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Today, the content strategy brands use to capture their targeted audience’s interest is significantly different from a decade ago. Although content marketing has always been in the spotlight, it has become more relevant in the digital era.
Whether you want to attain or retain customers, content marketing has the power to entice people. An effective content marketing strategy creates business identity and allows you to earn the trust of individuals through social media platforms.
Result-oriented content marketing leads to more brand awareness, conversion rates, and a revenue boost. Besides, the modern age needs up-to-date content for the audience members. It should be able to drive high ROI and help you realize the full potential of your business.
What Exactly Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is an act of curating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract, retain, and build customer loyalty over an extended period. It helps you define your audience with a specific set of parameters. Your content marketing practices, in fact, allow you to garner more profits.
The Importance of Content Marketing in the Digital Era
Content marketing lends your business a hand to become an industry leader. Once you learn to implement a layered content marketing strategy, it serves as a business opportunity–it is the reason digital marketers view content marketing as a financial asset to engage, convert, and reach out to prospective customers.
Furthermore, content marketing stands out from other forms of marketing in terms of its higher ROI. However, it takes search engine optimization (SEO) and content expertise to increase your organic presence online. Nonetheless, you can always align your content marketing strategy with other components of your business.
Relevant Content Marketing Facts and Figures
Before you learn about the content marketing forms and strategies, familiarize yourself with content marketing statistical facts:
- More than 80% of customers prefer a brand that delivers high-quality and personalized content.
- Up to 200 million online users utilize ad blockers, while the same group of users prefers to follow their favorite brands on social media platforms.
- 8 out of 10 people consider themselves avid blog readers, whereas almost 80% of online users prefer to read informative blogs.
- 90% of customers find personalized content useful, while 78% think businesses should create custom content to build effective relationships.
- Brands with a dedicated blog manage to generate 67% more leads each month than brands
- More than 60% of B2C marketers implement content marketing strategies.
- More than 90% of brands and marketers view content marketing as a business asset
- Almost 60% of businesses around the world want to spend more budget on content creation.
- More than 70% of companies concur that content marketing generates more leads.
Forms of Content Marketing
Video
Most customers prefer to see videos from their brands for better interaction. In fact, video content marketing is undeniably the most effective form to achieve instant growth. Video content marketing can boost ROI, build customer relationships, and engage the targeted audience. On top of all, you can share video content on landing pages and social media accounts.
Blogs and Articles
After the video, blogs and articles is arguably the most effective form of content marketing. With a single blog post, you can promote a brand message, include social share options, add product information, and incorporate internal and external links.
Podcast
With the advent of podcasts, more businesses want to curate and share content on their podcasts. Although it depends on the brand, a podcast can be relaxing and exciting at the same time. Once enough creative juice flows through your podcast, you can introduce and find new elements that help you grab more attention from people.
Infographics
Infographics have become a savior for businesses that have complicated product and service offerings. Infographics can simplify the most complicated information into easy-to-understand language through clear design, bold fonts, simple wording, and brief statements. It is one of the effective ways to relay your content and help audience members understand it.
Social Media
After a decade of social media evolution, businesses have gradually started to understand the endless possibilities of social media content marketing. With billions of active social media users on various platforms, brands now invest more in social media marketing. You can use live videos, Instagram stories, and images to tell the story of your brand.
Top Content Marketing Trends Right Now
The sooner you plan for the contemporary trends, the better you can devise your content marketing strategy:
Live-streaming and Video Content
YouTube and TikTok (at the time of this writing, TikTok has yet to be banned) have managed to make live-streaming and short-form video content a standard. In fact, this trend will continue to be in the spotlight in the foreseeable future. Most customers prefer to see live-streaming and short-form video content from their brands.
However, the short-form (i.e., vertical) videos are gaining more popularity on Instagram and Facebook. Brands can hold live Q&A video sessions through Facebook live and answer the questions in real-time.
Personalized Content
Today, customers even prefer to receive personalized emails. The next evolutionary stage of personalized content will focus on more detailed demographic behaviors and interests of the target audiences.
Despite “how” or “what” type of content you want to deliver, it will have to be personalized. You can look at personalized content through the same lens as dynamic content. Therefore, don’t come across as robotic and instead add a human touch throughout your content without compromising the contextual relevance.
Conversational Marketing
One-on-one conversational marketing has become the quickest way to shift buyers from marketing funnels. After 2020, conversational marketing will become a more noticeable trend in digital marketing. Think of it as a flip coin side of the personalized content marketing that renders better human experience to customers.
The types of conversational marketing include live customer support, email marketing, chatbots, and customer-oriented success programs. With more advancements in AI, you can expect more human-like conversions from chatbots.
Content Marketing Benefits
Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is all about establishing what makes you different from other market competitors. Often, businesses almost have the same value propositions. And content marketing serves as a trigger to help you stand out among others.
The higher the differentiation, the more thought leadership you can exercise in your industry. A robust content marketing strategy comes with many benefits. In fact, a result-oriented content will complement your marketing and sales efforts for years to come.
