Content Marketing
“Content is King”
Content marketing is the only online tool to build trust, brand reputation, and showcase expertise in a domain. Good quality, informative, in-depth and engaging content is the key to building your online brand. Besides, having a sustainabale content marketing strategy can generate highly convertible leads and enhance brand reputation and attract revisits to enable better conversion rates.
Content is critical!
Content is the past, present and future of all digital marketing. It is the basic form of communication online, and the only effective one in the digital world. It is critical for a brand to perfect and practice a good content marketing strategy on a timetable.
Ignore content marketing at your peril!
All digital marketing is content-centric, be it blogs and articles for search engine optimization, posts for social media marketing or ad copies and text for search engine marketing. Branded content is the centre-stage of digital marketing. Every aspect of digital marketing revolves around great content. The more careful and critical you are about your content creation, you will see better marketing results across the board and marketing channels.
Appreciable, valuable, informative and well-presented content is an all-time digital asset. It will keep bringing rewards for months and years to come. Good and well-formed content is the foundation of branding and marketing. Long term content marketing is a practice that makes or breaks a business.
Content creation is one of the critical factors to keep in mind while choosing the right content marketing agency. Clearly, without this strength, your entire marketing budget goes down the drain.
“Content is king”. And will remain so, as it is the only communicator online.
Why content marketing?
Brand awareness
Well-written and well-placed content attracts relevant traffic and is a permanent tool to build brand awareness in place of PR marketing.
How content marketing strategy helps branding?
** Why brand with content?
You could ask, why content marketing for branding? We asked ourselves and found that it is the most effective tool to use. While Jonathan Bluemel, Senior Content Marketing Manager at leading fin-tech ecosystem, said “Content marketing is a valuable instrument in the marketing mix that keeps brand identity in motion”.
* Information discovery
Content marketing is a window for new ideas. It absorbs insights, new trends and customer issues directly from the consumers through industry experts, influencers, web analytics and Search Engine Optimization. While absorbing all this, your business will look to create content based on them. This gives way to thought processes evolving ideas about new market gaps, product ideas and building customer success assets.
* Taking on the world
A new online business faces the challenges of lack of visibility, trustworthiness and relevance. Content marketing is the best bet to meet these challenges head-on. It helps to tell the world about the expertise, your USPs and describes your products and services to the world. Of course, you will need a great content strategy to do that.
* Brand Identity
Content marketing, executed judiciously on a preset strategy, can become a branding asset forever. It can build brand identity over time and showcase your business as a domain expert to the world at large. It helps sharpen your focus on more important topics and filters out the unimportant ones automatically.
Content is evergreen
Barring some short-term content like news, statistcs etc, most other content pieces are long-term assets. Good content will serve you well into the future.
Make the most of your content
* What is Evergreen Content?
Search-optimized content that remains relevant and useful to readers forever is evergreen content. Once you publish content, it cannot disappear unless you decide to remove it. This kind of content is sustainable and once it search optimized, readers will keep finding it repeatedly. Some examples of evergreen content are tips, how-to’s, listicles, product reviews, etc.
* Integrate your keywords
Do your keyword research and integrate the keywords, long tail keywords will work better. Optimize the content for SEO and make sure it is perfect in every manner via alt text in images, keyword in title, URL and body etc. Use internal and external links and ensure that it is long content [3000+ words].
* Always write for beginners
Remember, experts in the domain do not search for broad keywords, beginners do. So, if you are looking for long-term freshness of content, share your expertise with beginners and not with experts. This will also give you a lot of recurring and larger audience. Don’t use technical jargon since you are writing to beginners. Keep it simple.
* Repurpose your content
We can repurpose all content into smaller pieces or into other formats. Don’t spin it using AI, that’s not repurposing. You can use the ideas in shorter formats like forums, infographics, etc. Remember the cardinal rule of ‘duplicate content’, while you are at it.
Builds links
If your content is good and crowd-pulling, other businesses would like to link to your content, enhancing its credibility and spread.
Building organic links via content
* Research your keywords
Now that you want to create content and market it, begin with researching the content. You may have a few keywords in mind before you put pen to paper. Research those keywords on Google and check what works. Which keywords are ranking better, which site is ranking high, go research and find out the reasons. A brief insight into what you want to do will let you do it and position it better.
* Choose format and create content
During research, find out if listicles are ranking high, or is it definitive guides, is it case studies or infographics? For a keyword and its variants, find the format that ranks higher. This insight will help plan your content better. Now, get ahead and write or design some immaculate and useful content. Useful content will always attract links, without a doubt.
* Promote, promote, promote
Promote your content through social media marketing and other channels that you feel are effective for your domain. Promotion is the key to people linking to your content. They need to read and check before they link, don’t they? The more your promise, the more links you get.
* Build links
Building links using content marketing is the most honest way of doing it. Google does not approve link farms, reciprocal linking etc and you risk being black-listed on the search engines. At least, you will not rank using those links. Keep your content marketing honest, build content for people, not for search engines, and your success is automated.
How content search works?
Any visitor searching is looking for answers. It could be about a product or a service or something else. Content serves as an educational tool for most.
The visitor's thought process
* Why a visitor is where he/she is?
People look for something on the internet because they have some problem to solve. They have an agenda on their mind which needs answering. So, your content should answer a few questions immediately. Does the result match the search intent? Can I trust this link/website? Where do I go from here?
* Does the search result match my intent?
A visitor has come to your webpage following a link from social media, PPC ad or from another website. This means that the visitor’s premeditated expectations should connect with what the webpage offers. Therefore, relevance in content and links is critical. There are many critical factors that contribute to the webpage’s success here.
