Think about what will happen if a business creates innovative, engaging content? One thing is for sure, it will help build trust among audiences and yield success in the long haul. That's why it's advised that even new businesses should implement a solid content strategy from the very start

This is because you published the kind of content that helps your target audience and convinces them to take action.

But, there is a larger problem to tackle here. In order to achieve the desired results, you must know how to build a content strategy that is going to be successful.

If the content marketing statistics of 2020 are to be believed, 38% of content marketers thought that their content marketing strategy was Average'. Only 9% rated their strategy as Excellent'. The data clearly shows that several businesses are struggling to develop a winning content strategy.

To develop a successful strategy, you are required to set goals, learn about your audience, and map out how a buyer will interact with the content you produce and publish. To help you through this process, we have created this guide.

The Guide to a Creating a Successful Content Strategy

For a better understanding, let us first define content strategy. A content strategy is defined as the ongoing process of converting your business goals and objectives into a plan in which content is used as the primary means to attain those goals.

Let’s take an example to understand the content strategy to simplify things further. Let’s suppose one of your business goals is to increase brand awareness (for the ultimate aim of driving revenue). After you develop a solid understanding of your audience, you can execute this content strategy to reach your goal:

• Focusing on your story: To increase brand awareness, one of the best content topics is your business’s story. Write about where you started, what your beliefs are, how you succeeded, and so on. Because of this content, your potential customers are going to connect with you on a personal level.
• Choosing your channels: Many types of content work well in increasing brand awareness. These include:
• ‍Blog posts: Blogs are an excellent channel for driving traffic to your website. They help you become a trustable source in your industry if you keep posting them on a regular basis.‍
• Videos: This type of content can help you in many ways to increase brand awareness. For instance, you can tell your potential customers how you function with the help of videos.‍
• Downloadable guides: We all love anything that’s free, right? If you advertise a free guide that people can download, it will definitely work in your favor.

Now, it is time to know how to create a content marketing strategy. But before that, you are required to answer some questions to nudge your content strategy in the correct direction and ensure it is best positioned to achieve your goals. This means, at this stage, you are required to do some research. After all, research is a crucial step in any strategic endeavor.

Here's a list of questions to ask:

1. Who Will Be Your Target Audience?

The first question you need to ask yourself is ā who will be reading your content? Also, as your content strategy can definitely cater to more than one type of reader, you need to determine the number of audiences you will be creating content for.

Now, you may also wonder how you will deliver content to these respective audiences. But, you don't need to worry about that. There are so many content types and channels to help you engage every type of customer your company does business with.

2. What Problem Are You Solving?

Ideally, your service or product should solve a problem that you are aware your audience has. Hence, the content you produce should coach your audience regarding that problem which will, in turn, help them recognize and address it.

It is important to note that a smart content strategy helps two categories of people:

1) Those who are still finding out their main challenges

2) Those who are using your product to tackle those challenges.

3. What Makes You Different?

Your potential customers must know what makes you different or better than your competitors. So that you can prove why people should choose you, you need to show them why you are worth listening to. This is where content' comes to your aid.

4. What Are your Main KPIs?

You are required to evaluate the success of your program before developing a content strategy. Ask yourself questions such as - do you want to generate leads? Do you wish for more page views? Are you looking for a boost in subscribers?

As content marketing is a long-term strategy, it is difficult to track its success. So, there is an entire list of KPIs that helps you know whether you are on the road to a successful marketing strategy. Some of them are listed below:

• Overall traffic: It is essential to track this metric because it tells you the number of visitors coming to your site and the posts that attract them. When you know this information, you then get an idea of the kind of content you must continue to produce.

• Click-through rate of internal links: Click-through rate is important to check as well. If some content has a higher CTR, you must examine it to see what is the reason for its high performance. This information can help you apply the same principles throughout your content.

• Social shares: These help to measure the engagement that your content is creating.

