Building your brand online takes time, especially when you’re competing with the countless other brands offering the same product or service as you.
How do you stand out from the crowd, improve your Google rank, and attract new customers? Content marketing.
Content marketing is a marketing strategy used to attract customers through the distribution and publication of valuable content online. Valuable content can be anything from blog posts, articles, pictures, or videos.
What’s the Purpose of Content Marketing?
The purpose of creating this content is to help reach a wider audience of your preferred consumer base and convert them into customers.
Content marketing can help to spread brand visibility, improve your SEO ranking, and help you be seen as an authority in your market.
But creating the right kind of content is key to how successful your content marketing strategy will be.
Check out our tips below for creating an effective content marketing strategy that will help your business grow and increase your conversion rate.
Keep a Goal in Mind
Make sure the content you publish has a clear business goal in mind. It’s great that you’re getting tons of likes on your Instagram posts, but likes don’t necessarily convert to sales.
There should be clear intent behind every piece of content you create. Your content should be relevant to your brand as well as your customers wants and needs. You should be able to identify your audience and create content that caters to them.
Then be sure that content ties into your business and helps to advertise what you are trying to sell. The goal behind content marketing is to eventually increase sales, after all.
Consider your buyer’s journey
Content marketing is about attracting new customers as well as convincing hesitant buyers to follow through with their purchase.
For example, a customer may be hesitant to buy one of your products because they think it is too complicated to use. To absolve their concerns, you could create a video showing just how easy it is to use your product when used correctly.
Similarly, a customer may be hesitant to buy a fashion accessory because they’re unsure of how to style it. Create a video or photo stream of multiple ways customers can style your accessory with their outfits.
Thinking about your buyer’s journey will give you ideas for creating valuable content.
Write Informative Content
If you’re producing written content in the hopes of ranking higher in Google search, long form content performs better than short form.
But your content shouldn’t be written for the sake of having words on paper. A “fluff” piece provides no real value to the reader and won’t help you to attain topical authority.
Instead, your long form content should focus on one main topic and provide in-depth information on that topic. Readers should walk away from your post or article with all their questions answered.
Additionally, your long form content should focus on only one or two relevant keywords. Doing so will strengthen your topical authority and leave you with more keywords to target in other written content.
Repurpose Content
Nowadays, there are so many ways to obtain information. Consumers can choose between blogs, articles, books, social media, video content, podcasts, and more.
Repurposing your content into different types of media allows you to reach a larger audience.
Say for example you wrote a blog post that got a lot of attention. If people liked reading your post, there’s a good chance they might like watching a YouTube video about the same topic. And if they like the video, why not turn it into a podcast for people who don’t watch YouTube to discover your valuable content?
Repurposing content is a great strategy to increase your visibility across all platforms and attract new customers.
Personalize Your Website Content
Personalizing your users shopping experience through your website content allows you to better target your products to the right customers.
By tracking your customers’ online behavior on your website, you get a better picture of their wants and needs.
For example, you could optimize your website to suggest certain products to customers that have previously bought or searched for similar products on your website. There’s a higher chance that person will become a repeat customer if they are being offered products, they are interested in versus ones they have no interest in.
On your website you have complete control over what your customer sees based on their previous behavior.
Better yet, you don’t have to implement personalization manually. There are plenty of personalization software that will trigger certain actions, send personalized emails, and show certain content by tracking your customers previous shopping habis.
Use Data To Attract Attention
Using real life data and statistics to support the efficacy or importance of your product or business is a great way to attract attention and strengthen your points.
For example, say you are a company that sells organic produce wash. In your marketing, you could include a statistic about why thoroughly washing your produce is so important. Maybe you could include a statement like “more than 60 percent of Americans will contract a parasite from improperly washed produce every year” (Totally made-up statistic we’re using to prove a point).
Using data, if it’s relevant and accurate data, is a great way to catch your customers attention and help them understand how your product can benefit them
Optimize Your Content
The user experience is vital to engaging your customers and converting their engagement into sales.
Make sure your website and selling platforms are optimized for the best user experience.
A buggy website that takes forever to load, a disorganized homepage that is difficult for visitors to engage with, or a website that is not optimized for mobile use is a sure-fire way to turn off potential customers. You could have the best content ever but if your user experience sucks, then no one will want to stick around for it.
The Takeaway
Content marketing strategies are ever evolving but rest assure that content marketing is here to stay.
Providing valuable content to your customers is not just about increasing your sales. It’s about creating trust between you and your consumer base and establishing yourself as a brand that cares about their customers.
Content marketing is a long-term strategy that will help you build a loyal customer base that will sing your praises and do your marketing for you.
Whitney is a content writer for DeWitt’s Media, Inc. She is all about facts when it comes to producing digital marketing content. The best thing about reading Whitney’s content is that it’s up to par and not full of misleading information. Her goal is to focus on what actually works and share this with our readers.
Expert Review By Tyler DeWitt
A Top Performing Marketing Executive, Consultant, and Speaker.
Tyler’s success at helping clients scale has resulted in numerous speaking engagements. Tyler has spoken for numerous tradeshows including DigiMarCon which is one of the world’s largest digital marketing conferences.
Read Tyler’s BIO