Content marketing. Sounds like a buzzword, doesn’t it? The truth is, you’re probably already doing lots of it, even if you don’t know it. Every time your business puts information out there, it’s marketing content that contributes towards getting your brand known, liked and trusted.
I’ve built my career helping businesses grow through content marketing. A strong content marketing strategy enables brands to speak to their audience in a way that’s interesting and adds value — turning new contacts into customers and converting existing customers into fans.
So, what is content marketing?
Content marketing is the collective term given to many different types of content published by your business, including:
- Blogs
- Social media posts
- White papers
- How-tos and guides
- Infographics
- Case studies
- Videos
- Emails
It’s one of the most (if not the most) important strands of marketing. It’s all about creating brilliant content that your target audience will respond to, so that they begin to see your business as a friend, authority or trusted advisor.
This helps you cut through the noise — of which there is a lot!
How does content marketing help?
Content marketing serves a number of key purposes:
- It puts your company in a position of trust with your customer. Giving prospects engaging, helpful and accurate information nurtures them through the buying process towards a sale.
- It grows your company’s reach. Customers are far more likely to share useful blogs or funny videos than an obvious advert. That means your content is seen by their connections too — and when it’s presented as a recommendation, its influence is even more powerful.
- It boosts your online presence. Ever wondered how some companies appear so high up on Google searches? It’s all down to content.
Because the internet plays such a huge role when a customer is looking for a solution to their pain point, or a new business to engage with, content marketing cannot be overlooked. If your organisation creates a solid content marketing strategy, then you’ll be in a much stronger position to reach new customers online.
How to create your own content plan
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The most important element of content marketing is knowing your audience. You need to really understand your customer: who they are, what they need help with, what they like to do, where they spend their time online, and so on. Get the answers to these questions, and you can more easily determine what your content plan needs to cover.
A content plan should look at all the different channels available to you (e.g. blogs, emails, social media…) and use each one to its full potential. You should repurpose your content appropriately across these channels, so you get the most ‘bang for your buck’ from each piece and your customer has plenty of chances to see it.
There are lots of brilliant tools out there that businesses can use to support their content marketing. From design aids like Canva to writing tools like Hemingway and Grammarly, the internet is full of resources to help make content marketing manageable if you opt to tackle it alone.
How to monitor and evaluate your results
As with all marketing, you need to pay attention to how well your content is working. Make sure you have the basics of online monitoring set up, like Google Analytics and a good social media management tool. Then, build these insights into your activity reviews.
Think back to the goal you want to achieve — more followers, for example. Has your activity helped? If not, why not? If so, how can you do more of the same? In this way, you can continuously work towards achieving your mission and growing through communication.
Behind every successful business is a great marketing strategy. And behind every great marketing strategy is content that develops the brand, engages their audience, and generates exceptional results.
By Kelly Gilmour-Grassam
About Kelly
Kelly is the founder of content marketing agency Making You Content. She set up the business in her early 20s after freelancing as a content marketer, and now helps some of the biggest names in UK business create exceptional content for their audiences.