5. How Often Do you Want to Publish?

Ask yourself - how often will you be able to publish? Will it be daily or weekly? What will be your plan of action in a situation where your team is not able to publish the way you had planned?

6. How Often Will You Revisit Your Strategy?

Because of the ever-changing nature of the marketing industry, your strategy must be revisited and tweaked accordingly. Some of the questions you need to ask yourself at this juncture are ā how many times in a year will you evaluate your strategy's success? How many changes would you be willing to make? And so on.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy?

Now that you have answers to all the important questions, it is time that you get to know the specifics of how to develop your content marketing plan.

At this stage, it is important for you to know that there is no grand solution that any business can follow when we talk about content strategy. The strategy that you develop will be unique as per your situation. However, there are a few tactics that will steer you in the right direction. Let's discuss them one by one:

1. Set Your Goals

Start with a definitive objective. Doing so will help you stay focused and prevent you from publishing content just for the sake of it. Also, during this stage, ensure that your analytics are set up. It will allow you to track potential metrics such as social media shares, page views, and e-commerce conversions in your analytics tools.

Image Source

2. Conduct Persona Research

In order to craft a successful content strategy, you are required to determine your buyer's persona, which is also called your content's target audience. This is particularly crucial for those who are new to marketing. When you are aware of your target audience, you are able to produce relevant content that they would want to read and subsequently convert on.

In case you are an experienced marketer, you must revisit your audience parameters annually. This is because your target may have changed. You may have to re-evaluate if you wish to expand your existing target market or target a fresh group of people. Such a step is of paramount importance when it comes to growing your audience.

3. Research the Relevant Keywords

Now that you have clearly defined your target audience, you need to meticulously research the keywords that hold relevance to your target audience. There are a lot of tools to help you find keywords that will ultimately become the backbone of the content that you produce. So, ensure you research keywords that help you get higher SEO rankings for your business.

Let’s discuss some of the ways in which you can research relevant keywords:

a. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest produces keyword ideas from the search suggestions of Google. You can enter a keyword and Ubersuggest will find long-tail keywords of the term you typed in.

Now, you may wonder what are long-tail keywords. These are search terms with relatively low competition levels and search volume. These are longer in length (more than 3 words), such as “inexpensive life insurance for elderly people” and “order vitamin B12 capsules online.”

b. SEMRush

If you want an excellent recommendation for a paid keyword tool, go for SEMrush. The tool saves a lot of time in your keyword research. Just enter the website of your competitor in Google and examine the list of keywords they rank for. That's it; you can use this ready list of keywords for your own website.

4. Check the Competition

Once you are armed with the knowledge of your target audience and the relevant keywords, now is the time to analyze your competitor's content. This means a thorough examination of the keywords and areas they rank for. Check for the topics, length of content, and the keywords on their site and different distribution channels. In case you spot the areas where you can fill the gaps and offer better value to your audience, use it to your advantage.

5. Choose the Right Channels

The countless amount of distribution channels can seem overwhelming at first. However, it is recommended that you choose a few channels for content distribution, such as a YouTube channel and a blog. This allows the company to concentrate on distribution to the right audience using the right channels.

The channels for distributing your content will differ based on your resources and audience. The categories in which most distribution channels are:

1. Owned media channels: Owned media are the channels that belong to you, so you have control over your published content. It applies to your site, social media accounts, company’s blog, email newsletters, etc.
2. Earned media channels: Earned media channels are also known as shared channels. Earned media is like free advertising. It can range from a press release about your company to a person talking on social media about the products you offer.
3. Paid distribution channels: Paid channels cover media that needs payment for distributing content. Usually, they include paid influencer content, social ads, sponsored content, and PPC advertising.

Image Source

6. Brainstorm Content Ideas

Based on the information you have gathered in order to understand your target audience and competitors, you are now in the position to brainstorm content ideas.

At this point, you can determine the type of content you want. Check what type of content will best serve your purpose.

Tip: For example, if you want your audience to constantly visit your website, going for a recurring schedule of quality blog posts can be a step in the right direction. On the other hand, if you want to showcase how your products work, you can shoot engaging videos for the same.

