How to Use Content Marketing to Grow Your Business

What Is Content Marketing?

So you’re asking what is content marketing? Well, it’s when brands create engaging and thoughtful posts to reach their target audience. Content marketing is the practice of creating high quality, engaging content to establish your brand as a thought leader in your niche.

It’s often thought of as a way to market products or services online; however the main goal isn’t necessarily about selling anything at all–in fact many marketers find themselves focusing less on monetization in favor of creating great writing.

The goal of a marketing strategy is to drive traffic and convert visitors into customers. Your content strategy should align with your company’s goals and vision. At its core, content marketing is the creation and sharing of information that is both relevant to your business and seen as valuable by your businesses’ target audience. There are many different content marketing tactics available.

The critical difference between this form of marketing and traditional marketing is that content marketing indirectly stimulates interest in your company, brand or products as opposed to explicitly promoting a particular product or service. People have been bombarded by ads for so many years that they instinctively mute them, fast forward through them or skip them depending on which medium they are watching the ad. 

Content marketing is a targeted, strategic marketing approach focused on attracting and retaining customers by creating and distributing valuable, informative, insightful, consistent and relevant content. The goal of a successful campaign isn’t just about getting people’s attention but rather providing them information they can use in their everyday lives that will drive profitable customer action.

Your content marketing strategy is your roadmap for success. Without one, it’s not easy to stay on track or know when and where you should focus efforts in order get the best results from your posts. Take YouTube as just one example to clearly see the difference between content marketing and traditional marketing.

You’ve just finished typing in a search for a video on a topic that you really want to learn about. The first thing that happens, typically, is that an ad comes on and starts playing right before your video. If you’re like most people, you click that “skip ad” button as soon as you’re able to.

That ad that comes on is a perfect example of traditional advertising, while the video that you are trying to watch is a perfect example of content marketing. The video you searched for has information that you perceive as valuable and want to watch.

It was made by a smart content marketer who will get you as a subscriber to their channel and eventually get you to buy products or services that are related to their channel’s subject matter from them. This is in contrast to going for the “hard sell” from the outset, which is that ad that you couldn’t skip fast enough.

A content marketing strategy should be measurable and actionable. You probably ask yourself: How should I start with content marketing and especially how content marketing can grow your business? Don’t worry, I’m going to give you some answers below.

Frequently Used Content Marketing Strategies

In order to be effective at content marketing, it’s important that you have a documented content marketing strategy. Having an in-house content team can help you create a content calendar. In order to create engaging content, it is important that we understand our audience and their needs.

Content creation should be at the center of your company’s marketing strategy. The tone of voice should be informative with authoritative insights about the topic at hand.

Before promoting your content, you need to create it. This sounds obvious but many people struggle to create new content. You should always have a plan and come up with new content ideas for your niche.

There are various ways that businesses or organizations can distribute content to get the attention of people they believe will be interested in what they have to offer. Businesses should utilize multiple methods in order to have greater potential to reach more prospects. The following are just a few of the more common methods.

Content Marketing’s Importance Today and in the Future

The content marketing industry has been on a steady rise, and it’s not too surprising why. Content can appeal to customers in many different ways: through humor or sentimentality; by providing information that aids decision making (such as an FAQ section); creating just the right amount of intrigue so readers want more without being pushy about promoting their product – all while building trust between brand owner/creator and clientele.

One of the most crucial aspects to developing a successful content marketing strategy is defining your goals. Without clearly defined objectives, it’s likely that you’ll experience challenges when implementing content marketing tactics such as creating or sharing content online with customers, prospects and leads in mind and measuring success. If your current content is failing, follow the trends, don’t always try to re-invent the wheel.

Search engine optimization is a powerful tool used by nearly any remotely successful company for generating leads and traffic, and this is only expected to continue through the coming years. As mentioned in the “increase your visibility” benefit above for content marketing, Google’s algorithm updates of late have only served to make valuable content more integral to a website’s pages ranking well under targeted keywords for generating qualified traffic.

Google is placing a higher premium on visitors spending more time on a website, and people will click off of keyword-stuffed webpages and blog posts that offer nothing of value faster than you can say “going out of business sale.” 

All of the above reasons are exactly why content marketing is already one of the most utilized digital marketing techniques today. Most of the other methods of online outreach, such as paid search marketing, display ads and online PR, are far behind content marketing.

Even if they may be successful on some level, businesses that are not fully leveraging content marketing are essentially operating their marketing effort with one arm tied behind their back, and they won’t be living up to their full marketing potential until this changes.

So, if you want to grow your brand and don’t have a content marketing strategy yet, I recommend you to start from today. A great benefit of content marketing is that you’ll be able to market your business even if you’re on a budget. Indeed, content marketing can grow your business! Content marketing is the future of your brand!

When you create content, don’t forget to focus on quality vs quantity. On another note, don’t forget to create your own strategy to promote your content. I see too many content marketers spending most of their time creating content without thinking about distribution or promotion. At Growth Hackers, we often tell our customers to use the Pareto Principle 80/20 by spending 20% of the time/money creating content and 80% on distributing it.