Content marketing is a secret weapon for brands in the digital space, but not many marketers know exactly why. As e-commerce and B2B spaces become more competitive, effective content marketing has continued to deliver success for businesses. The value of content marketing exists in its ability to increase brand awareness and presence, and drive sales. High-quality, targeted content heavily impacts consumer decision-making. Whether you’re a content marketing prodigy, or just dipping your toes into the mix, keep reading to learn why effective content marketing is so important in today’s digital world.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on providing relevant and useful content to attract new audiences and drive consumer decision-making. Content marketing is important because it allows a brand to build trust with their audience, while also connecting with current customers, increasing conversions, and generating sales. In fact, studies show that using high-quality, real content can increase conversion rates by up to 35%. Because of this, content marketing is a highly valuable tool for businesses when used efficiently and effectively.
Types of Content Marketing
Several different channels are used in the content marketing space. Each channel has its own benefits and drawbacks, but businesses need to consider each to create a well-rounded marketing strategy. Here are the most popular channels for content marketing below:
- Instagram content marketing: Learning how to create, promote, and optimize content on Instagram is highly effective for increasing brand awareness, and ultimately increasing conversions. Instagram also provides advertising tools that allow brands to promote their best performing content within Instagram stories and feeds. The platform offers a diverse set of content creation options, ranging from stories, posts, IGTV, Reels, and Guides. Because most of its content is highly visual, Instagram is the best platform for influencer marketing compared to other platforms like Facebook.
- Facebook content marketing: Similar to Instagram, Facebook offers a variety of tools to help promote content on highlights and feeds. Another similarity is the ability to optimize and generate high-quality content that generates organic engagement with posts. Unlike Instagram, Facebook allows clickable links within posts and has more wiggle room when it comes to written content.
- Tik Tok content marketing: With 800 million users worldwide and counting, Tik Tok has evolved into one of the top content marketing social media platforms. The Tik Tok for Business feature is constantly helping brands take advantage of traffic. The most important thing for marketers to understand Tik Tok is to use the app themselves. With the rapidly evolving trends and styles, marketers should stay up to date in order to create relevant and authentic content.
- Email marketing: Email marketing is the best way to generate direct responses from customers. Because customers sign up to receive emails from a brand, they are willing to open the emails, learn more about the company, and participate in sales. Remember to have a catchy subject line, and make the email simple for reading with ease.
- Website: Using your brand’s website for representing your brand is one of the most overlooked, but also most important aspects of content marketing. Creating content for your website’s home page that is relatable and authentic is important for building positive first impressions with new customers.
- SEO: Any brand that has an online presence should be focusing on producing content that is SEO-driven. Using SEO strategy within any written content on a website or platform allows for a brand to directly target audiences, while also providing actionable and relevant information. Of course if a brand has excellent curated SEO content, their page is more likely to appear higher in search engines, which will ultimately help to generate more site impressions and conversions.
Why Content Marketing is Important for B2B
With the world of advertising transitioning into the digital world, and the B2B space becoming more competitive, content marketing is especially important in the coming years for B2B marketers. Using content marketing for a B2B marketing strategy means that a company is using different forms of digital content to generate leads and attract potential buyers. Studies show that 71% of buyers use the internet daily to make their purchasing decisions, and this is only projected to increase with the advance of B2B communications moving online.
Using the content marketing channels and strategies outlined above can help to increase communication with buyers, increase brand awareness, and build brand credibility. In other words, the more authentic a brand’s online presence is, the more likely they are to attract new buyers.
Why Content Marketing is Important for B2C
B2C content marketing is generating and promoting content that is designed to appeal to a set of targeted audiences who are potentially interested in buying a product or service. B2C content marketing allows brands to directly connect and build relationships with their target consumers while influencing their purchasing decisions. B2C content marketing is different from B2B, because it is targeting individuals rather than buyers or teams at select companies. Content promoted for B2C marketing should be fun, relatable, and storytelling. Posts should encourage consumers to engage and interact with the content.
What is an Effective Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing can be effective, but only if its strategy is implemented properly. Here are the recommended steps for building a valuable content strategy:
- Audit all existing brand content: Auditing a brand’s existing content will help with setting goals for what the content should look like in the future, and which channels should be used. Which channel has proven to be the most effective for sharing content? Which channel has been the worst? What kinds of content does your audience interact with the most?
