telling your story well.” As a result, you must focus on creating content that’s valuable to your prospects and define your goals precisely.
When you create content that appeals to your target audience, not only it boosts the visibility of your brand, but it also helps you build lasting relationships with them.
In this post, we’re going to discuss why content marketing is essential to digital marketing, along with some easy yet effective ways to improve it.
So, without any further delay, let’s get started!
Importance of content in digital marketing
If you have been hanging around cyberspace for a few years, you must have heard the phrase, “content is king.” Although most businesses use content marketing to set themselves apart from their competitors, today, it has now turned into a necessity for all online
Content is a versatile marketing medium that helps businesses in a lot of ways. It would be right to say that “digital marketing without quality and relevant content is a lot like a car without an engine – it won’t move at all”!
If you search, you will find that behind every successful digital marketing strategy, content is a crucial element. Coca-Cola, Cox Media Group, Red Bull, Xerox, and Expedia are a few examples of businesses that have been using content marketing in a bit different way to stay in touch with their audience.
Are you still wondering why content marketing is essential?
To help you better understand its importance, we have put together some top benefits that content marketing can provide your business.
It boosts brand reputation
Content marketing is quite helpful in improving brand reputation. In the modern digital marketplace, every business must build trust with their prospects and existing customers. After all, building trust helps a company create a positive brand reputation.
Quality content helps you build trust with your customers. When people read your content, they start making an opinion of your brand. If they find your content valuable, educational, and engaging, they start thinking the same about your business. It means the more value you provide to your content, the easier it will be to establish trust with your customers. According to a stat, 78% of people trust a brand that creates more relevant content.
Besides this, when your target audience sees that you’re regularly publishing valuable content across different platforms, they might come to see you as a master in your respective industry. Perhaps this is the reason, around 60% of advertisers create at least one piece of content each day.
It influences conversion
Content marketing has a significant role when it comes to conversion. The following stats are adequate to show you the importance of content marketing in improving conversions.
- More than 61% of online buyers in the United States decide to purchase after reading recommendations on a blog. (Content Marketing Institute)
- According to 72% of businesses reviewed, video content has the potential to provide a high return on investment and increase conversions to a great extent. (CrazyEgg)
- Content marketing generates three times more leads than outbound marketing and costs 62% less. (Content Marketing Institute)
It helps you improve your SEO efforts
Some online marketers consider content marketing and SEO to be entirely different strategies but opposed to this belief, both content marketing and SEO are interconnected and complement each other.
SEO plays a significant role in enhancing the visibility of your brand. However, if you want to improve SEO, you will need to create optimized content. In the absence of high-quality content, you can’t receive all the advantages of SEO.
Remember, quality content helps you generate a high click-through rate (CTR), and quality backlinks. In addition to this, it also enables you to provide a great user experience.
For better SEO, content is worth optimizing. Don’t forget, 95% of internet users look at the first three pages of search results only. If you don’t have SEO-optimized content on your website, it won’t be easier for your website to get good ranking over search engine results.
An affordable way to ear new leads
If you rely on consistent traffic to boost your sales, you can’t overlook the importance of content marketing in lead generation. If you’re able to target the right audience and produce value-added content, you can bring in new leads with your content. Did you know that 60% of people are encouraged to buy a product or service when they read fantastic content?
Content marketing is not just great for lead generation, but it is affordable as well. It generates three times more conversion than traditional marketing but costs 62% less.
The benefits of content in digital marketing are endless, but you must know how to use it for maximum effectiveness. Below, we have accumulated some ways to improve content marketing in 2020.
How to improve content marketing
Create quality content for every phase of the customer journey
If you want to get the desired results, you must provide your potential customers with valuable content at the right time and place during the customer journey.
At each stage of the purchase cycle, usually known as a sales funnel, you must deliver relevant content to your customers. Most marketing experts focus their content marketing efforts in the awareness and consideration phases.