* Can I trust this website?
Trust, initially, emanates from visuals. A professionally created website is just the beginning. There are other trust signals that need to be integrated. Number of years in business, past clients with logos, a secure HTTPS website add to the trust and credibility.
* Where do I go from here?
Getting is visitor is only a part of the job, converting that visitor is another. Every click that lands on your webpage is a prospect. And each of those prospects should go through a comprehensive customer experience. Ensure that you have levels of content and your call-to-action guides are in place. Remember, a visitor buys the experience along with your product or service.
Elements to keep in mind
Set yourself apart
The only way to set yourself apart from your competition is to create better content. This will bring in more relevant customers for your business.
Being different is critical
What Is “Unique Content?
Unique content is not just passing copyscape or content that is not duplicated. Unique content exists on your website only and differs from your competition in a way that it adds more value to customers. Exclusive, informative and upselling content will let you stay in the game.
How does unique content matter?
When you provide a great customer experience, it lasts forever. And the easiest way to do this is to provide unique content. This unique content can help improve conversions drastically, as well as build your brand and customer loyalty. Make it a part of your content marketing strategy.
Unique content and SEO
Keeping search engines happy is important. Search engines show minimal results for a search and unique content helps them prune the results. Search engines support relevant and good quality content to ensure that they are quick and take lesser time to differentiate and analyze. So, unique content is always rewarding for search engine optimization practices.
Creating unique content
Do not repeat topics or pages on your website just for the sake of content. Choose the right topic, probably the one that has not been addressed previously in your domain. Research your keywords and present it like a five-course meal. Be creative and ensure that you review your content periodically. Motivate others in your domain to link to your content or copy from you and not vice versa.
Customer relationships
Content marketing is a great way to build customer relationships. Each excellent piece of content will gather its own followers and aid conversions.
Improve customer relationships with content
Maximize customer investment
Maximizing customer investment in your business is the key to repeat business and excellent referrals. We can achieve this by producing and offering training and educational content in the domain and your services/products, common troubleshooting guides, case studies or invites to discussions facilitated by your business.
Change customer business perception
Customer relationships can also improve by changing their perception of your business and achieving and trusted advisor status. This becomes relevant when you offer them taught-leadership content like strategy guides, white papers, how-to’s, specific issue related information, latest news and analysis, etc.
Strengthen B2B relationships
Contracts and contacts are important, but cultivating a symbiotic business relationship is critical for long-term sustainability. You can expand the value of your B2B relationships by offering peer-to-peer networking forums, VIP content programs aimed at the ‘C’ club and helping them promote themselves through partnered case studies.
Drive cross-selling and up-selling
Once you have a customer for life, it is important to leverage a win-win situation. A cross-sell, up-sell content marketing strategy can be handy. This can be achieved by creating and promoting targeted content on new products/services, business value analysis studies and case studies with similar B2B customers.
Content marketing funnel
Each phase of your marketing funnel needs a different content with different depths. Create your content marketing strategy with ease.
Build funnel based content
Create awareness
Always assume that you are starting from ground zero. A visitor is unaware of your business or services/products. Now, the first step is to create awareness. Content types that create awareness are blog posts, social media posts, infographics, videos, e-books, and podcasts. Choose and test with a few of these content types by checking interactions, follow throughs etc. [TOFU]
Evaluate and build trust
It is time to build trustworthy relationships using the interactions and follow throughs generated through creating awareness. No customer buys from unknown businesses and it is time to get the wheel in motion. At this stage, content like case studies, white papers, emails downloadable resources and webinars will work wonders. [MOFU]
Conversion stage
No one purchases without confidence. You need to tell your customers why they should invest in your service or buy your product. At this stage, content types like comparison charts, pricing, discounts, influencer marketing, etc. work well. [BOFU]
Delight your customers
Traditionally, not a part of the content marketing funnel, but a few businesses have added this to ensure customer retention and loyalty. Content to engage the audience like feedbacks, quizzes, upselling content, referral bonuses and customer success stories work well at this stage.
Expertise
Well-written content without depth is of no use. Expert content is invaluable and showcases your expertise in the domain. Impresses customers!
Create expert content for better marketing
Why expert content?
Expert content is about building authority in a domain. It has great appeal because it will have great information to enrich the readers and answer the most complex questions. Building expert content is the way to building authority and goodwill which will connect more customers.
Insight and depth of knowledge
Expert content offers deep insights coming from the depth of knowledge. Such insights are invaluable, coming from various angles of the subject. So, hiring a subject-matter expert makes a notable difference compared to hiring ‘any’ writer for your marketing process. Expert content translates to accurate knowledge and real value to readers.
Breadth of knowledge
Expert content also shows the breadth of knowledge besides the depth. This means that the content is customer issue specific and addresses the most complicated of their concerns. Showing breadth of knowledge translates to better customer support because of its relevance. Creating content that answers tomorrow’s questions today is the key.
Keep it simple
The content should be easy to understand and assimilate. Coming from a subject -matter expert does not mean the usage of complicated jargon. One should write all technical information in an easy-to-understand manner. Inform the prospects, don’t patronize them. Keep it simple and showcase your domain expertise to your customers. They will happily lap it up.
More on Content Marketing
Need expert content?
At efficaci, we deliver deep-expertise content which in unique and adds value to your visitors. We do not create content for the sake of SEO or search engine optimization. We crete it for the visitor to add real value, to enhance re-traffic and brand your business by creating trust and informational value to visitors and customers.
Talk to us today for clear, concise, no-fluff, unique and error-free content, on time, every time and reap rich dividends.
The first consultation is on the house – FREE!