The 2000s saw a boom in blogs, text, and articles.
The 2010s introduced long-form videos, infographics, and illustrative media to us.
The 2020s is the time for bite-sized content.
And no matter how much content transforms, it still follows the principles of content marketing that eventually make or break your brand.
Since the content you produce is the face of your brand, you’d want to make sure that you produce the right type of content that reaches the right people.
All that is possible by understanding content marketing and ultimately using it the right way to establish a strong brand identity.
This blog is a comprehensive (and actionable) guide to help you understand and leverage the power of content marketing.
What is Content Marketing?
Content is what you produce for other people to consume. It’s the medium brands use to communicate their message or ideologies to the people likely to buy from them.
This includes videos, images, infographics, blogs, tabloids, apps, and more.
The better your content, the more attention you attract which results in more conversions and better sales.
The Power Content Marketing Yields to SMBs
Content marketing is one of those avenues that will garner a lot of attention and clicks for your brand.
However, none of it’s possible till your brand doesn’t have a solid content marketing and distribution strategy in place.
But how paramount is content marketing in the first place?
Here’s what you should know:
Content attracts as a lead magnet: Depending on how valuable, informative, or entertaining your content is, you’d find a lot of inbound leads coming in because of the quality of content you produce. This is the same content that will also put your business as the authority in your industry.
Build a community: The internet right now favors communities and groups with the same interests and the same topic(s) of discussion. Your blogs, videos, and other forms of content invite people to join these communities. Adidas is one of the best examples of this. Adidas suggests people join their discord group for updates, discussions, and new releases.
Attract organic conversions: 49% of businesses say that organic search brings them the best marketing ROI. Organic conversions are the goldmine every business and brand is digging for. This includes creating (and optimizing) content in such a way that people find it easy to discover.
Content marketing increases brand loyalty: Brand loyalty is achieved by implementing trust signals and promoting customer happiness on your brand. This eventually leads to a customer coming back to repurchase from you. This only happens when they discover you again. And content is the best way to achieve that. Content marketing allows you to retarget audience segments and existing customers, acting as a reminder for them about your existence.
Content Types You Must Deploy (Ascending Order of Priority)
As your brand is heading towards a solid content marketing strategy, you need to have a solid base of content that allures readers and viewers to your brand in the first place.
Here are some examples of these types of content:
1. Blog Posts and Articles
Blog posts and articles act as a cornerstone for your brand.
Depending on whether your content is educational, engaging, entertaining, or all three, blogs will help you find your audience.
Written content serves two purposes for your audience:
- Work as a knowledge base to understand the product or industry better.
- Drive organic traffic.
Over 92% of global traffic comes from Google. This means that the more search-engine-optimized content you produce, the more likely people are going to discover your brand.
Now of course, you should know that bloggers publish around 7.5 million posts on the internet per day. So how do you make sure that your content stands out?
Here’s what you can start with:
- Provide your users with high-quality information
- Match your content to the search intent
- Write attractive titles and subheadings in your blog
- Make your content actionable and shareable
Suggested Tools: Semrush, Grammarly.
2. Social Media Content
Over 5 billion people across the world use some form of social media.
Instagram in particular brings in over 200 billion views every day.
In the same way, TikTok has over 1.5 billion daily active users whom you can cater your content for.
Social media has been able to drive enormous engagement for different brands.
And if there’s one single rule that governs any social media platform, it’s that attention is the only economy that drives engagement.
Because of how much content is out there, regular media like sharing your company offers doesn’t work as much.
People like to see behind the scenes of brands. In fact, social media is progressing so much that the more creative you are with your content, the more attention you’re able to generate.
One of the best examples of this is Heinz’s ad campaign with Ed Sheeran.
Ed’s Heinz Commercial (Behind the Scenes)
There are platforms like Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube, that you can create content on.
However, to make your social media marketing successful, make sure that you:
- Research your audience – Use tools like Taplio
- Choose platforms where your audience is most likely to discover you
- Regularly optimize your content – Use trending audios, trends, and templates
- Engage with your community – Leave comments and feature others with your brand
- Create informative, shareable, or entertaining content
Suggested Tools: Hootsuite, Taplio.
3. Video Content
When your computer starts malfunctioning, of course, you can Google for solutions and read through a bunch of solutions.
Or what’s easier is to just go to YouTube and search for tutorials.
Why?
Because videos are fast, easier to pay attention to, and more actionable than text.
Right now, more than 52% of companies create videos to educate their audience.
And this number is only growing over the past decade.
Video content has grown so much in popularity and consumption that short and long-form content is being consumed on a daily basis by billions of people.
