Content Marketing!
Can't stop seeing or hearing about it everywhere, can you?
Sounds like some complex concept that can make your business a powerful, money-minting machine.
No, it's not that complicated.
Yes, it can do a lot for your business.
For starters, what's content marketing?
Content marketing is creating, publishing and promoting relevant, useful content to a defined audience to build a relationship with them - with the ultimate aim of turning prospects to customers.
It can also be defined as using storytelling to sell a product.
Content marketing however, is a long-term strategy and the goal is to build a solid relationship with your customers. This is what easily separates content marketing from traditional advertising.
The attention and relationship with your customer is prioritized over just selling.
For most businesses, the goal of content marketing for them is to:
- Increase brand awareness
- Achieve better SEO rankings
- Engage with their audience
- Increase customer loyalty
- Turn cold audience to paying, repeat customers.
With content marketing, there is a method to it. Some people prefer to call it the content marketing lifecycle.
It is a repeatable process used in effective content marketing.
Processes involved in the Content Marketing Lifecycle
2. Planning: You need to plan the type of content to create.
Will you create videos, audio or written content? What length?
Will you partner with other content creators, influencers or brands?
Will you write a listicle, how-to, infographic, etc.
The options are limitless so you must plan for the kind of content that will deliver the best results.
While bearing basic SEO rules in mind, you must create content that your audience actually wants and can use.
In your content, answer the questions they need answers to.
Don't write for the search engines, write for people. If what you put out is useful, people will come. Focus on being the authority with your content.
When you create, bear three things in mind:
Your content must be:
Useful: Your audience should find value in it. Whatever questions they had before visiting your site, answer at least 60% of them.
Actionable: Actionable here means they should be able to use or implement at least one thing right away.
Yes, content can be useful but not immediately actionable.
When it's actionable, it means something can be implemented or spur them to take immediate action.
This is particularly important if you want feedback. You want your readers to tell you your advice did something for them when they implemented it.
It's easier to have loyal, raving fans with actionable content.
Simplified: lay emphasis on this. Quit trying to sound intelligent with industry jargons.
Seriously, what's the use if it's lost on your audience?
Your readers may not be in your industry. All they need is the solution they think you can give.
How will they know you have what they need if they don't know what you're talking about?
Simplify!
4. Content distribution: It's the marketing aspect of content marketing. As a new business, if you don't make yourself visible, how will they know the goodness you have to offer?
Promote shamelessly.
Tag whoever can give you extra visibility.
Have your partners & workers, share your content.
Work with influencers in your industry.
Run ads to your most insightful contents. Distribute as far as you can.
5. Analysis: your content marketing effort is a waste if you are not measuring and analysing results. Check your page views, your reach, likes, comments, bounce rate, click-through rate, and of course, shares.
Without these, you'd never know what's working, what your audience likes.
Do bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly reviews to check your growth. Go back and double down on what's working and rework or discard what isn't.
Now that you know what content marketing is and what makes up an effective content marketing strategy, why exactly should you use it?
What is in it for you?
What can Content Marketing do for your business?
Better reach on social media:
Social media is an integral part of content marketing. In this social media age, any business without social media presence is missing out.
You can use social media to show how utile your product or business is to potentially millions of people.
When you create content that trends, resonates or that people find useful, you're guaranteed shares on social media which translates to more eyes on what you do.
It's also a quick way of getting feedback on your content and business.
Through engaging content on social media, you get views, more followers and more engagement. A single viral post can make the difference between folding and attracting a ton of customers.
Example: I know a local businessman on social media who deals in household items.
His strategy? Making short facebook posts that were heavy with pictures of what he was selling.
Somewhat catchy, but he barely had any engagement. Till he changed the content he put out to video.
He posted a video of him using a non-electric hand blender showing how it works and what it does.
His comment section exploded.
Not just any comment, they were mostly enquiries. He was making lots of sales due to that video and getting lots of shares which means more eyes on his product.
What did he do here?
He utilized social media and by putting out the right content(video) which showed and not just told of what he sold, a single viral video made him lots of sales.
Content marketing can help you establish presence on social media and make sales.
Establish trust:
Content marketing helps you win the trust of your audience. When you consistently dish out value to your audience, it increases your brand reputation.
They come to rely on and trust whatever you tell them. That includes whatever you recommend. Like your product/service.
Example: I stumbled on David Perell (the writing guy) on twitter and was enthralled by his content.
He tweets on writing effectively and produces such beautiful essays that show how effective his writing advice is. The same day I found him, I signed up for his newsletter.
There's something else, David has a writing program called "the write of passage."
It's a community that helps build up your writing skills as a writer and even find other writers to befriend and exchange ideas with.
If the time comes and I feel like taking a course on writing, guess who I'll go for.
That's right, David Perell.
I trust him when it comes to great writing advice. His thoughts on writing reaffirmed some of mine and he demystified good writing.
That is what good content can do - Build trust.
Improves SEO:
Creating more content, having shareable content and establishing authority via quality content helps you gain more readers and improve your site's SEO.
What's more?
Quality content helps you get more backlinks. The more people link to your site, the more search engines recognize your site as valuable and this increases your ranking.
