What is Content Marketing? | Content Marketing Process
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What exactly is content marketing and how can the right strategy improve online sales? Read on to learn our expert secrets on content marketing management and creation!
This article is Part 1 of 3 in our Expert Guide to Drive Sales with Content Marketing in 3 Steps
Online marketing strategies like content marketing help you create, publish, and distribute content for a target audience through an online medium–such as your website or social media feed.
These online materials serve to attract potential customers and users in a unique way and ultimately drive sales.
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Types of content marketing include social media marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing (or SEO), using infographics or podcasts, video content, and even paid ads.
Altogether, your content marketing is what helps you increase sales by elevating visibility, boosting effective leads, and promoting your brand to your ideal target. Great content adds consistency, value, and a better web experience for every user that visits your website.
That’s why today we want to explore the various types of content marketing out there.
More importantly, this article sets out to teach you how to measure the success of your online marketing strategy–whatever that looks like for your business.
By the time you finish reading this article, you will better understand how content marketing works, and how to use it effectively to drive sales, increase leads, and grow your business in the long-term through great, relatable content.
Content Marketing Tips | Content Marketing Goals to Boost Sales
Now, more than ever, your online marketing plays a huge role in attracting customers to your website. A good website should not just be a place for people to see your menu, discover your services, or learn more about you. It needs to be an effective tool to drive sales for your business.
That’s the main goal of content marketing.
The best part is, when content marketing is done well, you get new leads from users who are searching for solutions to their own problems through popular search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
Whatever content you produce, however, the main goal of content marketing is to inform and educate prospects, so you can build trust and authority about your brand. That’s how content marketing works!
For example, The Digital Navigator uses different content marketing mediums such as videos, blogs, articles, images and even a content marketing newsletter to communicate with our clients on our website. Not only does it allow us to enhance user experience but also allows our clients to get a better understanding of our services.
You can even create one piece of content that serves you again and again in the form of email blasts, social posts, or even white-papers and eBooks (once you create enough content).
That’s why we consider content marketing as part and parcel to any search engine optimization strategy we develop for our clients–because it’s also the most versatile online marketing strategy out there!
Of all the different online marketing strategies, a good content marketing strategy allows business owners to reach their goals in a creative and innovative way. Remember, when we think about content marketing vs. product marketing, you will want to ensure you’re targeting leads generation, not sales.
In this way, content marketing can become a real mainstay of your sales focus later down the line, as it helps increase your business’s bottom line through:
- Higher visibility: with digitally optimized content, your website or blog can be positioned better on search engine results if you use relevant keywords. This not only increases traffic but also gives you a competitive advantage and helps you increase sales.
- Increase in traffic: your online content allows you to advertise your business or brand to create and enhance the awareness and exposure of your products and services. By doing this, more customers flow to your website, which creates more opportunities for you to increase your sales volume and drive sales through added content assets.
- Improve brand image: a well-written online content piece will not only help you build an increased trust level with your users, but also helps them find information about your products/services. This information stays with them, and many of these end up coming back looking for professional assistance with their issue in the future.
- Gain leads: this is one of the most important reasons why businesses do content marketing. The ability to acquire leads and customer information will not only convert to boost sales, but also allows businesses to retarget potential customers through newsletters and email subscriptions. This is one of the best ways to educate leads as well, which makes sure they’re still thinking about you 200 days from now. After all, who knows when a great lead will become a forever customer!
- Customer ease of use and loyalty: as you know, great content is not always about selling your products and services online to increase sales; it’s also about fostering a positive customer experience. A loyal customer is looking for a pleasant interaction with your website, where they can discover valuable content or reach out for support.
What Do You Need to Write Great Content? | Content Marketing Process
Why use content marketing? Why is content marketing important?
Because your website is an introduction or a gateway to your business, while the website content is a portal for your customers.
An effective website not only serves as a way for customers to build interest in your business but also puts them on the right path for your end goal–sales!
That’s why we think a good website is not just one that looks good, but one that manages to get quality leads and increase sales by converting those leads into long-lasting, loyal customers.
So, what do you need to write great content?
In the digital world, content writing refers to the process of planning, writing, and editing content specifically for digital or mobile content marketing purposes. This process can include various content objectives and assets, such as the creation of blog posts, articles, video scripts, and podcasts. Check our Digital Marketing tools for a list of content marketing resources.
For example, when credible news websites write content to post on their website, they try to address critical problems, provide logical reasoning for the issue, and give readers an accurate image of the news.
In this way, content provides users with solutions or useful information to make them aware of any action they may need to take next on their journey.
As such, content writing is extremely beneficial for businesses as a tool to improve sales processes, as great content inadvertently makes customers aware of how you run your business. This is another tactic that increases trust in your products, enhances your authority, and ultimately drives sales.
We also believe your online content is just as important as the design and aesthetics of your website. This content is key, particularly because it influences search engine results, increases traffic to your page, and builds credibility in your business. We just wrote an article about SEO Ranking Factors, if you’re interested.
In the meantime, consider the following three factors before you commit to writing and publishing a piece of content on your website: customers, objectives, and competitors.
- Customers: the primary aim of your content is to nurture your relationship with prospective customers. That’s why content language should always cater to the audience you’re trying to target. Getting their attention is important, so you can drive sales to your website. Identifying your customer and their needs will improve the sales process for your business, especially since your content will be catered towards their needs.
- Objectives: objectives are all about identifying your website’s purpose and goal. This process is crucial to helping you identify which direction you want your content to move in. (Think “sales funnels”–if you don’t know what those are, here’s a free template from The Digital Navigator). To make sure your objectives will actually make customers aware of your services, provide them with a socializing medium, or simply to boost sales, consider getting a website consultation from a professional content strategist who will know which goals and purposes will put you in a better positioned to write content that will help you increase sales, and customer loyalty.
- Research competitor’s website: learning about your competitors and their website content can help you understand their content marketing strategy, which gives you an idea on how to improve sales and how to increase revenue for your own business. Likely, they’ve done some of the legwork of figuring out what works and what doesn’t, so you can use these pages as a jumping-off point to creating your own content. This effort was in fact critical to the success of our own website–so much so that we now do competitor research as part of the initial executive report prospective clients receive when they come to us for SEO consultation.
With all of this in mind, we have no doubt you are well on your way to content marketing success!
This article is Part 1 of 3 in our Expert Guide to Drive Sales with Content Marketing in 3 Steps. Already know the basics? Skip ahead to read Part 2: How to create unique content for your website, or Part 3: How do you increase sales with content marketing? for more great content tips!
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