At the time of brainstorming, don't be afraid to try something new as long as it is backed by research. Build a list of ways that will help serve your purpose and execute your research. Then, narrow it down to the ones that will ultimately work the best.

To help you further in deciding the content types you can choose to execute your purpose, consider these pointers:

Social media content helps connect with younger audiences

Blog posts work well in informing your audience and driving traffic for your site.

Digital media, such as videos and infographics are brilliant ways to engage the audience in a way that they won’t easily forget.

7. Create an Editorial Calendar

Last but not the least, comes the aspect of publishing and managing your content. With an editorial calendar, you will be able to publish a diverse content library on your site. An editorial calendar will help you iron out the details of when and where the content will be made available. It not only helps you keep track of your content, but also ensures that you are consistent in publishing content.

In addition to this, you need to create a social media content calendar so that you can promote as well as manage content on various other sites.

Tip: It is important to go for evergreen ideas i.e. the ideas that will always be relevant. However, you must not ignore timely topics as they help produce spikes of traffic even when they don't form the bulk of your calendar. Keep in mind some niche holidays that will be of interest to your audience at the time of planning the calendar.

Bottomline

It takes a lot of planning and brainpower to devise a perfect content marketing plan. To simplify the entire process, ensure that you always focus on your audience and its needs while developing your strategy. Trust us, if you follow this approach, your audiences will certainly reward your website with page shares and views, with many of them ultimately investing in your business.

When you have a solid marketing plan in place for your business, you have already taken the first step towards gaining an advantage over your competitors.

Now, Happy strategizing!

Content marketing has come a long way since its early days when it was primarily about blogs and keywords. Now, you need to understand “content strategy” and its various elements to get it right.

Here we discuss all content marketing essentials that can help both beginners and seasoned marketers. However, if you are already familiar with it, feel free to look at the contents first and jump to the relevant sections.

Table of Contents

• What is Content Marketing
• Elements of Content Marketing
• Content Creation
• Content Distribution
• Customer Retention
• Active Sales Funnel
• Types of Content Marketing
• Blogs and Articles
• Infographics
• eBooks and White Papers
• How to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy
• Set Goals
• Identify Your Target Buyer Persona
• Audit Your Existing Content
• Research Top-Performing Content Across Industry
• Create a Distribution Plan
• Implement
• Measure and Tweak Your Strategy  
• Content Marketing Essentials
• SEO Tools for Keyword Research
• Content Research Tool
• Editorial Calendar
• Writing
• Distribution
• Analytics

Let’s start with a fantastic example of what content marketing can accomplish when done right.

In the 19th century, when the automobile industry was in its nascent stage, there were only 3000 cars in France. André Jules Michelin and Édouard Michelin sold tires for vehicles but were thwarted by insufficient demand. The only way for them to push sales was by getting more cars on the road. It involved inspiring and educating people to travel by car more frequently and make it a part of their daily life.

The Michelin brothers came out with an innovative strategy. They started promoting tourism instead of tires and published a travel guide for France’s vehicle owners and travelers. The guide mentioned the best restaurants, motels, and hotels in France’s various locations. However, it offered a lot more than a regular directory. It shared road maps to help the drivers navigate, listed various repair shops and gas stations, provided tire repair and replacement instructions, and introduced star ratings for listed businesses. The brothers named it the Michelin Guide; it is one of the first recorded examples of content marketing in history.

The Michelin Guide is not just one guidebook. It’s a series of guidebooks that the French tire company has been publishing annually for the last 120 years. The first edition was published in 1900, and it sold nearly 35000 copies. Today, it is widely considered the oldest travel guide for Europe. It is also among the most popular restaurant rating systems globally. The guide accords eateries ratings between 1 to 3 Michelin stars depending on their level of excellence. It is so definitive and influential in Europe that a variation of just one star can significantly impact a restaurant’s success. To get a Michelin star is a matter of great pride for every restaurant. If a place gets three stars, it means they offer exceptional, world-class food.