Also, more content on your site gives your site the opportunity to rank for more keywords.
Higher ranking = more eyes on your site
More eyes on your site = more potential customers and more revenue.
Easier to nurture customers:
Nurturing customers is easier with content marketing. Unlike before where blatant selling works, now you can't just shove a product to an audience or scream "buy from me" and expect to be taken seriously.
Customers need to be nurtured to get them from unaware or even uninterested to "take all my money".
You must see everyone as a "cold" audience that you need to "warm up" before you sell. Content marketing does this effectively.
It helps you move customers from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the sales funnel.
Wait!
Funnel?
What's that?
Relax.
We capture the buyer's journey via the sales funnel.
For most businesses, only a handful of people who stumble on your content are ready to make a purchasing decision immediately.
For most of the readers, they are probably unaware of the problem they have, the solutions available to their problems, or unaware of you. That's why you need content marketing to guide them.
What does it look like at each stage of the buyer's journey?
Awareness: Here, a customer has a problem, needs to solve it and begins to research. They search on their favorite search engine or even social media and find you.
Hoping you have what they need.
Your content at this point should be educational and informational. Help them understand their problem and the best solution(s) available.
By creating this sort of content, you imprint your site or business in their mind.
They are not necessarily ready to buy. But, by creating valuable content, you become a reliable source of info in that niche and their go-to when they're ready to spend.
Consideration: at this stage your potential customers are evaluating their options. If you do a good job at the awareness stage, they are aware of the various solutions available for their problem.
This is the time to take each of those options/solutions apart. Educate them on each solution and help them come to a final purchasing decision.
Ensure you're adding value. The goal is to sell to them but you don't want to be sale-sy. Make it clear that you just want their problems solved.
Decision: at this point they're ready to convert. Your content at this point should include testimonials, more case studies and of course, throw your special offers, promos and discounts in their faces.
Explore benefits-based content.
What happens when they patronize?
How are you helping them save money, time and effort?
Ideally you should start showing them this at the consideration stage but at the decision stage, they are ready to spend so this sort of content will be a push.
It is important to note that you must have each kind of content ready. Either on your blog or via email. You can't tell which stage your reader is. You must be ready to receive them with great content.
As always, focus on value. Sell without selling. Win them over with the amount of value you provide that buying from you becomes the most rational decision.
Measurable:
As said earlier, content marketing is not complete if it can't be tracked. The beauty of content marketing is, you get feedback on your efforts. With data available, you know what works, what doesn't and the kind of content to create. This improves your content strategy, leads to better content and eventually quality leads for your business.
Of course, you do not want to obsess over everything. For instance, a hundred thousand views mean little if you're looking for sales.
If you're just interested in getting the word out there, you must look out for views, likes, comments, shares, resource downloads, etc.
Shares especially tell you that not only do they like your content, they find it valuable or interesting enough to pass it on to their own audience. This is an exciting metric to look out for.
If you're looking for sales, likes and "wow" comments may not mean much to you. Rather, you want to look at click-through rate, people filling your forms, enquiries and purchases.
Aids product creation:
Remember the first stage in the content marketing lifecycle - market research. Done right, you will have lots of ideas delivered in your hands.
Proper research of your target market, their problem, available solutions, what the gaps are, what they respond to and their overlooked complaints can guide you during production.
Example: James Clear, the author of "atomic habits." He started off writing over a 100 articles on different niches. Overtime, he discovered he was making a lot of posts on habits.
What's more? His audience seemed to enjoy his write-ups on habits more than other topics.
What did he do? He niched down to it.
If he wasn't tracking his numbers, he would have been writing irrelevant content and missed his chance to respond to his audience's need.
Now he has a best seller "atomic habits" and other engagements.
When you combine data with feedback from your audience, you can create something that truly sets you apart from your competitors.
Even better, you can create something for a ready market.
By engaging with your audience, taking feedback seriously and continuous research, you can improve on an existing or create a winning product.
Own your platform:
With the constant change in algorithms, terms and conditions on social media platforms, you need to own your platform.
Specifically, your email list. But an email list won't magically appear without content marketing. It is in the process of making and distributing valuable content that you can attract people to your list.
By consistently putting out great content, you build a tribe who love and want to see more of your content.
This is how you get them to join your email list. The best part, with good content, you're attracting a "warm" audience. Because they know and trust you, they're more willing to pull out their wallets whenever you're ready to sell.
I hope you understand now how important content marketing is and why you need a content marketer.
Now, if you forget everything you just read, don't forget two things:
1. You must have a clearly defined business:
- What is your offering?
- Who's your market?
- Your value proposition?
- Are you willing to focus on selling only one thing before expanding to others?
Many businesses have their hands in a lot but lack direction. If your content marketing efforts are not channelled to something defined, don't even bother stressing that content marketer.
Go define your business first.
2. Understand that content marketing is a long game:
It can yield amazing results for your business but it's not a magic wand. The idea is to build trust, establish authority, be of help, basically be the go-to guy in your niche.
Don't cut corners or piss off your readers with sale-sy content.
At that point it's not content marketing but harassment.
Hopefully you're ready to adopt content marketing in your business.
I know you'll get rewarding results.
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