In the past few years “content marketing” has become a buzz word in the digital world. As traditional channels to promote products and services are faltering and consumers are demanding an increasing individualized offering, it has been lauded as the answer to many marketing woes. The days of in-your-face, aggressive and sales orientated marketing are over.
Instead more subtle techniques, tactics like ghost marketing have come to the fore. Experts are warning that it is not as easy as simply spinning a good yarn – there is a great degree of science to telling stories that will build your brand, engage your audience, and drive more profit. In this article, we look at how you can use content marketing to engage your audience and ultimately grow your business.
Keyword analysis is the best place to start when designing a tailored content strategy. “Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about,” he explained. There are many tools available online to perform these analyses and it is worth the time finding out which one works best for you. Roy describes Google Ads keyword planner as one of the most trusted tools explaining that apart from identifying the most relevant keywords it allows for the keywords to be exported in excel spreadsheets, check on the performance of competitors and look at keywords on search engines other than Google. He added that there are many other tools too and the key was to find the one that works best in optimizing your business’ content strategy. In the busy marketplace insights on how to rank on Amazon, for example, will be very valuable.
Liam Fisher from BuiltVisible said in a Q & A session that starting is the most difficult part – as the digital marketer will have to go through a lot of data to tailor the right strategy. He suggests that it is important to first be very clear about what you want out of content marketing for your business, who your audience are and what would resonate with them.
He said that in the modern world there is an oversupply of information bombarding customers. This leads to the impact of traditional advertising becoming diluted. Content marketing is a way to find a method to promote a product that resonates more powerfully with potential customers and therefore stands out without being “overtly promotional” as this will build trust with your audience.
He stressed the importance of research saying that great content means nothing if it doesn’t reach the right audience and what the goal is that you are trying to achieve. He advises digital marketers to also use site analytic tools, tools tracking the number of social media shares, gaining insight on who is influencing who on Twitter and monitoring other brands.
“The easiest pitfall to slip into is thinking that making good content is enough,” he said adding that even very interesting and engaging content that misses the mark in aligning with the brand’s objectives or does not resonate with the target audience will be useless. He adds that collecting as much data as possible on the impact of a piece of content is also essential to determine how successful it was.
Frank Cespedes, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and author of Aligning Strategy and Sales writes in an article will the results of analysis of 34 million interactions between customers and content. They came to some conclusions, of which the most important was that a piece of content had less than three minutes to make an impact. He adds that content creators should also keep in mind that buyers no longer move sequentially “through a funnel” but instead engage with several parallel streams – making the process a continuous and dynamic one to which content strategy must adapt.
He said they also found that while there are many theories of when content should be sent out, there are in fact no “best day and opinions about Tuesday afternoon and Thursday mornings being the optimum time to send out content are not substantiated. He advises that content strategists rather focus on finding the correct type of engagement and follow up.
In order to create engaging content, you will of course need engaging topics to write about. In order to choose which topics you will cover, consider your own areas of expertise and topics relevant to your products and services, as well as what your audience is most interested in. The ideal content will fall into the intersection between these two things.
Cespedes adds that their data overwhelmingly showed that case studies have the biggest impact.
“Buyers, especially B2B buyers, want to know what others are doing with your product, not what they might do to improve productivity or other outcomes,” he wrote. “Good case-study content does that, while providing a compelling reason for the prospect to learn more and initiate a change process.”
Unless you are very clear on the metrics and type of content prospective buyers will be reading it, you might not see a return on investment by blindly following this strategy. Don’t simply start churning out content because it is what your competitors are doing. Rather, develop a strategic approach based on market research and competitor analysis. With a carefully considered strategy you will be able to create and distribute interesting content which will engage your audience, build brand awareness and significantly increase sales and profit levels.