That's what effective content marketing can do.

Despite the complexity involved, content marketing is pretty simple if you stick to the basics. All you need to do is consistently create and distribute relevant and educational content for your target audience.

In essence, content marketing should:

1. Solve your audience’s problems
2. Add some sort of value to their life
3. Build trust and authority

Elements of Content Marketing

It is the easiest and yet the most powerful way to help a potential customer navigate the buyer's journey. Effective content marketing makes it easier for them to trust your brand and make a purchase decision. Here are four key elements you should consider when creating content marketing strategies to boost sales:

1. Content Creation

You can't expect great results from content marketing quickly. It is most effective when you regularly post and publish relevant content to forge strong relationships with your audience.

Your marketing approach should address your prospective buyers' problems. You need to educate them about the possible solutions. More than closing sales, it should be about making life easier for your audience. However, you need to go through trial and error to learn the different aspects of content marketing.

2. Content Distribution

With information overload and almost 3 million blogs published every day, you need a robust content distribution system to target your core audience. Social media is a powerful medium to distribute your content to a diverse audience. Therefore, make sure your content is easy to share.

Consider using a social media management platform to help you streamline your content marketing processes, analyze your performance, and manage all your social media accounts in just one place.

You can also try content syndication. While syndicating, you will republish your content on third-party websites in your niche to reach a wider audience.

An example of article syndication. The original article was published on LinkedIn.

3. Customer Retention

Knowing your audience’s buyer persona is crucial in creating relevant content. However, to deliver the right kind of content at the right time, you should also be familiar with:

1. The sales process
2. The key factors buyers consider when making a purchase decision
3. Your audience’s problems and pain points

This information is incredibly useful in creating content that resonates with your audiences. Sales is not a one-time activity. Your job is not done after you've closed the first sale. Instead, it is only the beginning of a long relationship with your customer.

Tip: Your ability to generate relevant and valuable content will decide how long your customers will stay with you. You can also use content to provide after-sales support.

4. Active Sales Funnel

Content marketing offers many benefits but its core objective is to educate and nurture leads, move them across the sales funnel, and help the potential customer make a purchase decision. To achieve this end goal, a content marketer uses well-conceived, data-driven, and original content.

Google algorithms are constantly updating themselves to find the most useful content for online searchers. So, the more useful content you create, the higher your chances of ranking on top. Once you start ranking high on search engines, you will attract more visitors to your site, resulting in increased sales. It also means more people in your sales funnel, whom you can nurture with good content and personal interactions. Creating high-quality content for a sales funnel's various stages is an essential part of content marketing.

Tip: Well-written, data-driven, and original content will help you achieve your business goals. The more useful content you create, the higher you will rank in search engine results.

Types of Content Marketing

1. Blogs and Articles

Text-based content, such as blogs, is quick to read and easy to understand. It is also the least expensive to produce as compared to videos and podcasts that need costly editing software. But since text-based content is visually less appealing and engaging than videos, you must find creative ways to make it more interesting.

Tip: Break complex ideas into bite-sized chunks for easier understanding.Ā

Here are a few tips to help you write engaging blogs:

1. Share your stories
2. Provide useful content
3. Experiment with your topics
4. Use compelling headlines
5. Get to the point quickly
6. Write short sentences
7. Focus on flow
8. Promote your posts

Tip: Readers love blogs that are readable, skimmable, and easy to navigate. Use lists, subheadings, tips, graphics, data, and visual elements to create unique content.

2. Infographics

Infographics and picture messages are three times more popular than any other type of content for likes and shares. Their visual appeal catches the attention of the reader instantly. Graphics make complex information easy to process and learn from. You can combine several infographics into an animated GIF to make it even more exciting and useful.

