The Importance of Good Content

Prioritising good content is essential to marketing your business effectively. From writing amazing content for your website pages, newsletters and blogs, to creating posts that convert on social media, great content is at the core of what brings more customers to your business.

Believe it or not 82% of marketers are now investing in content marketing and there’s reason for that: content is powerful! On average, social media users spend over 3.5 hours online every day. That’s millions of people spending millions of hours online every single week which is truly a mass market to sell your business to! In this blog, we’re going to discuss the many ways we can use content marketing to interact with our current and potential customers.

What is Content Marketing?

‘Content marketing’ isn’t just marketing jargon, it is genuinely an excellent way of creating and sharing valuable and appropriate content to your current customers and budding prospects.

There is an assortment of different and useful ways of doing it including:

• Social media posting
• Blog writing
• Email campaigns
• Newsletters
• Video creation

Four Benefits of Content Marketing

Each and every one of the different types of content marketing has its own merit and has the ability to show your company’s authority and why the person seeing it should give you their money! Some of the big benefits of content marketing are:

1. It Creates Brand Awareness

If you regularly publish great content on your blog, social media channel, website and email newsletters, you will give your target audience more chances to notice, acknowledge and understand your brand, what you’re selling and how it can benefit them. Equally, if you are creating content for paid advertising, it is imperative to create the right content for the advert, to achieve more interactions with it and visits to your website.

Content marketing can also increase traffic to your website. For example, if you create blogs and landing pages that rank well in Google, then you will appear higher in search results and your potential customers will be able to find your website easier.

2. It Can Bring You More Leads

Following on from our previous point, it may be obvious but the more people that visit your website, the more opportunities you have for people to see your product or service. The more people that visit your website, the more they can gain an understanding of what you do and how it’s relevant to them. This is a great way of converting interested people into buying customers.

3. It Establishes You as An Expert in Your Field

Knowledge, expertise, and experience are things that most of us look for when looking for a business to buy from. It’s natural to be drawn to companies who have proven authority in what they do, who talk the talk, walk the walk, and have content that backs it up. This is why it’s vital to ensure that your content isn’t just about selling, but actually informs your customers about the things they are interested in and shows how much you know about your subject. If you put out valuable content , like blog posts, news articles, emails and social media posts that teach your clients and potential clients something, this is a great asset to your business. In fact, you can get 3X more organic traffic from ‘Guide’ articles alone.

4. It Can Be Cheaper Than Other Forms of Marketing

Many people would agree that traditional marketing campaigns can be an expensive outlay. Most of the more traditional forms of marketing like print, mailings, phone, and advertising boards may help you reach a wide audience, but they can be extremely costly. Conversely, modern content marketing can be a substantially cheaper way to reach a huge audience and allows you to try many different tactics easily.

Top Tips for Content Marketing

Create a Strategy

Above all, create a content marketing strategy (or get someone to create one for you!). Whilst content marketing is the actual information you put out, a content marketing strategy is your plan for how, what and when you put it out there. Your content marketing strategy is essentially your marketing plan. It considers the type of information that you are going to put out and what aim it has for example, is it meant to educate, entertain, or inspire? It can be a bad strategy to make sales the focus point of every piece of content you create, so make sure there is a balance of different subject matter. Your strategy should also plan what you post and when you post it, essentially what is called a content calendar. It’s important to be consistent with this.

Look at the Best Kinds of Marketing for Your Materials

Most types of content marketing will work well for the majority of businesses but there are some techniques which may work better than others. For example, if you are a service-based business like a garage, sharing pictures of amazing cars you’re working on or images of your team are likely to do well, whilst sharing car parts that the general public won’t understand probably won’t achieve too much. Equally, if you are an interior design business, sharing images will be huge for you and it’s likely they will provide you with a lot of traction. If you work in a more complex niche like a financial advisor, then creating blogs to explain subjects in simple ways can really help create a connection with potential clientele. All businesses can benefit from an email list of clients to send regular updates and deals This can be one of the easiest ways to market to your current client list and will have quite a high read rate.

If You’re Using Social Media – The Right Images and Videos are Key!

If you’ve worked with us, you know that we’ll often request images and videos of your business and there’s good reason for this: your potential customers will respond well if they can see you and what you do. Something that works well are images and videos of you and your team working at your business or with your  products. People really appreciate the sense of connection that comes from seeing who they are working with, and we often find that social media post likes increase significantly on posts like these.

Engagement is Everything

This brings us on to the next point. Engagement is crucial on social media! Social media is a two-way thing and you need to create content that provokes a response – content is created to connect people to people, people with businesses and businesses with businesses. Engagement means the interaction people have with content for example likes, comments, favourites, messaging, replies, shares, saves and mentions, to name but a few. Social media algorithms will show content with better engagement to more people, so it is a worthwhile technique.

Multiple Channels of Distribution is Important

There’s a reason many businesses have different marketing outlets (for example you have no doubt seen marketing for McDonalds on social media, on TV and even on posters at bus stops), that’s because the more places you position your marketing, the more opportunities you have to reach customers and the more likely you are to make sales. We’re not saying that you need to spend loads of money advertising on different streams, but we would suggest you invest in a few different forms at the very least and monitor how well they work for you.

Content Ideas

One of the most challenging aspects of content marketing is thinking about what to share because as mentioned, the focus shouldn’t always be on selling your products/services but if that’s the case, what else should you focus on? Here are some ideas:

• Share behind the scenes photos and videos of your business and how it runs.
• Share yourself and your team! Whether it’s a simple photo and then a little bit of information about the team member or a video conversation – it builds connection.
• Create ‘tips’ and ‘how -to’ emails, blogs or posts. These provide a great deal of value, especially if they answer common questions and help the reader.
• Share deals!
• Rework previous content in other formats – for example you can transform a blog into social media posts.
• Share the benefits of what you do.
• Discuss current news events in your field but try to not make it political!
• Speak to other experts and get them to write guest blogs or interview them.
• Feature a client and what you have done for them.
• Run polls

As you can see, it’s so essential to create good content and it can have a powerful and beneficial effect on your business, but the operative word is ‘good’! Lazy content with bad images or inaccurate spellings can easily turn someone away from your business, so make sure you create content that sells or contact us if you would like some help!