Content marketing is about offering valuable content to your audience in order to attract potential customers. As customers of a service, we want the information sent to our email to be useful and of high quality, otherwise we could confuse it with spam.
The content you generate for your customers must be useful or relevant in order for you to help them solve their problems. For example, they can be newsletters, infographics, videos, manuals, eBooks, podcasts, blog articles, etc. In this article you will learn about some of the benefits of content marketing for your business.
1. Increase organic traffic
When you create unique content that answers users’ questions, Google shows it in search results, thus showing more clicks. It is important that the content for your audience is of quality, that is, that it seeks to entertain, inform or educate.
2. Create brand personality
One way to show your brand personality is through content marketing. The voice of your brand can be transmitted through the content offered to your customers. Depending on the category to which your business belongs, you can create content that reflects the values and purpose of your service or product. In this way, your business will be more recognizable, since it will reflect its identity in its publications.
3. General authority
It is possible to generate authority in content marketing, that is, provide information that is useful to solve customer pain points. By applying this strategy, the brand of your business will be a reference for users. For example, they may turn to your content to educate themselves on a topic, learn, or simply clear up their doubts because they claim your brand will provide them with a solution.
4. It helps you get to know your audience
Content marketing helps you get to know your audience better. One of the benefits of content creation is that you can use it to find out how your customers respond to it. You can try different formats and types of content, after analyzing the results, you will know the preferences of your customers. You will understand what impacts them, entertains them or hooks them.
Knowing the interaction of customers with the content will allow you to understand how to help them solve their concerns.
5. Get loyalty
A well-projected content can generate good experiences for customers. Loyalty is achieved by building a lasting relationship with users through interaction and content marketing. It is important to know the frequency, formats and content that your customers need to create experiences that enrich them. With effort and perseverance, you will make your brand a space used by your customers since they will trust the content you generate for them.
6. Improve conversion rates
Content marketing can boost conversion rates. It is possible to include demand generation strategies in your publications. For example, you can create content that provides solutions to consumers, help audiences discover new products, create stories that engage customers, share incentives, sell a product or service, etc.
7. Reuse content
If you already have content made, you can reuse it in another format. One of the advantages of content marketing is that you can apply different formats to content that you have produced in the past. If you made a traditional text story with images, you can turn it into an infographic, video or podcast to give it fresh air.
8. Connect with your customers
One way to connect with your customers is through teaching. It is true that people have different ways of learning, some learn by reading, others prefer to watch an infographic or video, and there are also people who choose to listen to a podcast. Content marketing is flexible, so you can offer different learning formats to your clients. For example, offering books, blog articles, essays, infographics, webinars and classes, podcasts, videos, interviews, templates, and much more.
9. Boost your presence on social media
Every time you post valuable content on your website, you gain the support of people who share it on social media and become promoters of your brand. This is possible thanks to quality content valued by customers, either because they found it useful, entertaining, new, moving, etc.
Over time, your customers will become advocates for your brand and promote your content on social media with the intention of commenting on it or recommending it to their friends.
10. Save costs in the long run
Unlike other strategies, content marketing does not require as many paid ads. The cost may be high at first, but by using proper SEO and social media tools, you can save in the long run.
What is and what is not content marketing
What is content marketing
- A way to provide free value. “Give, what you will receive” is one of the great maxims of content creation.
- A long term investment. Some companies start with great enthusiasm to write a blog, and leave it when they do not see results in a few months. Mistake! Before jumping into the pool, you have to be clear that to obtain the best results you will have to be constant and think in the long term.
- A bet from the whole team. If you think about the different people who work in your company, surely they can bring refreshing points of view to your content. Although the main effort corresponds to the marketing department, involving your entire team will make your content much more interesting.
What content marketing is not
- It’s not just writing articles. When we think about this type of marketing, we often stop at the first step: creating content around your brand. Actually, a complete content strategy consists of four phases: generating traffic, generating leads, lead nurturing, and generating customers.
- It is not native advertising. Although they have things in common, native advertising has two big differences with content marketing: it is based on paying for space in other media (instead of publishing on our own channels) and it makes use of an existing audience (instead of going creating our own from scratch).
- It is not inbound marketing. Content marketing is inbound marketing, but not necessarily the other way around. And it is that this term implies all the actions to attract customers to your business, including more traditional tools, such as advertising.
- It’s not copywriting. Don’t be tempted to use your blog as an excuse to sell! Content marketing is based on helping and supporting the user. Overly promotional slogans and speeches are out of place.
The most common formats of branded content
Before starting to think about formats, my recommendation is that you have a clear focus: what value can you bring to your potential customers and how are you going to communicate it? Depending on this, you will lean more towards some formats or others. In any case, remember that it is always good to create different types of content, to see which ones work best and to maintain some variety.
That being said, these are the most common and proven formats in content marketing:
- Blogging. They’ve been with us for decades, but they’re still one of our favorite ways to consume content. The key to a successful blog is to post regularly, have well-organized categories and tags, and invest in quality articles. Filler content may be cheaper to produce, but it is expensive in the long run.
- Reports, white papers and other downloadable PDF formats. This type of content adds a lot of value to people looking to learn about a specific topic, while positioning you as an expert on that topic. In addition, they are a very effective way to get hold of the email and basic contact details of your potential customers. It’s all advantages!
- Newsletters. When you have already managed to get a database of people potentially interested in your brand, newsletters are a great way to keep in touch. You can use them to promote the best content on your blog.
- Videos. The videos continue to be a trend and gain the acceptance of users. Formats such as video tutorials are very effective when it comes to positioning your brand, while live videos are a new way to connect with your audience and show freshness and spontaneity.
- infographics. The perfect complement for your blog and to share on social networks.
Strategies to attract customers with content marketing
When planning your content strategy, there are many possible approaches. My star tip to start with is to opt for the simplest and keep in mind the four steps that we have already discussed. Here are some ideas to deepen your planning:
- Create the best content possible. If you’re going to make the long-term investment that content marketing requires, do it right! You need your content to leave your users impressed, that they recommend it to their friends and that they take you as a reference.
- Do not focus only on traffic, but on conversion. The visits, by themselves, will not generate benefits. Instead, leads do have value. Therefore, you need to have a strategy at hand so that visitors leave you their contact information. And for this, you will have to offer them added value.
- Invest in SEO. Creating content on a regular basis makes search engines very happy… but it’s not the only aspect of your SEO that you should consider. In order for your contents to be found, they must be well labeled and classified and prepared following positioning guidelines (not repeating meaningless keywords). If you take care of this aspect from the beginning, you will make your investment in content profitable much sooner.
- Think long term. I won’t get tired of repeating it: planning is half the battle! If you want your rate of content publication to be sustainable, you will need to organize your editorial calendar in Advance.