Content marketing is an excellent strategy to make potential customers aware of your brand.
The ‘content’ in content marketing could be a video, blog post, podcast, or social media post.
As most potential customers often do some preliminary research before purchasing products or services, they’ll likely find your content before making a purchase decision.
If your content is helpful, those potential customers are more likely to trust your brand and buy your products or services when they’re ready to make a purchase.
The problem is that not all content marketing strategies are equally effective.
You need to know what problems your potential customers are searching, what makes a piece of content convert, which content platforms they’re using, and how to work with platform algorithms to get in front of your potential customers.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing that attracts users to your brand by providing useful or entertaining content – usually in the form of text, video, or audio.
Content marketing is valuable to companies because it helps them build relationships and trust with their potential customers and existing customers at scale.
As a result, it’s easier to sell your products faster.
The ROI of content is notoriously difficult to measure as it’s often just one step in the customer journey, but brands with strong content marketing strategies tend to have lower customer acquisition costs and generate compounding returns.
Content marketing also has a snowball effect, as those who use content marketing to build an audience see higher returns for each additional piece of content they publish.
How Does Content Marketing Work?
Effective content marketing attracts people to your brand.
You might publish a video, podcast episode, or blog post, and then people interested in the topic consume it and become acquainted with your brand voice.
Once you have that person’s attention, you can build a trusting relationship with them. As a result, you can sell them products and services.
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4 Ways Content Marketing Can Help Your Business
Companies with excellent content marketing strategies have an unfair advantage over their competitors for several reasons. Below we’ll discuss just a few of them.
1. Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs
Quality content creation isn’t cheap, but you’ll see a stronger ROI from each piece of content you produce because your audience will grow.
It’s a snowball effect.
The first video, blog post, or social media post you publish might only be seen by a few people, but as more and more people find your content and become followers, each sequential piece of content you publish will be seen by more people and produce a stronger ROI.
So unlike paid ads, where you and your competitors can earn roughly the same ROI for each dollar spent, brands with strong content marketing strategies and a large audience can earn significantly more for each piece of content published.
2. Improve Lead Quality
Another benefit of content marketing is that you can filter the type of customers you attract based on the content you produce.
For example, if your target audience is exclusively CMOs, you can discuss only topics that a CMO would be interested in, like hiring great talent. You might also offer access to exclusive reports on industry benchmarks that would interest a CMO.
In contrast, paid ads force you to rely on the platforms to accurately identify your target audience. With privacy concerns on the rise and less accurate audience targeting, these platforms are producing lower returns.
3. Build a Stable Lead Pipeline
Content marketing has a flywheel effect and produces higher returns over time – especially if you produce evergreen content.
With evergreen content (content that is relevant for years), you can continue to generate returns from it even years after it was published.
So even if you stop producing content for a period of time, you’ll still likely have a steady pipeline of leads thanks to your evergreen content.
4. Increase Customer Retention and Loyalty
Content marketing is essentially a cheat code to build trust with your potential customers at scale.
The more they become familiar with your brand’s viewpoints and identity, the easier it is to trust your brand and the more likely they are to continue purchasing from your brand.
Forms of Content Marketing
Content marketing can be any type of media across a variety of platforms, though the most common forms of content marketing include:
Emails
Long-form text (Blog posts, white papers, case studies, etc.)
Social media posts
Video content
Podcasts
Long Form Written Content (Blogs, White Papers, Research, etc.)
Blog posts are the bread and butter of the content marketing strategy for most B2B and even many B2C companies and local businesses. Blogging is valuable because it can help you rank in search engines for keywords that your ideal customers may search.
For example, if you sell CRO software, ranking first in Google for the term “best CRO software” will help you drive valuable leads because those searchers are clearly looking to purchase a product like yours.
The process of optimizing blog posts to rank at the top of Google is called SEO search engine optimization
While blog posts are excellent at generating organic traffic to your website, effective marketers know that they need to also provide a next step to move the visitor through the buyer journey and eventually convert them into a customer.
Therefore, savvy content marketers often include a call to action in the blog posts to download a lead magnet, like a white paper or research study, in exchange for their email address.
Once you have a website visitor’s email address, you can retarget them with other valuable content to move them through your marketing funnel.
Another major benefit of long-form content like blog posts is that they often produce compounding results (assuming the content is evergreen or updated every few years).