Apart from the design, it’s crucial how you present information in an infographic. It will be much more impactful if you show infographics in easily digestible chunks or in a story format. Your infographic should:

1. Be easy to understand
2. Be visually appealing
3. Be clutter-free
4. Provide digestible information
5. Use storytelling to explain complex concepts

3. eBooks and White Papers

They help develop an in-depth understanding of the product or service. The tone and approach of eBooks and white papers differ from a regular blog or video; they are created mainly for research and analysis.

Most such content is created in PDF format; data, graphics, and stats support it. You can also make this content available on your website in exchange for the readers' contacts using an opt-in page; readers are generally keen to consume free educational content. However, be mindful of the design layout and the presentation when creating this type of content.

Creating an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

To create an effective content marketing strategy:

1. Set Goals

Different businesses have varied business goals, and you should shape your content marketing strategy accordingly. A strategy that's data-driven, goal-oriented, and backed by proper market research will give you an edge over your competitors. Define your target market and focus on your competition. You can use several tools such as SpyFu, BuzzSumo, and SEMRush, for competition analysis.

2. Identify Your Target Buyer Persona

To identify who your real buyers are:

A. Pay attention to their demographics, pain points, job profile, income, lifestyle, buying behavior, and culture.
B. Map their buyer’s journey right from the awareness and introduction stage to the final conversion/purchase stage.
C. Use empathy to give correct information about your products or services across the sales funnel’s different stages.

3. Audit Your Existing Content

All types of content are not equally impactful. You need to perform an audit regularly to figure out which content is performing well. Your content's success will give you a foundation on which you can base future strategies. Apart from performance, audit your blogs to double-check format, layout, design, process, relevance, and the target audience. Use crucial metrics such as shares and page views to find the content that works the best for your website.

4. Research Top-Performing Content Across Industry

Competitor analysis is a great way to discover the kind of content you should create. Run audits across your niche and take insights from well-performing competitor blogs. It will help you shape your overall content strategy. You can find the best global content in your niche using the following steps:

1. Perform competitor analysis
2. Research the top keywords your competitors are focusing on
3. Figure out the keywords you want to rank for
4. Find the leading global content for those keywords
5. Study the factors that contribute to better-ranking content; apply them
6. Generate topics

5. Create a Distribution Plan

Content distribution is as important as its creation. Even the best quality content is of no use if it's not distributed properly and fails to reach the right audience. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube are powerful distribution channels; use them. You can also make use of email marketing to distribute your content.

6. Implement

Once you have content topics, keywords, and a strategy, gather the necessary personnel (content strategists, writers, graphic designers) and marketing tools to implement your plans. The right people and effective content marketing and SEO tools will help you research, write, and present important information in an interesting way.

7. Measure and Tweak Your Strategy

You need to measure your content marketing performance and constantly tweak it to get the best results. The key metrics are conversion, social shares, traffic, brand interest, and built links. Continuous tweaking and optimization will help you create a laser-sharp strategy that can do wonders for your brand.

Content Marketing Essentials

The following can help you market your content effectively:

1. SEO Tools for Keyword Research

Finding the right keywords is the key to success in content marketing. To research the best keywords, you can use tools like MozPro, Ahrefs, WooRank, SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner, and Google Search Console.

2. Content Research Tools

To get fresh ideas to create new content, you need various metrics such as built links, page views, and social shares. You can get these insights through tools such as BuzzSumo and Ahrefs.

3. Editorial Calendar

Create an editorial calendar to plan content and schedule publishing. It will streamline your marketing, make it smooth and consistent, and help you achieve the best results from the content created to target the audiences at the sales funnel's various stages. It will also make it easy to edit, publish, promote, and update old content.

4. Writing

You can use Grammarly, WriterP, SEO writing assistant tool, Evernote, Milanote, and Ulysses to make your writing more impactful and engaging.

5. Distribution

Social distribution tools such as HootSuite, Buffer, and AgoraPulse will make using multiple accounts and social media platforms a breeze. You can use tools like MailChimp or Infusionsoft for email marketing.