Better Brand Visibility
Without content marketing, you cannot achieve and maintain a continuous presence online. Whether it’s personal or business content, visibility is the key that helps you show up on Google search results. More content creation means more probability to attract your audience. From your landing page to social media profiles, optimized content can result in more visibility than you can achieve in a decade through traditional marketing practices.
More Customer Engagement
Having a YouTube channel or blog will always be more advantageous for your brand. It may sound like an endless loop of responsibilities, but the heightened customer engagement results often overwhelm businesses.
The more involved you are in your content marketing efforts, the more customer engagement you can expect. It is the benefit that shapes the foundation of your business. Brands, for instance, follow an annual calendar to post content and speed up conversions.
Higher Lead Generation
Whether you want to hop aboard video, infographic, or blog content marketing, anticipate more leads than you can imagine. Ordinarily, a blog is the starting point of a content marketing strategy for brands.
Once it moves on to video content marketing, your business starts to see real growth and ROI. Many businesses create and offer impressive content to visitors at the expensive of filling out a form to generate more leads.
Content Marketing Strategy
Review Your Current Content
If you want to create or update your content marketing strategy, you should look at your existing content marketing efforts. It is a great way to come up with more compelling content marketing ideas and perform better than competitors.
You can also combine your current content performance and add new elements to future content. Part of the content review means to check the format, layout, structure, and design of your video or textual content. You can use various metrics to analyze your current content. Insightful metrics can help you develop a more strategic and sound content marketing strategy.
Set Your Objectives
Once you evaluate your current or old content, you can set new objectives that align with your target audience’s interests. In fact, your entire content marketing strategy depends on what goals you want to achieve. Therefore, make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish as a brand. You can set goals regarding your products, target market, and competitors.
Research the Best Performing Content Online
An effective content marketing strategy depends on how much deeper you are willing to research the market. If you want your brand to seamlessly adapt to a content marketing strategy, find out as much as you can about competitors, market trends, and key performance indicators.
After that, you can optimize your strategy that aligns with your overall marketing objectives. For instance, most businesses keep an eye on their competitors to learn about new content marketing tactics. In-depth analytical research will improve your content and distinguish you in the market.
Figure Out the Buyer Persona of Your Target Audience
Each member of your target audience has unique habits, interests, and preferences. You need to put faces on a faceless audience to create more engaging content. In any case, if you want to engage customers, you will have to create a buyer persona.
The profile of the buyer’s persona involves identifying audience paint points, behavior, and demographics. In essence, you need to map out the entire buyer’s journey throughout the awareness and conversion process. The trick, however, is to put yourself in the same shoes as your audience and create the content that offers the most value.
Create Interesting Topics
Once you establish a buyer persona, you can brainstorm all the ideas that cater to your target audience. Again, research is the key that allows you to understand the various dynamics of online users. Once you move past that step, you can curate accurate, compelling, and relevant content. You can review the target keywords and metrics to create exciting topics.
Develop a Distribution Plan
Now that you know what topics you want to create, you should have a clear plan of action to distribute your content. You can, for instance, use social media platforms such as Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn to distribute your content.
Predominantly, channel distribution depends on your product or service offering. Furthermore, you can use email newsletters to distribute more content. Once you manage to entice sufficient people, you just have to make sure you have something interesting to say. You can improve your content distribution efforts through content syndication and partnerships.
Implement Your Strategy
If you want smooth implementation, hire expert writers and content strategists who can navigate intricate details of your content strategy. Before you roll out your content strategy, make sure the content creators you hire are great researchers, and understand the needs of your target audience.
Whether its visual or textual content, ensure design elements are at the forefront of your content strategy. Incorporate visual aesthetics that can inspire and encourage your customers to click. Ideally, you should use a combination of methods to execute your content strategy. A well-researched and visualized content marketing strategy can achieve wonders for your business.
Measure and Adjust Your Strategy
Often, many brands forget to measure and adjust their content strategy after initial implementation. Realistically, you need to measure the performance of your content and formulate weekly and monthly performance reports. You can use key metrics to monitor and measure elements that create brand interest, boost conversions, increase traffic, and social media shares. If something is not performing well enough, you can introduce new elements and optimize your content strategy.
Upgrade Your Content Marketing Strategy
It is imperative to understand that content marketing is a collaborative and collective effort. If you want to deliver the right message to the right target audience at the right time, you will want to seek a professional content marketer’s guidance (such as Hive Art Media’s–pardon our little plug here!) to help you devise an effective content marketing strategy.
The hallmark of an excellent content marketing strategy comes with the ease of managing and distributing to prospective customers. With specific marketing goals, budget allocation, usage of tools, and alignment of content marketing strategies, you can maximize your ROI.
Conclusion
When millions of online users have different tastes and preferences, it makes sense to create and share content that resonates with people. Essentially, you need to ensure that your voice is heard to stay ahead in a competitive market.
Often, you have to take bold content marketing steps to encourage people to share and appreciate your efforts. The more you interact with potential customers, the better you can build long-term relationships.
Still, think of content marketing as a continuous process that requires objective judgment and awareness of market trends. Despite the type of content marketing you choose, incorporate entertainment value with a touch of elegance to hook your customers from the start.