Content marketing can generate traffic and increase conversion rates. By creatively thinking and building a strategy for your content marketing, it can help you increase brand awareness, generate leads and improve engagement with your customers.
Being creative with your content and providing helpful content is key. Search engines will rate you higher if you have high-quality content on your website and you will also start to build long-term loyalty with customers on and offline.
Content marketing covers everything from social media posts to descriptions of products and services. It NEEDS to be good so that consumers talk about it, share it and, of course, become a loyal customer.
So what are the true benefits of content marketing?
- It gives your whole marketing strategy a direction. It allows your whole marketing plan to come together. Content marketing is the basis of all your other marketing, giving your business a distinct voice and focus and as such, it should come before you social but will also help guide it.
- It helps your SEO. If you consistently put out high quality, informative content then search engines will reward you for this.
- It will help with your PR. Successful content marketing can help you reach out to your customer base, letting them know you care about them and not just their money.
- It helps make your PPC work. You may be paying lots of money towards your pay per click advertising but if you have no good content to lead these clicks to.
- It keeps people on your site for longer. If you have tons of quality useful content, people are more likely to stay on your site for longer, and the longer people are on your site the more they trust you and more likely they will be to buy.
So where do you start?
As with many aspects of business, you need to start with a plan, a strategy with a purpose and goal in mind. We would normally start with a clear goal. It makes sense to have a goal in mind first and then plan around achieving that end goal. Here are a few things to think about when putting together your goals and objectives:
Buyer persona – Always the best place to start – who are you actually putting your message out to? Really think about creating a buyer persona. Who are you targeting? You need a clear understanding of who you are ‘speaking’ to so you can word your content accordingly. Common information for a buyer persona would be:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Income
- Occupation
- Why they would and wouldn’t buy from you
- What do you help or have in common with them?
Create content and campaigns that would attract these types of people.
What do you want to get out of it?
If you’re building content for a campaign or to advertise your latest service or product, what are you trying to achieve? More sales? Brand awareness? More people to attend your next event? More visitors to your website? etc.
Creative content marketing ideas
Next, you will need to generate creative, relevant and valuable ideas on content. A lot of people say to us that they or other people find their job or business sector boring. Without any offence meant, these comments generally come from accountants or people in the finance/insurance industries. We can tell you now – THERE IS NO BORING JOB/INDUSTRY, just boring ideas. A little creativity and imagination can go a very long way. You MAKE it exciting.
Some companies have created a fun mascot or spokesperson – Brands have made a massive impact by doing this! Just look at the energiser bunny by Duracell, the M&M’s characters by Mars, The Meerkats for insurance comparison. They have accelerated business for sure!
Tell a story – You can be humorous, inspirational, educational etc. A great past example of this would be the advertising campaign by Nescafe Gold Blend instant coffee. They told us a story of romance building between a couple. Viewers couldn’t wait to see the next instalment. More recently Airbnb has done a great job telling us short stories of the lives of Airbnb hosts. Everyone has a story!
Images – Be unique and try to stay away from stock photos that are available to everyone. you need to stand out and keep on brand and the best way to do that is to create your own content!
Eye-catching and engaging images can grab people’s attention and make them want to find out more.
Video – You can make explainer videos, humorous prom videos to grab attention, product demonstrations etc.
Infographics – Infographics are graphics that use visual/illustrative elements to present information such as data, timelines, step-by-step processes, statistics etc. They are very ‘shareable’ on social media as they are a great way to present information quickly, clearly and creatively.
Just a recap – Have a clear goal in mind, a clear topic. Make sure your content is relevant and will spark interest as this will also set the tone and structure. Think about keywords that may help towards your SEO and objectives.
Once you have your ideas and content, think about what format it will be presented in. Is it going to be a video? Mainly imagery with a show-stopping headline? Blog post? Social media campaign? Website content? Infographic? Etc.
Create a calendar
This is a good way to stay on track with your content marketing and help you to keep consistent.
Measure what’s working!
We can’t express this enough. As with any other type of marketing, it’s helpful to know what’s working and what isn’t. All your hard work could lead to nothing if the content your producing isn’t working or giving much in return. To begin with, it can be a little guesswork which is exactly why you need to measure what is working for your business so that you can do more of it.
And there we have it. A little look into content marketing. We hope this has helped and you can now start your journey into creating great content.
