Marketers around the world are extolling the benefits of content marketing. Business leaders on the other hand are not always entirely sure why they should be investing in this medium. Below we list the top 5 Content Marketing questions most asked by clients and uncover the reasons why you should be seriously considering this form of long term marketing.
1. What is Content Marketing?
2. How does Content Marketing benefit my business?
3. How does a business go about creating content?
4. How should my business promote our content?
5. How can I tell if my content marketing is working?
1. What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is essentially a vehicle to promote your brand, products and services using a variety of digital marketing tools including blog posts, infographics, video content, social media posts, whitepapers, reports, ebooks, press releases, case studies and so forth. The objective of content marketing is to enhance your customer service strategy by providing useful, meaningful information to your prospects and customers through these channels thereby engaging them through creating a level of familiarity, trust and goodwill. Consider our 5 Steps to a Rock Solid Content Marketing Strategy to find out more detailed information and to help you in preparing a content marketing strategy.
2. How does Content Marketing benefit my business?
Content marketing essentially helps you to provide an enhanced level of service to prospects and customers through sharing relevant and valuable information. Because you are sharing your knowledge, customers are able to quickly ascertain the level of expertise within your organisation. Additionally, content marketing significantly improves SEO (search engine optimisation) which influences how your website ranks in search results online. Google favours websites which offer relevant, valuable information in response to search queries and it will trawl the content you have on or affiliated to your website, in order to determine where your website should be ranked in a search result. Lastly, content marketing is the best way to promote your products and services in the most informative, entertaining and engaging manner. In this blog post we uncover in greater detail the reasons why content marketing is a great investment.
3. How does a business go about creating content?
Maintaining high quality content is critical if you are to ensure a professional image on the internet. Whether you are preparing social media posts, blog articles, case studies or even just testimonials, you will need to ensure that the person creating your content, has an outstanding command of the English language, a solid background in sales or marketing, as well as experience in customer service. This could be a person inside your company, however if you do not have the suitable skills or time resources in-house, then you will need to consider outsourcing this task to a professional. The ideal team should comprise a copywriter experienced in social media and digital marketing, as well as a graphic designer skilled in promoting the professionalism of your brand. In this article we uncover the best approach that your business should be taking to content marketing and why.
4. How should my business promote our content?
All too often businesses make the mistake of thinking that ‘If we create it they will come’. In order to maximise the value that your business can derive from your content marketing investment, it is essential to distribute your content through as many marketing channels as possible. For example if you have created a blog article, be sure to distribute a link to the article via your social media platforms, as well as include it within your monthly email newsletter. Content such as case studies, whitepapers and video should be distributed in the same manner. In addition, it is imperative to make it easy for people to find your content, so social media feeds should be easily visible on your website and blog, and links to your social media pages accessible from your email signature and any advertising that you do. A newsletter subscription facility should be available on both your blog and website and if you have created whitepapers or reports, consider offering these to your website visitors via a prominent link or light box.
5. How can I tell if my Content Marketing is working?
Content marketing should significantly improve the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) of your website and so within a few weeks of distributing your content online,
you should start to see an increase in the amount of traffic through your website. When looking at your website statistics, check to see what sites are referring visitors to yours to determine what content is working the best. In terms of social media – interactions such as likes and shares on Facebook, as well as follows, retweets and mentions on Twitter will indicate what content is popular. Direct engagement is the ultimate prize in content marketing and so subscriptions to your newsletter, downloads of any content that you have on offer, shares of your blog posts or video’s to social media and comments in response to your content are activities which need to be monitored. For more detailed insight into how ROI in content marketing is calculated – read our informative blog article Taking the ROI Journey in Content Marketing.
Give Garth Dahl or Shiraz Khatib a call on 021 556 5661 or email us: info@theformula.co.za – our consultations are free and we look forward to keeping your company abreast of the latest trends in marketing!