Creating video content will help your brand create a strong bond with its audience. Not just that but it also leads to more conversions, a better ROI, and frequent engagement with your brand.
This video content could be used across your social media platforms, your website, or any place you deem necessary and relevant.
However, to make your video marketing successful, make sure that you:
- Create long and short-form videos equally
- Plan content production with regular and relevant content
- Schedule and promote your videos
- Keep your videos creative and informative at the same time
- Be the source of information by talking frequently about your industry
Suggested Tools: Hootsuite, Veed.io (for repurposing your content for different platforms).
4. Infographics and Data-Driven Content
Infographics are one of the best data illustrations that combine content and information in a simplified (yet attractive) format.
Infographic content could be of different types and purposes.
This type of content mixes words and statements along with images to create graphics that are easy to understand… and share.
Infographics will work best when you’re trying to simplify a complex topic and display it in a more digestible format for your audience to understand.
However, to create effective infographics that stand out, make sure that you:
- Display information in a very clear format
- Keep the content clean and simple
- Use different graphics for different titles
- Repurpose it for different social media platforms in different sizes
Suggested Tools: Venngage, Canva
5. Performance Marketing (Paid Ad Campaigns)
Paid ads are one of the quickest ways to reach a broader audience.
Depending on how much you’re spending, performance marketing will allow you to position yourself in every place on the internet that you want to be seen.
For businesses that want inbound leads, performance marketing is one of the best avenues to begin with.
Even though organic content optimization and SEO are equally beneficial for your business to take off, paid ad campaigns will help you bring in conversions and traffic instantly.
No matter what platform you’re using, you can use paid media to reach the users of this platform as quickly as possible.
To make your ad campaigns successful, however, make sure that you:
- Make sure that your ad copies are actionable and compelling enough
- Understand everything about your audience – their interests, age range, and locations
- Use a piece of content that accurately describes your product or business
- Use advanced audience targeting to get better results from your paid campaigns.
Suggested Tools: Google Ads, Copy.ai.
How to Create a Successful Content Marketing Strategy?
Even though there are plenty of ways for you to build an effective marketing funnel that ultimately converts your potential customers, every funnel requires the following things to be set straight at least:
1. Crafting a Brand Voice and Tone
Every brand is a business, of course.
And every business in the market aims to make money.
But it’s not necessary to make every brand seem and sound the same.
If every brand talks and produces content the same way, there would be no difference between Adidas and Nike shoes. An Apple phone and a Samsung phone would seem the same. And Coke and Pepsi would probably be the same things.
Crafting a unique brand voice is extremely important for your brand to stand out.
With the swarm of businesses out there, it’s important to give yours a personality.
dBrand is one of the best examples of this.
Before you even produce your first piece of content, make sure that the type of language and tonality you use matches the personality of your products or services too.
Producing content that will likely resonate with your target audience will help you establish a unique brand identity and draw more people toward you.
Here’s a SEMRush Guide on creating a brand voice.
2. Setting a Goal
A primary question you need to answer – what is it that you’re planning with your content?
Do you want to educate your audience?
Or maybe inform or entertain them?
Whatever the goal, it’s important to craft your content the same way.
You don’t want to be a jewelry business but just share memes across your Instagram.
In the same way, you don’t want to be a comic brand but talk about things that are irrelevant to your brand.
Setting a goal is extremely important as this goal will shape the rest of the journey that you have as a brand.
Answering the following questions will help:
- How much growth do you want from search engines every year?
- What is your ideal YoY follower goal across Instagram?
- How often do you have to create content?
- How credible do you want to sound and seem to your audience?
3. Data-Driven Approach to Creating Personalized Content
Creating personalized content for prospects and customers is essential to create quicker and lasting customer relationships. Data helps create personalized content. Now, of course you can go down the traditional route of understanding and exploring the demographics, locations, and behavior of your audience. But you need to analyze a little beyond that. Here are two very efficient ways to gather valuable customer data: :
- Using Analytics Tools
No matter how good your content is, if you’re not aware of who (and how anybody) is potentially going to interact with your brand, you’re going to find it hard to get discovered.
Rather than guesswork, there are plenty of audience research tactics that you can use.
One of the best ways to do that is to explore Google Analytics with your website or app.
This tool will allow you to understand:
- How a site visitor interacted with your page
- What locations and times do people visit your website
- Which browser did the visitor use
- Which device and operating system the browser is running on
Having all this data handy will allow you to have ample information about your audience. This helps you create original and personalized content.
