Why Is Content Marketing Important for Your Business?
Like other organizations, your business is likely wrestling with a convergence of changes that are upending the familiar tactics you’ve always used to communicate with prospects and customers.
Growing demographic diversity, the adoption of interactive technologies, and evolving media consumption habits have altered how consumers get information and how they perceive branded communication messages.
But before you dive in, you need to learn more. What is content marketing anyway? Is it just a fad? Does it mean anything, or is it just a cool-sounding buzzword? Could it help you achieve your objectives? And if so, how?
What Is Content Marketing?
The Content Marketing Institute offers the following definition of content marketing:
A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
So first and foremost, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach – not just posting items to your social media feeds. You need a clear sense of what you need to accomplish and how your content is supposed to move you closer to your objectives and digital marketing strategy.
- Valuable – The people who read your blogs or watch your videos must get something worthwhile out of it. They should come away feeling like they’ve learned something or that they’ve been entertained in a way that resonates with their lives and values.
- Relevant – Your content must address consumers’ wants, needs, and interests. Be that trusted expert they can turn to for answers. Show your audience that you get them – that you understand what’s interesting, funny, heartwarming, or important to them.
- Consistent – Effective content, delivered over some time, makes you instantly recognizable. Your look, feel, tone, and writing style – and of course the substance – should speak with the same voice that helps consumers get to know you and grow familiar with your organization.
Finally, a good content marketing strategy drives profitable customer action.
Why Content Marketing Matters To Consumers
Today’s prospects have a strong appetite for good information but more powerful resistance to the so-called “hard sell.” Most of us research products and services online before making a purchase. We study different cars, comparing prices and features, before ever setting foot in a dealership. Even grocery shoppers use mobile phones to compare prices and deals.
Why Content Marketing Matters To Search Engines
Consumers turn to search engines for solutions to their problems. Sometimes your best opportunity to win new customers is to be there when they Google it. You may already be working with a partner who specializes in Search Engine Optimization to develop a plan that works for you. You may also know that search engines frequently update the algorithms they use to crawl the web, so they can continuously improve the quality of results that we see when we search.
Google’s updates in recent years increasingly reward quality and punish low quality. And what does quality mean for Google? For one thing, up-to-date content is rewarded. So publishing fresh articles, and updating your existing content, will help you maintain a strong showing on search engine results pages (SERPs) and keep people coming back to your site.
Second, Google increasingly punishes what it considers to be “spam” or overly optimized pages. One example of this is “keyword stuffing,” which generally means using the same keyword too many times when it adds no value to a passage.
Why Content Marketing Matters To Your Business
As you can see, effective content can help you build customer relationships while avoiding less effective “hard sell” tactics. It showcases your subject-matter expertise and gains trust by highlighting important topics that affect your prospects. Well-crafted content can draw traffic to your website and social media accounts, boost your performance on search results pages, and allow audiences to share your content with their friends.
Getting Started With Content Marketing
Just because marketers realize the importance of content, many have yet to establish a formal content marketing strategy.
So how do you develop a content marketing plan that makes sense for your business?
Here are five key steps that can serve as a framework to guide your efforts:
- Planning: Determine what objectives your organization needs to achieve, then what role content will play in meeting them. How will content marketing complement other activities, such as sales, service, promotions, or advertising?
- Audience: Do you have a single, homogeneous audience, or do you have multiple segments who would benefit from what you have to say? Where is the match between their interests, concerns, and information needs and your expertise?
- Content development: Great content begins with a clear sense of what you need to say. Establish a consistent tone that represents the expertise and values of your organization. Your content must be optimized for your audience, for search engines, and your business objectives.
- Implement: How will you distribute your content? Will you publish articles to your website? If you start a blog, what topics will be covered, and how often will it be updated? A regular, consistent schedule is best for establishing familiarity with your audience. How will you optimize your social media and other channels for disseminating your message?
- Monitor results: Pay attention to what, if any impact your content has on your website traffic and search engine rankings. Are people interacting with your content in any way? Assess the number of likes, shares, comments, and other actions. What are people saying in their comments – positive or negative? Are they asking questions or lodging complaints – and how are you responding to them?
By tracking results, you will be able to get important insights into whether and how people respond to your content. That will enable you to take what you learn and improve your content strategy, which allows you to improve your results over time.