Content Marketing

Content Marketing is a marketing approach to create and distribute useful, valuable, and relevant information to attract the attention of the target audience to pursue specific aims.

In this video, a SendPulse marketer, Anna, explains how to use content marketing to your advantage.

Content Marketing Goals

• New lead generation
• Target audience growth
• Increasing customers' engagement
• Lead nurturing
• Building brand awareness
• Customer loyalty raising
• Driving traffic
• Passive clients re-engagement
• Cross-selling and upselling

The choice of goals depends on the stage of the buying cycle you consider.

Buying cycle stages

1. Awareness
2. Research
3. Consideration
4. Buy

Once you set your goals — decide which key performance indicators will measure the fulfillment of every goal.

The most used indicators are the following:

• number of page visitors
• time spent on every page
• unique visitors
• bounce rate
• comments and likes
• shares on social websites
• conversions and transactions

Besides, you should set the goals for these indicators for you to see the progress, work better, and improve content. Make sure that all the goals you have set are realistic, achievable, and measurable.

Now, it's high time to dwell on the content that will make your business develop and bring income.

Know your audience

Creating content for the sake of creating content is a complete failure. You must know your audience very well. This does not mean just having an extensive mailing list. Why don't you spend some time researching? This way, you will provide yourself with valuable information about your clients that will help create desirable for THEM content. Make sure that your content satisfies the needs of your clients, solves their problem. 

Find out information regarding your customer's age range, occupation, social status, education, place of residence, hobbies, and preferences.

Provide qualitative content

Content marketing is aimed at creating original, unique, and valuable content. These three features mean quality. You may ask about the amount of content to publish, but no one answer will fit everybody. Once you neglect your content quality in favor of quantity, you will lose customers. They should look forward to hearing from you. Don't disappoint them!

Proofread

Even if you have 10 thousand loyal customers or fans of your blog — there will always be at least one grammar nazi who will unsubscribe because of grammatical errors. Mistakes can be misprints, but they show your attitude towards your work. Use the spellcheckers and edit, edit, edit.

Write eye-catching titles

After reading a title, a reader decides whether an article is worth reading or not. Make it informative, unambiguous, and intriguing. 

Consider different types of content

This issue usually makes beginners feel confused. They desperately try to find out which kind of content will outdo them. An ultimate guide or a short checklist? None of the above. It's essential to create both long-reads and short articles, depending on the topic. Discover the best length for blog content. It will help you craft engaging contents for readers and optimized search engines.

Optimize every piece of your content

Search engine optimization is a must and can't exist without content. For people to read it, you should take special care for the search engines to see and to rank it. You don't need to be an SEO specialist to create valuable content. For search engines, valuable content means one that fits peoples' queries, i.e., content should meet people's needs. Use Google Keyword Planner while thinking over the topic to write about. Pay attention to the number of queries and competitiveness. Besides, you can use Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Trends. All these tools will help you discover new terms, give better insights on keywords used by people to land on your page, and much more analytics about your pages.

Blogs are the pioneer of content marketing. It is stated that businesses that have a blog get 55% more visitors than those who don't. Blog influences the relationships between companies and clients.

Content Marketing Formats

• blog posts
• articles
• ebooks
• case studies
• data-driven visuals
• newsletters
• illustrations and photos
• webinars
• vlog
• videos
• how-to guides
• glossaries and dictionaries
• graphs and charts
• reviews
• surveys
• quotes
• white papers
• memes
• user-generated content
• researches
• quizzes
• presentations

Now you are acquainted with the goals content marketing can achieve, tips on creating valuable content, and the most popular content marketing formats. Consider these issues and enjoy the results!

References

1. The article builds a holistic view of content marketing.
2. In this article, you'll find 25 content marketing examples with amazing results.
3. The article defines content marketing, shares examples, and gives tips on how to get started.

Last Updated: 22.03.2023