2. Using Customer Service Tools
Another way is to leverage data gathered by live chat and other customer service tools. Customer service software and similar tools are not just useful for the customer service team. These tools provide valuable data for marketing teams as well.
Take live chat and chatbots for example, which are commonly seen on many websites today.What many content marketers often forget is that customer-service chatbots and live chat software gather and analyze large volumes of data from customer inputs and interactions. This data offers valuable insights into the real-time customer needs, preferences, and pain points, pertaining to your business. Companies can use this treasure trove of data to create personalized content in the form of blogs, ebooks, use cases and knowledge bases to offer answers to prospects and customers – this will speed up conversion rates and improve customer experience. Moreover, this data can be used to design PPC and social media campaigns for better engagement, conversions, and sales.
3. Marketing Funnel and Content Types
Every marketing strategy starts somewhere and ends with a conversion.
Whether you’re sending your customers to your content-filled landing page or asking them to click on the link in the description of your YouTube video, the goal is to make them purchase from you.
But not every strategy is the same as well.
Every marketing funnel consists of three stages:
- Top of the Funnel (TOFU) Content
Top-of-the-funnel (Tofu) content is designed to bring awareness to your brand. People who don’t know you or your brand are the ones this stage of the funnel target. The goal is to get them to pay attention to your brand.
In such a stage, the content types that perform the best include:
- Short-form and long-form video content
- Endorsements from influencers or brands
- Blogs and ads
- Introductory emails
- Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) Content
This is the consideration stage. At this point, you may already have leads through inbound or outbound marketing.
Most importantly, your audience:
- May be interested in a feature of your brand
- May have shown some sort of interest or filled out a form on your landing page
- Added a product from you to the cart
In such a stage, the content types that perform the best include:
- An in-depth blog or a free ebook
- An actionable template or a checklist
- A newsletter or a microblog
- Case studies or webinars
- Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) Content
The final stage of your funnel is the decision stage – does a potential customer want to buy from you or not?
At this stage, your audience has already narrowed down and your lead is potentially going to convert.
From this point forward, you’re communicating with the goal of closing the deal or making the sale. The content you produce at this stage will make or break the deal, which is why you have to be specific (and smart) at this stage.
In such a stage, the content types that perform the best include:
- Assessments and consultation
- Product or service demonstration
- Coupon codes
Wix is one of the best examples of this, as it offers you a coupon code in case you haven’t completed your checkout.
4. Content Distribution
If your plan is to make a lot of content, post it, and hope that people will eventually discover it, your plan is already doomed.
Once you create your content, it needs a hard push across the internet through the right channels so that people find it easier to discover.
Some of these key strategies include:
- Email Marketing: Email marketing isn’t new; yet still insanely effective. Email marketing notifies your subscribers about all the content you want them to see and engage with it frequently. You can also use email marketing to build new mailing lists and serve promotional or informative content on a weekly basis. Morning Brew is one of the best examples of this.
- Scheduling content: Social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have certain ideal times to post content. One of the best ways to utilize this time is by scheduling content for these specific times. Hootsuite is one of the best platforms in this case as it allows you to distribute your content across different platforms at different times.
- Ebooks: Ebooks are one of the most relevant distribution techniques for almost all kinds of businesses. Whether it’s a DIY guide or a “Tips about X”, an ebook or a template is an actionable piece of item that everybody wants to get their hands on. For you to market your brand, ebooks will act as the pillar of tangible information that readers can extract from your business.
- Sponsored content: If your business has the budget, you can explore the option of performance marketing by running sponsored ads by partnering up with certain social media influencers or audience networks. This is one of the best ways to get more eyeballs across your brand.
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5. Content Analysis
Even though producing more and more content increases your chances of getting discovered, you can’t keep producing till you don’t understand how your past content has performed.c
You can establish certain KPIs for your blogs and videos.
Of course, more views are great.
But beyond that, you can also measure how many people signed up for your newsletter (if you have one), how many people added your product to their cart, where they came from, how many conversions you received, and how people landed on certain pages.
In order to do that, Google Analytics again is a great tool to measure your content performance. You can check out other tools to analyze content here.
Make sure that you’re regularly reviewing your performance data to identify what’s working well and what’s not.
There are certain times when your content needs a pivot and you can find that only when you analyze the performance of your current content.
Leverage Content Marketing the Right Way
Staying on top of content marketing trends is essential to beat competition, and build a resilient business and a powerful brand.
SMBs that are just entering the market can effectively boost brand identity and achieve sustainable growth by prioritizing this – creating the right content for the right audience.
We hope this actionable guide will help you deploy or re-strategize your content marketing efforts.
Till next time…
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