We’ve all heard that content is king, but when it comes to content marketing, what exactly does that mean?
At its heart, content marketing is all about creating useful, engaging content that is tailored to your audience.
It’s an inbound marketing strategy, which means rather than sending out communications to your audience (as you would for outbound marketing, such as email blasts), you create relevant and engaging content that positions you as an expert in your field, and encourages your audience to come to you.
Below are five of the top reasons to adopt a professional content marketing strategy for your business, plus how and why outsourcing your content marketing can help you get the most out of your content marketing.
1. Engage Leads and Customers
Creating useful content is essential to capture the attention of potential customers. Think about how you might act if you wanted to buy a new car. You might start out by asking friends for recommendations, and then begin researching makes and models online. Perhaps you would seek out reviews and blogs, read safety guides or checklists, watch short videos, and eventually book in a test drive.
These are all examples of how you might engage with content online. For a large business purchase, the buying cycle is often much longer, and involves many considerations.
Depending on your industry and audience, your content might include blogs, social media, white papers, case studies, infographics, videos, podcasts and any other short or long-form content that helps inform or even entertain your target audience. Finding the right content and channel for your target audience is an important consideration for your content marketing strategy.
2. Rank Higher on Google and Other Search Engines
The type and volume of content on your website will help with your rankings on search engines. This is important, given that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.
However, simply starting content marketing for SEO purposes is fraught with danger. For starters, it’s not necessarily effective, since half of all search queries are four words or longer. But perhaps more importantly, you are likely to turn off readers if you create content that is stuffed full of keywords or not aligned with your brand.
Keyword stuffing is actually more likely to penalize you than reward you. Search engine optimization (SEO) has evolved over time, and today Google rewards useful, engaging and information-rich content:
“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
Other strategies for successful SEO, such as linking to other relevant pages on your site as well as on other sites, are also useful but should be secondary to producing high-quality content that is tailor-made for your audience.
3. Tell Your Brand Story
Content marketing is a way to get your business into the public domain and ideally, in front of your target audience.
Brand awareness builds brand trust, and is essential to drive sales. Creating a consistent narrative for your content will make it feel authentic, engaging, and help you build relationships, credibility and trust with customers, vendors, and within your industry over time.
4. Build a Subscribed Audience
A lesser-known advantage of outsourced content marketing is that you can build your subscribed email database. Make it easy for your readers to subscribe to your blog, and therefore engage with your business again in the future. Again, it’s all about building credibility and trust with your target audience.
5. Generate Sales and Revenue
It might sound impossible, but content marketing can help drive sales, particularly in a B2B environment. Your customers want different pieces of information depending on where they are in their buyer’s journey—awareness, consideration, or justification. Providing the right content to the right audience at the right time is essential to help educate your customer and ultimately, drive sales.
Getting Started with an Outsourced Content Marketing Strategy
Perhaps you have a dormant blog or social media account and think that creating an entire content marketing strategy is just too complicated. It doesn’t have to be.
Engaging and outsourcing a content marketer can help you pinpoint who your audience is, what kind of content they find relevant, and how you can best create and distribute content that will make an impact.
Importantly, an external or outsourced content marketer can help you set realistic goals, and track and measure results so that you can see what’s working, and how you improve in the future.
What’s more, working with a professional marketing agency like Viabrand makes it simple to plan, create and execute a content marketing strategy that aligns with your outbound marketing efforts.
Book a consultation with one of our marketing experts today to discuss how we can assist with content marketing for your business: https://calendly.com/viabrand/15min