Social Media Posts
Social media content is excellent for generating brand awareness, and many brands (particularly those in the B2C space) rely heavily on social media for audience building.
Social media marketing is also becoming increasingly popular among B2B brands as more and more people turn to individual thought leaders for professional advice and industry news.
LinkedIn’s revenue alone is an excellent reflection of the rise of B2B social media, as the platform grew to $14.5 billion – the highest percentage of growth it has seen in the past three years.
The benefit of social media marketing is that you can develop relationships with your audience much more quickly, as it’s a very personal form of content marketing.
The downside is that social media content isn’t evergreen, and the key to winning with social media marketing often comes down to publishing a high volume of high-quality content. This can be tricky as it’s important to publish high-quality content readers want to consume.
Video Content
Video content is also becoming increasingly common in B2B and B2C content marketing strategies, as it’s now easier than ever to record a high-quality video on even a simple iPhone.
It’s also easier to quickly build a relationship with your audience if they can see and hear you, which is likely because body language makes it easier to trust a person.
Video content is also excellent for content repurposing, as you can turn a single video into podcast episodes, social media clips, emails, or blog posts.
The downside with video content is that the best video content usually features a person, so it might not be a great option if there isn’t anyone within the company who enjoys being on camera. In addition, the person on camera will likely become the face of the brand. If that person later leaves the company, the audience might leave as well.
Podcasts
There are more podcast listeners (and podcasters) than ever before. But even with the competition, audience
When people hear your voice and stories repeatedly, it’s easy to quickly build a deeply loyal following. Podcasts also have very high retention as, unlike other forms of content marketing, the audience can passively consume your content. So, unlike videos or blog posts that require the listener’s undivided attention, they might multitask while listening to your podcast.
Your podcast will also likely become part of that person’s routine, which makes the audience even stickier. For example, they might always listen to your podcast while driving to work or working out at the gym.
Like video content, the downside of podcast content is that you’ll likely lose your audience if the podcast host decides to leave your company.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is arguably one of the best content formats because it’s the only platform you own entirely.
Email marketing is also an essential part of ecommerce performance marketing.
For example, a social media platform might change its algorithm, causing you to lose access to your audience, or a Google algorithm update could cause your blog content to drop in the search results, and you’ll lose organic traffic.
However, after someone gives you their email address, you own that list and can retarget them until they unsubscribe because you aren’t at the mercy of a platform.
Another benefit of email marketing is that the people on your email list have demonstrated interest in your company by giving you their email addresses, making them higher-quality prospects.
A Simple 5-Step Process for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
Many content marketing efforts fail because they lack a solid content marketing strategy to attract the right prospects and nurture them through the buyer journey.
If you randomly begin publishing content on different platforms without a thoughtful approach to which channels you’ll focus on, how you’ll position your brand, and how each piece of content moves the customer through the user journey, you’ll likely be disappointed by the ROI from your content marketing efforts.
Step 1: Define Your Ideal Target Customer
Content marketing only works if you attract the right customer.
Otherwise, you’ll have low conversion rates or convert customers who are a poor fit for your product or service, creating unnecessary customer support headaches and high churn.
To identify your ideal target customer, ask yourself these questions:
- What’s the title and position of the person who buys our product or service?
- What type of company does this person work at (size, industry, etc.)?
- What pain points does this person come to our brand to solve?
- What is the person’s knowledge level on this subject (this is key to avoiding beginner level keywords when you’re targeting advanced executives)?
Once you answer those questions, you’ll have a good sense of your ideal buyer persona, and the rest of your content strategy will become clear.
Step 2: Map Out Your Marketing Funnel And Choose Content Formats
Most customers don’t make a purchase the first time they visit your website, and that’s okay.
Content marketing aims to build a relationship with prospects to eventually lead them to make a purchase.
There are several stages of the content marketing funnel, from awareness (the customer is just learning about the pain point and potential solutions) to the purchase decision phase (the customer is solution aware and ready to purchase a product to solve the pain point).
For example, if your product automates accounting processes, here’s what the customer journey might look like:
- Read a blog post about the basics of business finances
- Watch a video about executing specific business finance topics like accounts payables/receivables
- Watch a webinar about how to automate all of these steps with your software
Creating content for each of these phases of the customer’s research process is important so that you can lead them through the funnel to ultimately purchase your product or service.