New businesses (and existing ones) invest money in establishing websites to showcase their products and reach a wider audience. Increasing revenues is also one of their hopes.
However, business owners get disappointed when their expected outcomes for establishing their websites are not achieved. They think that a website will work wonders as soon as it is up and running.
It doesn’t work that way.
Establishing a website is just the beginning of an important job – content marketing. If done right, content marketing will help you reach your target audience, increase your revenues, and achieve your business goals.
So, what is content marketing, and how does it work? In this ultimate guide for content marketing strategies, we’ll show you how exactly content marketing works. More importantly, we will teach you how to create your content strategy to make that website a lead magnet.
What Is a Marketing Strategy?
A marketing strategy, in general, pertains to the overall strategy of a business in reaching its prospective customers and converting them into customers. It revolves around its value proposition and how it can benefit its prospects.
Furthermore, a marketing strategy is highly dependent on your buyer persona. To develop an effective marketing strategy, you must understand your prospective customers beyond the surface.
By having a clear picture of your buyer persona, you can determine the overall long-term direction of your marketing efforts and tactics. Additionally, a marketing strategy defines your brand’s position in the market relative to your competitors. It also lets you evaluate its effectiveness.
It’s important to know the meaning of Marketing Strategy because we’ll be touching two other topics entirely different but highly dependent on each other – Content Marketing and Content Strategy.
Marketing Strategy sounds like an amalgamation of the two. It includes company culture, advocacies, and more.
As a business owner, you want to sell the purpose of your business, not just your products. Marketing strategy touches all these aspects.
On the other hand, content marketing and content strategy are focused on a single aspect – Content. Thus, these two forms are part of the marketing strategy in their entirety.
Moving on, let’s talk about buyer persona.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona or user persona is the visualization of your ideal customer based on these factors:
Market data
Demographics
Previous customers
Behavior patterns
Motivations
Needs
Goals
To add, identifying your buyer persona isn’t limited to these factors. If you can get as many details as possible, you’ll be closer to a clearer picture of your ideal customer.
What Is Content Marketing?
According to the Content Marketing Institute, this is the definition of content marketing:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
A content marketing strategy uses blog posts, articles, and ebooks. Together, they provide authoritative and credible resources that potential customers want.
Your target audience will likely discover your relevant content that answers their inquiries. In turn, you provide something they can’t find anywhere else.
Overall, it’s about an effective content promotion that earns their trust and loyalty. Eventually, this enhances relationships with customers and builds an active subscriber base.
Do it right, and your content marketing strategy may help you earn more. However, it requires hard work, time, patience, and perseverance.
Types of Content Marketing
There are many kinds of media, so there are various kinds of content.
Therefore, your next step in Content Marketing 101 is learning your options:
Sponsored Content
This is content you create to be shared on someone else’s website. For LeadAdvisors, we recommend this type of comment, as it boosts your authority online while giving you a larger audience. Example include listicles, how to’s, and product reviews.
Leadadvisors offers sponsored content that is not only appealing to visitors but also utilizes evergreen content. We’ll discuss evergreen content a little later.
Infographic
These are creative pictures that promote goods and services. They’re effective because people like visuals. That’s why most companies use them.
Video
Sites like YouTube make it easier to watch video content. What’s more, it’s a lot easier to make them too. If they like your videos, people could share them with others. In turn, they help you spread content.
Webpages
Most companies have websites nowadays. Also, they have pages on most social media. This helps them reach a wide customer pool. Even better, they could post other content on them.
Podcasts
These involve people talking about stuff on audio, just like radio shows. The hosts often read ad breaks in between. Your content is the podcast, or is the featured sponsor.
Ebooks
People read books on their mobile devices instead of paperbacks. They could help people so that they may count as content. However, you’ll need more time and effort to make a successful ebook.
Why Do I Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy?
Nowadays, most marketers use content marketing for their campaigns. Businesses specified their top 3 reasons why:
More sales
Fewer costs
Better clients with more brand loyalty
Content Marketing Institute research stated that 94% of brands pivoted to content marketing due to the pandemic. Also, the top performers use it for reasons beyond brand awareness:
73% use it to nurture audiences, leads, or subscribers
64% generate sales/revenue with their content marketing strategy
60% grow their subscriber base
Nearly every (94%) top performer measure their content performance
4 out of 5 top performers use a content calendar
A successful content marketing strategy lets your target demographic find your brand easier. Also, it increases the number of audiences engaging with your brand.
Furthermore, it helps your brand gather new customers. On the other hand, it could increase earnings from existing buyers. What’s more, it may help reduce or reallocate marketing costs.
How to Make An Effective Content Strategy
According to the Content Marketing Institute, this is the definition of content marketing:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
It uses blog posts, articles, videos, ebooks, and other products of research and creativity to provide authoritative and credible resources that potential customers want.
Overall, it’s about an effective content promotion that earns their trust and loyalty. Eventually, this enhances relationships with customers and builds an active subscriber base.
Content marketing is one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to get prospective customers into your sales funnel. However, content marketing is just a piece of a puzzle in your efforts to make your content reach your ta