What is content Marketing?

Consistent content, quality content – These are the two sides of the Content Marketing coin, and both are important for reliably increasing your brand’s SEO ranking and your ability to sell online. But if you’re not familiar with the term you might not know why it’s so vital in boosting your online presence.

Just what is Content Marketing anyway?

Content marketing is a term that you’ve probably been hearing for quite some time, and in the main, content marketing has not changed in the many years since the phrase was first coined. The term refers to a method of marketing that includes the creation and distribution of online content that encourages its audience to visit certain brand assets or encourages certain audience behaviours. This can either be a visit to a brand’s homepage or, much better for SEO, a specific landing page crafted for a particular campaign or product. Brand awareness is always part of any marketing strategy, but in the case of content marketing, we are talking about getting your audience to DO something. 

How do I produce winning content marketing?

Great content marketing starts with strategy and consistency. Your strategy should be centered around a central goal for the campaign or series of campaigns that you are running. What is your campaign pointing at? What do you want your users to actually do when they arrive there? Understanding how you can use the tools and platforms you have at your disposal consistently will allow you to build a solid strategy for your content marketing.

For example, let’s invent a brand – Acme Acorns – a UK-based acorn flour production company that sells it’s sustainably harvested acorn flour to manufacturing businesses and is now also looking to sell directly to customers using it’s own D2C ecommerce website. 

Now if you’re a food manufacturing business, you might know who Acme Acorns are, but at this moment in time, the average person on the street looking for acorn flour likely doesn’t have a clue who they are, so a launch campaign is produced, with a website launch coinciding with some social media and a couple of written PR pieces in some UK food magazines. 

Success. Now people know who to buy their acorn flour from, right? Well, no. It’s all well and good, but that’s not content marketing. For a good content marketing campaign, you need to be able to kickstart the engine of organic awareness for your brand, and this is done by producing marketing content with consistent messaging and tone across all of your brand’s social media channels, as well as PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising.

The tone, branding, message, and vitally, the Call To Action in each piece of content needs to be the same throughout the campaign. In the case of Acme Acorns, social media posts carrying the same brand theme, video and copy were presented across each platform, designed to engage with the brand’s ideal customers in each instance, and every post carrying a call to action, which in each case was a 10% off checkout code, and a link to a carefully curated web page on Acme Acorns’ website, detailing an acorn flour subscription service with free delivery for new signups. The signup form also captured the new customers contact details and signed them up (pending agreement) to Acme Acorns’ marketing databas, so these customers could be contacted with further promotions and news later on.

This means an increase in visitors to the site, specifically to a page with good SEO keyword/keyphrase ranking in the copy, and containing helpful information for the customer, with low load-times and no errors with images or dead links. This raises the Search Engine Optimisation ranking of this page for the big search providers, and so when somebody runs a new, unprompted search for “acorn flour” or something related, the page moves higher up the results. Acme Acorns have now successfully used content marketing (deliberate) to raise the SEO profile of their website (organic), resulting in increase of potential customers, and a boost in online presence.

Consistency and quality make for great Content Marketing

The keys here are consistency and quality. Consistent content marketing allows you to build a rapport with your audience; you become a familiar brand to them, perhaps they like your style, or your logo, or your turn of phrase. Quality content marketing means that you do something for the audience, answering questions, imparting information, or providing entertainment. Both are vital and can be tracked using analytics. If your content is consistent but it doesn’t really add value or entertain, then your audience will forget you and you’ll see low enagement. If your content is entertaining but doesn’t carry a consistent message or theme then your audience won’t feel that they know you and you’ll lose follows. If the continued phenomenon of influencer marketing has taught us anything, it’s that people really want to buy from helpful and entertaining personalities, so give your brand a consistent personality, and make it an entertaining and helpful one.

What are some basics of good Content Marketing?

Increase Audience retention with rewarding content

Your content is an important asset for your brand. It should create positive experiences for any potential customers, capturing their attention and cementing a positive impression of your brand and it’s messaging. Creating consistent and good-quality content helps your business to build trust and a relationship with your audience. If you have a relationship in which your audience gets content that helps and entertains them, then there’s more reason for them to stick around. This reinforces your brand reputation. In time, if consistently rewarded with quality content, your audience will become brand ambassadors.

Get better social traction with trends and influence purchasing

So you’ve increased your social media followers… that’s great but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to consistently create quality content to push those new audience members into action. A good content marketing strategy will include competitor analysis as well as trend analysis across social channels to discover what enageges and converts your target audience. Once you have your audience on side, you’ll need to keep them there too, so constantly review what’s new and trending, but don’t lose your brand voice in the process. Remember to stay consistent. If you’ve got plenty of followers but your posts arent feeding your landing pages, review what you’re doing and see if you can up the quality to produce better engagement.

Increase leads/sales through increased trust

Consistent content marketing can be a great lead generation tool. When your audience views quality content, they’re more likely to purchase from you further down the line. Embedding Calls To Action into your content is an effective way of pulling content consumers directly into the sales funnel via landing pages or signup forms. You can reliably track click through rates and all sorts of other metrics to allow you to tweak these CTAs’ effectiveness. Get onboard with downloadable too. Have a PDF or two handy that allows people to take some knowledge away with them. If you can give knowledge and authority away for free, then this increases trust, which increases leads.

Boost conversions with originality

A big part of making quality content is originality. We don’t mean do something off the wall and different every time, because this obviously fails at consistency, but as a brand owner, use your own content, pictures, your own face and voice. Stay consistent, but make it original. Don’t use stock photos – they are found to be the least engaging types of imagery – but craft a graphic, or attach an existing brand graphic to a real picture or a real story. Don’t forget to use the people in your team and those real faces around you – your company is a lot more attractive if you show that it’s a place where real people work, with real lives and stories of their own. This can be solid gold content marketing, as it’s consistent (your team might change but your brand won’t) and high quality (real people with real situations are the most relatable).

Save money with clear goals

Spending time and resources on a consistent and measurable content marketing strategy and producing quality content may seem like a large initial cost, but it’s far cheaper than just throwing everything at the proverbial wall and seeing what sticks. There is always an element of A/B testing, or interactive improvement in all digital marketing, but you should always start with a clear picture of what your campaign and brand messaging should look like and what your goals and Calls To Action will be. A solid content marketing strategy will allow you to do this.

Where can I get a reliable content marketing strategy?

Market Rocket are experts in digital marketing, and have been developing content marketing strategies and creating quality content for brands for years. We can build a comprehensive content marketing strategy for your brand at any stage of business development, whether you’re launching or you’re established and looking to create growth, get in touch and speak to our team today.