Content Marketing
Content Marketing is what any business needs to start implementing after developing a website, a strategy, and refining their brand.
Content marketing is the effective creation and distribution of digital content. Content and its consumption by your target audience is the glue holding the attention of your potential client or customer from the time they become aware of your brand till the time they decide to do business with you.
Why Content Marketing?
What is it about content marketing that makes it so vital to your digital strategy? Let’s go over just a few of the reasons below:
Develops trust and credibility with prospects before even talking to them
One piece of content can be used to attract prospects on multiple channels
Improves conversion and close rates
People find you when they need you (instead of endless chasing)
Content is an owned digital asset and can be used an unlimited amount of times
Reduces sales cycle times
More inbound leads, less manual outreach
Compounding, long term ROI
If you look at your analytics and you currently get 250,000 visitors per year, and then you create and push out one piece of content that generates you 50,000 website visitors per year. You’re improving annual visitors, leads, and revenue at a compounding rate if you continue to push out valuable content throughout the time the business is operating.
Now imagine what would happen if you did that multiple times a month. Over time, you’ll have likely also developed an email list with people waiting to hear from you on a regular basis.
Side note: Your email list is an invaluable asset to develop and continue to grow because you own the traffic and there isn’t anyone or anything that can stop you from sending out emails (not even new algorithm updates that happen on every other channel you can think of).
Our Content Marketing Process
1. Competitive analysis and keyword research.
These two things alone set the foundation for the strategy and the rest of our digital strategy. This informs us of high intent keywords (words that are used when people are in the buying stage) and content that can be created to help funnel people from low intent to high buying intent using effective, high value content.
2. Content Ideation
Once we understand the customer journey well and what kind of content needs to be created from awareness to close, We combine the findings from high ranking competitors, high ranking content, our target audience, and other information depending on the scenario to start generating ideas for long form content, video content, and static visual content that will help the target audience get a better grasp of the information being presented online.
3. Content Creation
nce we have some solid ideas for content and we know the sequence of short and long tail keywords that we want to rank for, we hone in on the top 3-10 pieces of content to create right now and start testing with. We make sure we insert keywords into the headings, meta tags, meta descriptions, and alt text of static visuals on the long form pieces of content. This is all assuming that we already have the site and service pages SEO optimized.
4. Content Distribution
Once the site is optmized and the content is created. we use a social media management tools to schedule the posting of the content onto relevant social channels. We also make sure to use relevant hashtags for each channel we push the content onto.
5. Social Listening + Content Refinement
As the content is being pushed out over the course of the next few weeks, we make sure to tag people and ask for as much interaction and feedback on the content as possible. If we get good feedback and clients are getting leads or inquiries from the content, we end up coming up with more ideas for later content to push out and test with.
6. Paid Distribution / Social Campaign(s)
If content produces results, we create paid social media campaigns for the content that was effectively converting leads. We use targeting that the social platforms have which help us effectively target people that are similar to those people that we have already had success with in the past.
You may have heard of the term “lookalike audience” before which is referring to the term Facebook uses to help with this process of identifying closely related groups of people to promote the content to in order to scale our successful content marketing campaigns.
Content Marketing FAQs
You have questions. We have answers.
What is content marketing exactly?
Content marketing is the creation and distribution of content with the intention of bringing in new business. Content can take many shapes and forms. It can be text heavy blog posts, audio recordings or podcasts, videos, or other visuals (charts, infographics, etc).
Will content marketing work for your business?
Content marketing can work for any business. With some businesses, there requires a bit more creativity than others but no matter the situation, content marketing can boost every metric of your business you can think of if done correctly and consistently. Sometimes it requires a lot of experimentation and iterations. In other cases, you find a content marketing strategy that works on the first go.
Is content marketing worth it?
Absolutely. Even without getting immediate leads in from the content creation and promotion, you’re still gaining valuable insights into what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. Over time, honing in on and creating more of the content that works will prove to be one of the most valuable things your business could be doing to attract more business.
How long does content marketing take to get results?
This depends a lot on the context of the situation. If done consistently and correctly, 1-4 months is usually when things start to click and gain traction. Don’t expect to see a dramatic increase in KPIs hit at first. It’s just like with anything else, it takes a while at first, but when you do, stuff just absolutely takes off and you see exponential growth making up for the period of time where not much was seeming to happen. This time can be reduced by experimenting with content using paid ads to test faster and get rapid feedback.
How does it work without direct outreach, networking, or any other common marketing / sales approach?
Well, just like explained above. You create content that you think your audience would find useful and will help them reach their goals. You give value up front at scale (creating the content and then distributing it across the platforms that your audience is on and maybe even throw some money at the platform to get more eyeballs on it). And then tweak by tweak, you start to see results. Check out above in the “our process” section to get more in depth information on this or check out our content marketing blog post to get even more.
Why should I give away information for free?
If you know Gary Vaynerchuck, you know he’s all about giving value up front and not having ANY expectations as far as return or ROI goes. He’s built a massive media agency around this philosophy of his. He knows that just by being in front of more people and helping them out in as many ways as he can, he’s going to get some kind of return over time if he continues to create, iterate, get better, and add value to the marketplace. Again, all without any expectation. It may seem counterintuitive to give away your information for free but it actually has quite the opposite effect than you’d expect.
How does content marketing drive revenue and growth?
Like we covered above, the more content you have out there and available for consumption, the more you’re going to rank on google, the more you and your website content will get linked to and recommended by different companies and people, and the more you’ll be asked to be involved with other things people are working on. You’ll see that you start to get more clients, partnerships, deals, gifts, unexpected thank you’s in your DMs from total strangers, etc. And overall, you just have to know that by doing this you’re going to not only help yourself but you’re going to help other companies and people.
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