Why should your business consider a content strategy? Content marketing is quite time-consuming to produce and requires rigorous research. After all, it generally consists of informational and/or entertaining pieces aimed at turning viewers into customers without explicitly saying that. These pieces can include videos, blog posts, graphics, photo series, recipes, apps, or other useful online tools. The term is broad, allowing you to utilize your creativity in so many ways. They might be challenging, so are they worth it?
Absolutely! Content marketing produces more leads, drives a ton of brand awareness, and increases ROI. Plenty of CMOs are optimistic about it, as 78% see content marketing as the future of marketing. 90% of brands use it now, so don’t get left behind.
Producing great, effective, engaging content isn’t just about the numbers, it’s about the emotional connections made with your brand. First of all, it’s a great way to get past ad blockers and the people who use them. Few people actively seek out ads. If you’re making content similar to what people actively seek out, then that’s not what ad blockers are going for. Content pieces are considered too valuable for that. A little over half of traditional ads on Google aren’t even seen, prompting companies to turn to content instead. Traditional ads tend to be one-sided, while content marketing aims to make a genuine connection with you and making a small but positive impact on your day.
Another solid reason to utilize content marketing is to have a convenient route to consistently publishing new, fresh media to remind everyone of your existence. There are only so many ways to photograph your products for social media and ways to talk about its benefits. Even if making consistent social media and ad content is doable, it can get difficult to find new ways to promote the same few things. Instead of discussing what goes in your product and why it’s awesome, your content could tell the stories of your consumers or be tutorials on things that include your product’s use.
Content can open up more avenues to show your brand’s creativity. If you don’t think you’re the most artistic, aim to be educational. For example, Hubspot provides plenty of free educational resources, such as webinars or video courses, with no obligation to use its products. These resources have been extremely valuable for aspiring marketers looking for a career switch. You’ll find them linked all over the web under “how do I learn more about marketing?” threads.
Even though the core of a content marketing piece isn’t “buy now”, it’s a meaningful building block in your brand. Your value indirectly gives viewers more of a reason to buy from you. After all, your videos could have made them laugh or your blog posts answered the questions they were desperately Googling. To achieve this status, you really have to understand your audience deeply. You have to understand your company’s brand beyond the surface, beyond the price and physical functions. What problems will your product be solving or at least helping with? Where and when will your products be used? Those are some questions you can start with.
For example, Shutterstock (pictured above) users would probably be interested in media trends. That’s why every year, the site produces interactive, animated reports on what users are searching for.
Entertainment that features your product use
You can answer those questions in an entertaining way that attracts viewers who have never heard of you. Your content could be videos that show what happens when you use their products, following the steps of camera company GoPro with their YouTube channel. The channel, which currently has 8.37 million subscribers, shows what it’s like to go on trips skiing, surfing, and biking all over the world. How does this market the product? To be able to film these adrenaline-surging activities, you need a camera that can attach to your body, like the GoPro. There’s no way you’re holding your phone out while surfing!
Even if someone isn’t currently looking to buy a camera, it’s likely they’d stumble upon one of GoPro’s hundreds of videos if they were to search for something like “Galapagos surfing”. Someone looking to learn more about outdoorsy, extreme sports would find the channel entertaining whether they needed a GoPro or not.
Help answer Googled questions in detail
If you’re looking to go down the problem-solving route and feel creatively exhausted, tutorials are a great idea. Some brands make tutorials for common activities, showing their product being used to achieve the end result. Beauty retailer Sephora often publishes short makeup tutorials on its YouTube channel featuring looks a lot of makeup users are looking for, such as a makeup look for a job interview. These include tutorials for newbies who are just looking to start using makeup.
Your educational content can be short or long. Some brands even make entire in-person or online workshops or even courses! Hipster favorite Intelligentsia Coffee has a series of coffee-related educational articles and programs centered on showing coffee drinkers how to brew coffee and teaching them how coffee is harvested. It even has a mobile app complete with timers and instructions for the hardcore! This is a great way for coffee enthusiasts to discover Intelligentsia and for current customers to keep coming back should they ever need those resources.
Provide new, unique, insightful discoveries
This one’s slightly different from the above in that we’re talking about information that isn’t well known, but makes quite an impact when let known. These aren’t data points that would be commonly Googled, but catch the eye when scrolling.
Fitness coach and influencer Cassey Ho, known as Blogilates, has made some informational videos on the data of top female Instagrammers overall and in the fitness realm. In the videos, she discusses her findings such as average hair color, skin tone, and age of the influencers.
This type of content is a great idea if you’ve got a curious audience open to learning new things.
Be wholesome and create positive social impact
With social activism being especially widespread in 2020, many brands have used their platforms to create touching, emotionally provocative content promoting wholesome values. Aside from makeup tutorials and other content about their products, Sephora also publishes videos of some of its employees promoting diversity, equality, and inclusion and celebrating diverse backgrounds.
This kind of storytelling, often autobiographical content can help humanize a brand and help inspire its audience. It can also help showcase values you want your brand to be associated with, which helps with customer attraction and retention: consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand with a mission they support.
Improve your search engine optimization (SEO)
All these types of content creation work to slowly build your brand’s image and reputation, leading to deeper and more meaningful connections with your customers and viewers. Part of why these deeper relationships lead to improved ROI is through SEO. How? One of the biggest contributors to search engine optimization is link building, which means gaining as many links to your website as possible. This signals credibility and popularity to the search engines.
If your content is valuable enough, people will want to genuinely share it. Many of those people could be bloggers and journalists with thousands or more viewers on their articles. If they find your work worth sharing, that’s another link to you. The more notable your work is, the more links you’ll get. If you can go as far as being linked to from more prestigious, well-known blogs or even press, that’ll make a tremendous impact on your ranking. This seriously beats contracting and paying link building agencies or even worse, spamming your site on the comments section of multiple blogs and articles.
Even before your content gets shared, you’ll be feeling the effects of SEO. Content gives you more opportunities to use keywords, another important component of SEO. However, the keywords can’t just be placed anywhere at any time. It has to be done strategically, so it would be ideal for your content marketing strategists, especially the copywriters, to understand rudimentary SEO principles. For example, excessive keyword use is known as keyword stuffing and can negatively affect your rankings. Not only will it hurt your rankings, it’s also unpleasant for visitors to read.
Content marketing is a broad term and can encompass so many avenues to explore your creativity and knowledge. It’s a fulfilling, organic way to get your brand out there through ways more practically useful than traditional advertising.
Drop us a line when you’re ready to create some content of your own. We’re looking forward to creating the next viral video, a useful infographic, or promoting a wholesome social cause!