Many business owners have yet to realize the benefits of content in growing their businesses.
This is so because most of them have not been educated about it. To begin this education, one of the basic knowledge they have to be exposed to is content, specifically, content marketing. What is content marketing? This will be explained in detail in the section below.
Content is king and key when it comes to digital marketing because you can’t do without it to successfully pass your brand message to your potential clients. This could be in the form of videos, blogs, infographics, social media posts, e-books, white papers, etc. It is the bridge connecting your brand and your potential clients and this should not be taken lightly.
When content is created strategically and set to achieve a goal is called content marketing. The goal of businesses is to amass high sales and revenue and for this to be a reality, your content marketing game must be smart. Your content marketing should strategically meet the needs and solve the problems of your potential client. It must be valuable and relevant to them.
To effectively come up with smart content marketing, planning out a content strategy is just mandatory. This is needed because content strategy is the roadmap designed to guide the creation and publication of content.
This blog post will explain what you need to consider before planning out a content strategy before then we will dive into what is content marketing and its benefits in boosting your business growth.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is simply about creating and consistently publishing helpful and useful content to a targeted audience where they are most likely to see it. This is because the content is an effective way to reach prospective buyers, drive revenue, and retain them.
With content marketing, you don’t have to directly pitch your products or services, you only provide useful information that helps solve potential client problems. The truth remains that, nobody can ever patronize a brand when the first thing they sell! In order not to chase them away from your competitors, let them know how your product or service can be of help to them before they make that buying decision.
Content marketing is important because it’s cost-efficient, sustainable marketing your audience, answers their questions, and builds their leads which helps you generate better leads, more conversions, and more sales.
Benefits of content marketing in boosting your business growth
Trust building
One powerful thing about content marketing is that it helps you build trust. With your customers. Yes, that is more reason for your content not to lack relevance, value, and emotional connection. When all these are present, trust is built and this can drive more sales and revenue which automatically leads to business growth
Increase organic traffic
When your content marketing is well crafted, it increases organic traffic to your website. This happens by using some strategic keywords you know your potential clients are more likely to search for in your content. This helps rank your website high on search engine result page which ordinarily drive more of your potential clients to your page. In fact, it also reduces your marketing cost because you won’t be spending money on PPC and other means of advertising generally.
Create demand
Planning out your content marketing smartly can create demand for your products or services. You ask how? When your potential clients consistently get value from your content, this makes them want more from you. So when this happens, you have to create long-form content like ebooks, and white papers to discuss topics that only resonate with them and also create an urgent need for your products or services.
Uplifting brand awareness
When you create content that helps solve your target challenges, it tends to get high engagement on social media and gets high clicks on websites. This means when your website ranks high on the search engine result page, it means there must have been good content in there. This automatically increases your brand awareness and visibility.
Improved conversion rate
The moment potential clients begin to visit your website or engage with your social media content, often, you have already earned their loyalty. Once this is established, it’s easier to make buying decisions. They can patronize your brand without doubts in their minds – ultimately this leads to a high conversion rate.
Cost-effective marketing strategy
Adopting content marketing into your marketing effort doesn’t require you to have all the money in the world. It is a cost-effective marketing strategy, unlike traditional marketing.
Improved social media engagement
High-quality content posted on social media platforms can boost engagement which automatically means your business gets to reach more people and they are aware of it. Remember this will only occur when it’s high-quality content. This is another point to prove that when content marketing is devised rightly, this can cause an increase in social media engagement.
Essential elements of a content strategy
Content strategy is the roadmap that guides you on the creation and publication of your content. Without it, content marketing may not be as effective as it will when content strategy is devised. So the elements to note while planning a content strategy are explained below:
Have a goal
It is essential you know what you want to achieve with your content. This helps to know what kind of content to put out at every stage of your brand marketing ensuring that every goal set still ticks back to the general goal of boosting your sales and revenue which determine your business growth.
Understanding your audience
Understanding your audience helps you to know who you are creating content for. To know this, it is important you do research about them and write a buyer persona. This will guide you on how to solve their problems, answer their questions, and meet their needs through your content so that they can find it valuable and useful.
Content audit and analysis
Analyzing what content is working and what is not is extremely important when it comes to content strategy. This is so because it gives you room for adjustment. This way you’ll be able to identify gaps and opportunities for content.