6. Analytics

Google Analytics can give you insightful reports on how your website is performing. You can use it to analyze your website's traffic pattern, and measure the performance of your content marketing and SEO campaigns. You can also use metrics such as bounce rate, user engagement, page visits, clicks, and pageviews to formulate recommendations on your SEO and content marketing strategies.

How do you feel when you are watching an interesting YouTube video and the video is interrupted by an ad?  The ads can keep interrupting the video more than just the one time, potentially spoiling your viewing experience.

‍

People generally don’t like to watch or pay attention to intrusive ads. It becomes even more prevalent in the wake of shrinking attention spans and the overall slump in the reach of social media channels. Emerging competition and loss of public trust maybe some of the reasons behind it. ROAS (return on ad spend) on Facebook advertising decreased from an index value of two in April 2018 to below 0.5 in the following months after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

‍

You may also lose your ROAS if your ads are not hitting the mark. So, marketers are always on the lookout for more sustainable options to ensure that their marketing efforts are paying off.

If you are seeing your ROI decreasing, divert a part of your marketing spend to content marketing and create authoritative, persuasive, and thought-provoking content that triggers an emotional response.

What is Content Marketing?

With the declining effectiveness of traditional marketing, marketers the world over are switching to content marketing.Ā

Below you can see the definition of content marketing according to Content Marketing Institute, an online resource for everything related to content marketing.

Why Content Marketing?

Here are a few stats that will blow your mind.

1. Businesses leveraging blogging as their content marketing weapon are 13 times more likely to see positive marketing ROI.
2. According to a Content Marketing Institute study, 200 million people now use ad blockers
3. Content marketing leaders experience 7.8 times more site traffic than non-leaders.
4. According to a 2015 IBM digital experience survey, 56% of marketers believe that personalized content promotes higher engagement rates.
5. According to a Demand Metric study, content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing but it generates more than three times as many leads.
6. According to a Content Marketing Institute study, 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing in their marketing strategies.
7. Content marketing adaptors have nearly six times higher conversion rates than their competitors.

Businesses have now woken up to the importance and effectiveness of content marketing. Here are a few benefits of content marketing every marketer should know.

1. Less Annoying and More Engaging

Content marketing provides value, and it's not as annoyingā  compared to intrusive ads. Traditional advertising is losing steam and digital advertising is facing many challenges including attention span issues and people using ad blockers.Ā

According to a 2016 Google survey, 600 million devices were using ad blocking software programs worldwide. This trend is likely to grow in the future. Content marketing provides a better and more sustainable alternative to digital ads. There is no need to divert all your marketing spend on ads when you can achieve better and long-term results by creating engaging content according to the interest of your target audience. People love to read blogs and watch YouTube videos related to the topics they find interesting.

2. Enables You to Use Education to Engage

There are many brands that are successfully pitching product information to educate their audience and to encourage them to purchase. There is a psychology behind what drives people to purchase and more and more companies are now using that to their advantage.Ā

Whole Foods is a brand that offers healthy organic food, not necessarily a unique segment. They do content marketing through their community blog which shares delicious recipes along with stunning photos of ingredients and many other things that might be interesting for their audience such as tips to keep kids healthy and spotlights on new local vendors.Ā

They take this educational value one step further to their brick-and-mortar stores where they put posters explaining things like seafood safety recommendations and the source and taste of a variety of mushrooms they offer.

Similarly, Stanford University uses an educational approach to capture the attention of their audience on Facebook, YouTube, and their customized app. They target people who are interested in higher education either for themselves or for their children. To create excitement, they share studentsā€™ work and experiences and allow their teachers to interact with their fans, answer their queries, and provide on-the-go resources for current and future students.Ā

It is time-consuming to create educational content but it pays off in the long run because you build a navigable library of evergreen content which helps in raising brand awareness.

