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Content marketing has become the go-to strategy for businesses that want to build their brand and attract new customers. As a cost-effective alternative to traditional advertising, content marketing enables businesses to create content (i.e. articles, videos, infographics, etc.) that attracts the type of customer they want to reach and optimizes it for search engines.
To get started with your content marketing strategy, you’ll need to conduct thorough research on your target audience and what they find interesting. Here are some of the reasons for creating an effective content marketing strategy that will help you grow your business.
Source: Pexels
What is Content Marketing?
Before going further we need to know what content marketing is. The use of it is to drive marketing activities that lead to more leads and sales. In other words, it’s the strategy you use to create and distribute content to attract, engage, and convert leads. Marketers use content to educate customers and build their brands. Some of the most famous examples of content marketing successes are Airbnb, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.
60% of marketers report that content marketing generates demand/leads. In addition, 70% of marketers say that content marketing helps to educate the audience, and 60% say that it helps build loyalty with existing clients/ customers (Content Marketing Institute).
Source: Unsplash
Why Content Marketing is Important?
It’s a strategy that has been shown to be effective. In addition, it provides a competitive edge. Look at the data on content marketing to see if it really works:
- 67% business with blogs can generate more leads than other companies
- Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs 2.5%).
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.
- 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing to be more easier to communicate their products
The benefits of Content Marketing
- Build Trust With The Audience. It is challenging to trust a company that doesn’t communicate with you, and vice versa. Brand-focused messaging may have worked in the past, but it doesn’t let you connect with consumers. In addition to that, creating content that impacts a wider industry can establish the brand as a thought leader.
- Expand Brand Awareness. Every content that is created and promoted provides a new point of view for potential customers to become familiar with the brand. When trying to reach people in every part of the marketing channel and something that can move them, content is often the answer.
- Help to answer audience questions. Creating an article that can answer the audience can serve as good conversion content while also serving as good educational content. For example, you can create an article about “how to run Facebook ads: complete guidelines”.
Source: Pexels
Define target audience and their needs
The first step to creating a content marketing strategy is to define your target audience. To do this, you’ll need to conduct thorough research and have a clear understanding of who the ideal customer is. You can also use this research to create personas that represent your ideal customer. Once defined your target audience, start to brainstorm their needs. This will help to create content that solves problems and answers their questions. Google Trends is also useful to discover what the customers are searching for, which can help to create relevant content.
Decide on your content marketing goals
It’s important to decide on content marketing goals. By doing this, you’ll be able to focus on efforts and track the ROI of your content marketing strategy. Spreadsheets can be used to help create a content marketing goal. Choose a goal for each type of content that you create. This will help to create a more focused strategy that gives something to aim for. Once decided on the goals, you can use them to identify the target customers and create content that will engage them and help you to achieve your goals. Try using the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goal-setting method to help set achievable goals.
Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Once the target audience, their needs, and your goals are decided, it’s time to create your content marketing strategy. Start by creating a content calendar, which will help you to stay organized and create consistent content. Consider the different marketing channels that can use to promote your content, and which content types will work best for each channel. This will help to reach your target audience and build your brand. After creating your content strategy, start to create high-quality content that will help to achieve your content marketing goals.
Source: Unsplash
Powerful Content Marketing Examples
A. Spotify Wrapped Playlist
Some of the most notable content marketing initiatives from Spotify are the Wrapped Playlist programs. Every near end of the year, Spotify users receive a fun roundup of all the music they’ve listened to that year. The roundup is broken down by genre, year, artist, and more, and is displayed in bright colours.
Then, the user’s most frequently played songs are assembled into a custom playlist, and users can share their customized playlists on social media—a crucial aspect that has made this campaign popular on social media every year.
Source: Spotify
B. Apple’s #ShotoniPhone
User-generated content campaigns are terrific because they are cost-effective and much of the legwork is done by brand loyalists. Apple has a long history of capitalizing on user-generated content. In 2015, they have been launched a campaign called #ShotoniPhone that showcased pictures users took on their iPhones.
The #ShotoniPhone campaign reinforces consumers’ desires and abilities by letting them know that they, too, can make art like the pros using an Apple product. That campaign has hugely popular social media campaign by influencers. The gorgeous photos are more than a testament to Apple’s tech. They’re also an example of enduring campaigns.
Source: Instagram
C. E-Book Technical Marketing
Marketers see E-Books as a chance to provide in-depth expertise on a subject, build their reputation, and generate new leads. Most people, on the other hand, view E-Books as something they can download to read while lying on the beach.
The design, length, and content type of E-Books are often different. It is fairly simple to create an E-Book for marketing purposes, provided that the file format, design, and distribution channels all match both your business and customer needs.
Source: Pixie Digital E-Book
Summary
The benefits of create content are increased brand awareness, leads, traffic, sales, customer retention, and customer satisfaction. this marketing can be used to target different demographics and can be integrated with social media. It can also be used to create content for your customers and help to create engaging content.
Not sure what to create content for your business? Feel free to ask us any questions. Pixie Digital is a digital marketing agency Bali that’s ready to help your business grow digitally.