1. Content Marketing Strategies Build Trust
In the constantly expanding business world, your competition is multiplying daily. What can set you apart from all of the companies that are similar to yours? This is where a content marketing strategy that defines your brand identity comes in. Identity is the foundation of your company’s brand. It represents the company’s core values, and those core values are what establishes you with your audience. You build trust with an audience that shares your core values. People who interact with you don’t want to know who you purport yourself to be; they want to know who you really are. Knowing who you are humanizes your business, and that is precisely what builds trust among consumers.
While the mediums through which you choose to engage with your audience may change and adapt over time, your identity should remain the same. Consistency is a key component of establishing and maintaining trust for consumers. With that being said, your company and brand identity need to be creative and unique, and maybe even unusual, in order to appeal to your target demographic more than your competitors do.
2. Content Marketing Strategies Improve SEO
In the last few years, I’ve heard other Content Specialists assert that content marketing has surpassed SEO. In truth, successful content marketing actually relies on strong SEO. The two strategies necessarily overlap because they address two different, but arguably equally important, aspects of digital marketing. SEO is more analytical, technical, and constricted, while content marketing is more expansive, encompassing the bigger picture.
Basically, there is no SEO without content. SEO embodies requirement, and content satisfies those requirements. Put another way, SEO requires good, relevant content, and content marketing provides that content. Keywords are a fundamental component of SEO. SEO relies on keywords that are significant for identifying you within your industry. You simply can’t have keywords without a body of words, and that means content. Content marketing is how you apply keywords to your content.
Furthermore, search engines such as Google love and favor fresh, new content. Frequently posted good content provides strong SEO, which in turn, increases your search rankings, driving more traffic to your website. Failing to incorporate content marketing and SEO strategy dooms this aspect of your digital marketing plan. Unless you integrate your content marketing campaigns with your SEO campaigns, you won’t see the results that your business needs.
3. Social Media Marketing Relies on Good Content Marketing Strategies
We’ve already established that SEO and content marketing necessarily go together. They are both forms of inbound marketing strategies that focus on organically creating a strong identity, which appeals to the target demographic. But how do you integrate your social media platforms into your content marketing strategy?
Obviously, the first step is creating unique content that interests your audience. Posting this content across your social media platforms creates additional access points for your potential customers to find you. If there are more ways to find your business, then you have better chances of generating more leads. Also, be sure to link all of your social media accounts to your website. This not only increases your ability to build trust among consumers, it also increases your SEO rankings.
Additionally, social media marketing increases your chances of your content “going viral”. Websites don’t go viral, but blog posts, articles, and videos do. Social media posts go viral (or attract the most attention) because they focus on engaging audiences. It isn’t enough for people to simply see your posts; they need to engage with it, click the Like button, share it on their own social media, and/or comment and get involved in the discussion.
4. Content Marketing Strategies Improve the Quality of Lead Generation
In order for your content marketing to improve the quality of your lead generation, your content needs to have a solid basis in industry research. Your opinions don’t matter much if you can’t actually back it up when questioned. Market research focuses your content criteria on what’s important and relevant to your consumers, which results in your content’s appeal to a wider audience and increasing the quality of your leads, meaning that you’re generating more leads that are likely to follow through your sales cycle. Knowing what your leads are searching for, what keywords they’re using, will help you increase your SEO, your rankings, and your general knowledge of how to approach your customers.
If you’re looking for a high lead conversion rate (people who go from clicking one of your ads, social media links, or links that direct straight to your website and then follow through as a sale), you need to create high quality landing pages. First, you need to understand why you’re creating a specific landing page. Once you figure that out, you can proceed to create a beautiful, dynamic landing page that will increase your conversion rate optimization (CRO). For example, let’s say you’ve created an informative eBook that you want to promote in order to establish authority and trust. You post an announcement of this eBook on your social media platforms. When potential leads click on the link that you published to social media, where does that link take them? Ideally, it takes them to an engaging landing page that encourages them to quickly download your eBook.
5. Content Marketing Strategies Establish Your Brand as an Industry Thought Leader
Many business owners and marketers believe that a thought leader is a singular person who is considered an expert in their field. While a single person certainly can be a thought leader, thought leadership can also apply to a company or brand as a whole. Good content marketing is focused on the dissemination of useful information, and that can be created by an individual or a team; ultimately, the usefulness is what’s actually important.
Thought leaderships depends heavily on the aspects of content marketing that we’ve already explore, building brand awareness through SEO and social media marketing, gaining and maintaining the trust and loyalty of your audience, and generating quality leads. The individuals or brands that are most successful at promoting themselves as thought leaders are those who consistently and reliably address the needs of their consumers, answer their questions clearly and concisely, and provide useful information as an aspect of a broader cohesive content marketing strategy.
Now that you know some of the reasons a content marketing strategy is a vital aspect of your digital marketing strategy, it’s time to think about your content and how it can work for your business. If your business still has questions contact our content marketing agency and we’ll be glad to help.