- Set content performance goals: Create a list of realistic KPI’s and measurements that follow the SMART framework. Make sure you attach a time frame so that your goals are attainable and reachable.
- Identify target audiences: Understanding and identifying the needs and interests of your target audiences plays an important role in building an effective content marketing strategy. The content a brand presents on any given platform should be designed to draw a certain audience in. Audiences are not necessarily customers, rather they are groups of people that may be interested in a particular product, service, or trend.
- Create a content plan: Creating a content plan and schedule is critical for ease of workflow, while also establishing clarity for content goal deadlines. The further in advance a content calendar is planned, the larger the buffer a company has for staying flexible with content and scheduling.
- Establish a content production plan: Consider what kinds of content will need to be produced to attract the attention of potential audiences. What tools and external resources are needed to produce and distribute this content?
- Create and track performance measures: Tracking the performance measurements established when creating content goals will help make decisions towards any necessary adjustments in strategy and campaigns.
How to Measure Content Marketing Effectiveness
One of the key steps in creating an effective content marketing strategy is tracking content’s success on different platforms. Performance measurements help to decide whether a content strategy is effective, so it’s important to keep tabs on how campaigns are doing. Below is a list of popular performance metrics for measuring content success:
- Clicks and impressions: Quantifying clicks and impressions on pages and content is one of the best preliminary metrics for analyzing the effectiveness of content marketing. Clicks are the number of times someone has clicked on an ad, post, or page. Impressions are the number of times the content is displayed on someone’s screen. While clicks are a great indicator for interested customers, impressions give a broader view of how well a campaign is performing.
- Conversions: Conversions are one of the most important metrics because they relate to any brand’s ultimate goal: to convert page visitors into customers. If a brand produces a piece of high-quality content, this will actually continue to drive conversions over longer periods of time.
- Content sharing: Different social media platforms track how many times content has been shared and sent to other people. Using page shares as a performance metric can offer insight into the types of content audiences are interested in sharing with others.
- Inbound linking: Inbound links are an especially relevant performance indicator for written content like blogs. When a brand creates a piece of high-quality content, and another brand links it in their own post or site, this immediately gives credibility to the original page. Inbound links help with driving traffic from other sites to your brand’s site. This is an important concept within SEO strategy.
- SEO metrics: If you implement SEO strategy into your content marketing, you’ll want to track SEO success. This starts with analyzing content rankings for targeted keywords, the number of inbound links, and tracking how often a page ranks in Google answer boxes. All of these metrics involve how often your content is ultimately seen and engaged with on the internet.
The Latest Trends in Content Marketing
Staying up to date with the latest trends in content marketing is important for continuing to create relevant and high-quality content that performs well. As the digital marketing space continues to expand, so does the use of technology for content marketing strategy. Check out some of the growing trends within content marketing:
- AI and content marketing: The AI software market is projected to have a 26.79% CAGR between 2017 and 2025. Because of this, AI-based content strategy has grown in popularity and has allowed brands to create highly curated content for specific audiences. In content marketing, AI can help with tracking performance, automotive content generation, and even interacting with customers. Cohley combines machine learning with UGC strategy to implement new and effective content marketing strategies for brands.
- Marketing automation tools: Automating the content workflow process is a great way to increase the effectiveness of content marketing strategy. Marketing automation tools like Cohley exist to assist in any part of the content process, from distribution and planning, to performance measurements and content creation. Cohley helps by introducing brands to new audiences through developing creative and authentic approaches to content marketing. This is done through performance analysis, high-quality content generation, and more!
- UGC and digital marketing: 92% of consumers trust organic, user-generated content more than traditional advertising campaigns. UGC can be intimidating because it is the form of content that marketers have the least control over, but it may prove to be the most effective. Not only is UGC affordable, but it allows brands to easily present authentic content that gives audiences a sense of participation and inclusivity.
Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy With Cohley
Are you ready to create a stellar and effective content marketing strategy? If so, contact the team at Cohley to learn more about how we can help improve your content, grow your brand, and achieve all of your marketing goals!