Have a look at the following illustration to find the suggested content types according to different stages.
Get to know your target audience
Before you create any content, you must know your audience precisely. Are you targeting IT professionals? Or maybe your audience is working women or new mothers? Make it clear who your target audience is and create content for them accordingly. Also, understand your motive to create content. It will help you create content that supports your goal. Although a piece of content can serve multiple purposes, you must have a goal in mind when creating it.
Tips to find your target audience.
- Create readers personas
- Use Google Analytics
- Find your target audience on social media using insights
- Run an annual audience survey
- Monitor your social activity
Vary the format of your content
There are plenty of ways you can produce compelling content. Some of the recommended content formats include:
- How-to: This format helps you teach your audience about your product and service.
- Listicle: It lets you organize your content in a list — for instance, the top 10, 5 steps, and more.
- Q& A: You can interview someone from your industry.
- Survey: Survey your readers
- Explanatory: Explain what your product or service is about
Create personalized content
Nowadays, people respond better to personalized content as it makes them feel that their interests and preferences are being taken into account. As per your convenience, you can create personalized content in any form, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, and case studies.
Tips for creating personalized content.
- Create a vision
First of all, you must think, what is it you want to achieve – leads, brand awareness, or customer loyalty?
- Get data about your target audience
Until you know your audience, you can't deliver them a personalized experience. Get to know your customer's behavior, lifestyle, demographics, and personas.
You can compile data of your customers by looking into social media, surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, and website analytics. Also, check out the search results; your potential customers are making in search engines and create content around that.
In case you're targeting overseas audience, you can use VPN software to find out their organic search results. Virtual Private Network lets you see the actual SERPs of a particular location.
- Create the right content
Once you have gathered adequate information about the likes and dislikes of your target audience, it is time to create the quality content.
Make sure your content is easy to read and soaked in value. Also, put your content in the right format.
Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group, talks about how businesses should deliver the right piece of content to the right audience at the right time. You may listen to his webinar for free here.
Don’t overlook video content in 2020
Today, video content has become more critical than ever before – thanks to platforms like YouTube and social media. According to a stat, each day, more than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube. Perhaps, this is the reason, around 87% of online marketers are using video content in their digital marketing strategy.
Quick tips for creating a killer video content strategy
- Keep the title of your video informative and as short as possible. Also, add relevant keywords in the description of your video and include a link to your web page.
- To get more views and increase conversion, use social proof. However, don't forget to build trust and credibility between you and your audience. There are plenty of ways you can do that. For instance, you can provide testimonial videos, case studies from your past customers.
- Optimize your video. Include a clear call-to-action depending on your objective.
- Look for the right video distribution channels and convey your content to the perfect audience. Depending on which is better for you, you can use your video content on your site, upload it to YouTube, embed it into emails, or simply create Slideshares.
- Engage with your viewers, and promote your videos with paid advertising tools
- Analyze your video performance with the help of tools like Google Analytics and YouTube Analytics.
Create a content calendar
If the content is king, consistency is queen. Remember that it takes time to achieve results with content marketing, and you need to consistently deliver exceptional experiences to your audience.
With a sound content calendar, you can plan your content publishing at your preferable periodicity. Some of the significant details your content marketing calendar must include:
- Members responsible for content creation
- Stage of the sales funnel
- Format of content
- Due dates for content's draft
- Date of publishing content
- Promotion channels
You may use the Google Drive sheet to create a content calendar.
Conclusion
No matter in which form it is – blog posts, videos, images, or podcasts, content is crucial to your digital marketing.
Good content has the potential to take your marketing efforts to the next level. From improving visibility to increasing brand awareness to building authority and credibility, content marketing plays a big role in the success of your digital marketing. It would not be wrong to say that content marketing is the backbone of any digital marketing campaign.
In this post, we made you familiar with the importance of content marketing in digital marketing and some amazing ways to improve it.
