You need a content marketing strategy. You just do. Starting digital marketing efforts of any kind without one would be like building a house without a blueprint or hiking a new trail without a map — you’d be flying blind and hoping for the best.
Really quickly, do you know what exactly content marketing is? Simply put, it is the means by which you communicate your messaging and attract customers in the digital marketing world. It includes many different media, such as:
- Blog Design / WordPress
- Blogging
- Landing Pages
- Copywriting
- Social Media
- Ebooks
- White Papers
- Press Releases
- Email Marketing
Content marketing is a key pillar of any digital marketing strategy, and marketers have found that it seems to be the difference maker in turning leads into conversions. Statistics show that content marketing has a 6x higher conversion rate than other marketing methods.
Beyond sales numbers and revenue, there are numerous reasons why you need a content marketing strategy for your business. Here are six perks to having a content marketing strategy and what you should do next.
6 Steps to Start Benefiting from a Content Marketing Strategy
1. Start with a Plan
Digital marketing of any kind, be it PPC, social, or even longer-form writing, will be all for naught without a proper content marketing strategy. An experienced marketing strategist will help you conduct the research needed (about your keywords, target audience, user intent and more) to create campaigns designed to hit the goals you are looking to achieve.
With a proper content plan, you will be able to communicate to key stakeholders exactly what your marketing efforts are, what they’ll look like, and how you’re going to achieve your goals. When actionable goals are set and met, it’s easy to prove the value of digital marketing, and thus the value of a content marketing strategy.
2. Stay True to Your Brand
You’ve worked hard to define your brand strategy; your messaging should support that. With a content marketing strategy, everyone who communicates about your business or brand will have a consistent voice, tone, and message around your services and mission. This helps audiences better understand you while also helping your team stay on the right course.
This will also help with the multimedia content you produce, as a proper digital marketing strategy also includes infographics, videos, webinars, social media, and more. With a content marketing strategy, the people responsible for generating that content will also be able to stay true to your brand messaging across the board.
3. Gather Valuable Insights
Never is a strong word, but it fits here — you will never just set and forget a content marketing plan. Your first strategy outline will help you learn valuable lessons about your audience, their habits, and what content works for them. With that data, you can tinker with and adjust your content strategy to make it as effective as possible.
In our world, the amount of data that is generated every day is astonishing, but it’s also one of your most useful tools. With this data, you can continue to hone your messaging to achieve optimal results. Digital marketing and the consumer landscape is always evolving, and your content marketing strategy should too.
Your content marketing strategy is going to give you loads of actionable data that will impact your content, sure, but it can also improve other facets of your marketing.
4. Build Trust
Consumers turn to alternative resources when researching a product or service – think blogs, social media, and reviews. A smart content marketing strategy that uses blogging and social media to help your prospective customers will contribute toward generating positive reviews, and is possibly your most valuable tool for building trust with your customer.
CMI says, “Content marketing builds trust in a way that no other method can match. Building trust over time means consumers pay attention and listen to your brand’s voice.” Their statistics show that 61% of online shoppers in the U.S. made a purchase after reading a product recommendation on a blog.
5. Improve SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and content creation go hand in hand, so it makes sense that a quality content strategy plan will also improve SEO efforts. Digital marketing aims to increase traffic to your site and improve your leads, and the marriage of SEO and content strategy can achieve that.
According to a MarketingSherpa study, content creation is ranked the single most effective SEO technique by 53% of respondents. As you create meaningful, goal-driven content (guided by your content marketing strategy), you build more and more pathways back to your website.
Need proof? Populating websites with blog content far more search engine-indexed pages than other business sites that don’t publish content.
6. Get More for Your $$$
Companies spend boatloads of money on paid search campaigns. We’re not saying they’re not effective – they are, we use them too – it’s just that a content marketing strategy has been proven to cost less and perform better in the long run.
If you directly compared content marketing against paid search, content marketing results in 3x the leads per dollar spent on paid ads, according to the Content Marketing Institute. It also has lower initial costs and can continue to pay off, as content like blogs and case studies can be continually updated and search engine optimized.
How Can I Start Creating a Content Marketing Strategy?
This is the fun part.
If you’ve already been creating content for your website but aren’t sure if it’s following any type of structured content plan, now is a great time to start an audit of your work. See what you’ve got, see what’s performing, and get a better idea of what type of content attracts and converts customers for your business. Once you’ve got an idea of content best practices, you can begin to formulate your content marketing strategy goals.
If you’re starting from scratch or if you don’t feel like the content you’ve been using is very effective, we know a guy. If you need help formulating a new content marketing strategy or would like to improve upon a previous one, Vital Design has the expertise to help you out.
Our content strategy team has helped businesses of all kinds — B2C, B2B, you name it — transform their content strategies into lead-generating, sales-closing machines. Give us a shout or check out some of our awesome content resources.