3. Creates a Sense of Reciprocity and Gratitude

When someone offers valuable content for free, they create a sense of reciprocity and gratitude and their audience tries to pay it back by buying their products and services. It also creates brand affinity and trust which helps you to be on their mind. Ann Handley of the MarketingProfs fame, often quotes her friend, Tom Fishburne, The best marketing doesn't feel like marketingā .Ā

When we talk about human behavior, reciprocity triggers the sense of indebtedness in return for an unexpected favor, which brands use by providing free educational content that helps them solve a problem. Gratitude related reciprocal behaviors are an important element of relationship marketing and it affects performance outcomes.

4. Attracts Customers Without Paying a Single Penny

While advertising online, you attract traffic by paying money for it. On the flip side, by creating custom content for different customer segments, you create fresh pieces of content that keep on engaging and bring the readers one step closer to the final stage in the sales funnel. These content pieces act like free online ads that arenā€™t intrusive and posted for a long time.

5. Improves SEO and Delivers Traffic for a Lifetime

Content marketing is not fleeting and transactional as it aims to build long-term relationships. The essential element of content marketing is to keep a conversation going. Since the content we create addresses the queries and concerns of customers and includes popular and intent-based search terms, it becomes a rich, SEO-friendly extravaganza.

Since content is the foundation of organic search, it is the best way to drive traffic to your website. Content is also the number one priority for Google and anybody familiar with inbound marketing knows that you can't win the game of SEO without a robust content marketing strategy.

Effective and helpful content helps your SEO in many ways. High-quality content excites your audience and helps you increase the click-through-rate (CTR) and average session duration. When you create useful content that adds value and provides answers to searchers' questions, Google rewards you with higher rankings in the SERPs.

Courtesy: Stupid Simple SEO

High-quality content also attracts backlinks from high authority websites and thereby helps you to increase Google's trust in your website. But to achieve this, your content should be intriguing, informational, inspirational, data-driven, exciting, and entertaining.

6. Helps to Exploit the Benefit of Sharing

One of the best features of social media for marketers is that it allows users to share content. If your content is exciting, entertaining, and informational, people will love to share it and your business can get enormous publicity without spending any money on promotion.

7. Multiply Traffic From Various Content Formats Such as Podcasts and Videos

Content marketing also allows you to multiply traffic by repurposing your content into different content formats. During content repurposing, we can convert a blog post into a video or a podcast. Similarly, an infographic can be converted into a blog post or a slide deck presentation resulting in the creation of various content pieces. These can be used at different content marketing platforms to exponentially boost traffic. For example, a blog, when converted into a slide deck presentation, can be uploaded on sites like SlideShare, Google Slides, Prezi, Powtoon, and Haiku Deck. A webinar can be converted into a blog post, a podcast, and a video and its key messages can be used as tweets and social media posts.

8. Content Marketing is Highly Targeted

Targeted content is the holy grail of content marketing. If you want the content to be successful, make it personalized and try to speak to a specific person with a specific need. You should also keep in mind where the user is in the buyer's journey. To create targeted content, you should have ample information about your audience.Ā

Messaging is also an excellent way of creating targeted content, which helps you shepherd your audience through every step in their buyer’s journey. There can be various stages in a buyer’s journey such as:

1. Creating awareness
2. Promoting discovery (providing education about the products and services and how they can solve their audience’s problems)
3. Foster comparisons
4. Encourage a sale

It also allows you to do geo-targeting and demographic targeting.

Other Benefits

Apart from that it also offers the following benefits:

A. Increases brand visibility
B. Helps build a long-term relationship with your audience
C. Strengthens trust and loyalty
D. Helps you position yourself as authority in your niche
E. Enables communication through social shares and comments
F. Pushes your prospect to move through the purchase decision faster
G. Provides value without any terms and conditions

Conclusion

So with all these benefits, content marketing turns your website into an authentic source of information related to your area of expertise. Engaging content will also make your audience flock to your website and help them make an informed decision. The content created for different stages of a buyerā€™s journey helps them move to the next stage in the sales funnel. It leads to word-of-mouth promotion apart from trust-building that sparks loyalty.