How to Grow Your Business with Content Marketing

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a strategy that implies creating and distributing content that your audience and potential customers can find useful, thereby leading them to your website.

Content can take on various forms, including:

Articles and blog posts
Videos
Webinars
Podcasts
Infographics
Newsletters (like this one)
eBooks
Case studies
How to guides
White papers

Why is content marketing useful?

You can achieve many things with high-quality content on your website or social media accounts. Here are some examples:

Establish audience
Promote your website
Develop a brand voice
Build an email subscriber list
Build trust
Grow your following on social media and increase engagement
Generate leads

How to start with content marketing

Here are the best practices that will help you grow your business with content marketing:

Identify your target demographic
Carry out keyword research
Create a content calendar
Promote your content
Measure results

1. Identify your target demographic

When deciding who your target audience is, you need to think about their:

Geographic location – Knowing where your audience is helps you create content relevant to them.
Demographic information – Learning about your target audience’s age, gender, and income will help you determine what kind of content will appeal to them.
Psychographic data – Considering your audience’s values, opinions, personality, attitudes, etc., will help you determine what kind of content they will like and what they will want to see.
Behavior – Monitor how your audience interacts with your content.
Engagement – The content you create must be engaging, so see what your audience finds the most interesting and focus on creating content that meets that interest.

It would also help to check out the current trends in the industry, which will help you create content that is relevant to those trends.

2. Conduct keyword research

The point of content is to answer the questions your audience asks. So, a considerable part of your job will be identifying those questions and pain points.

The way to do that is through keyword research. It will tell you what your audience is looking for and how much traffic and interest a particular keyword is expected to generate. For a start, you can use Google for your keyword research. Type in the word you want and see the suggestions the browser offers. These suggestions are the most frequently asked questions and searched topics. You should also focus on long-tail keywords, short phrases that go into more detail, to help you create more targeted content.

Moreover, look at what your competitors are doing. Check out how successful they have been with particular topics and terms. Then, create the best possible content that your audience will find relevant and interesting.

3. Create a content calendar

Before you begin any content marketing campaign, you need to set clear objectives. Content marketing strategies are the same as any other strategies. You need to know what goals you are trying to achieve to see how well your efforts are working and if you need to do some tweaks.

Once you know what you want to achieve, you need to be able to keep track of all your campaigns. This is where a content calendar is helpful. It should outline your content strategy to keep track of where you are in the process and how things are progressing. Your content calendar should include:

Information about the type of marketing strategies
Publishing dates for each piece of content
All the necessary changes and updates
Channel you are using

If you have a detailed content calendar, everyone involved in content creation will know what type of content to create for what channel. It will ensure uniformity in style, and all the publications will coincide correctly.

4. Promote your content

Once you have created content, use various social media platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) to target a specific segment of your target demographic. Share your content and engage with your audience to get their feedback and find out what you can do for them. Doing so will also help you gain trust from your audience because you are not throwing adverts in their faces. You provide them with helpful content.

The point of all that content and promotion is to attract traffic to your website and specific landing pages. Therefore, you should ensure that your landing pages live up to expectations once you get visitors to click where you want them to. Besides seeing great design and relevant information, visitors should have a pleasant experience visiting your website.

For all this to work correctly, website maintenance is crucial. It’s advisable to have experts handle it if you don’t know what you are doing. In addition, strategy planning, research, and content creation already demand a substantial portion of your time. So, even if you know how to keep your website working well, consider if you will have enough time to do everything correctly.

5. Measure results

Finally, you need to measure results to see if your content marketing allows you to reach the goals you have set. There are three tiers of metrics to measure with some examples:

TIER 1	TIER 2	TIER 3
(creator-level metrics)	(manager-level metrics)	(director-level metrics)
a) Website traffic (page views, bounce rates, time spent, the number of unique visitors) b) Source (visitor demographics, inbound search keywords, referring sites) c) Sharing (retweets, shares)	a) The number of leads generated b) Lead quality c) Cost-per-lead d) Conversion rates e) Market share f) Awareness g) Qualitative feedback	a) Revenue b) Costs c) ROI

The bottom line

To grow your business with content marketing, you must be relevant, consistent, and quick. Content marketing has a great potential to attract customers, increase brand awareness, and generate sales, but only if done correctly. The most critical aspect of this is creating high-quality content that your target audience will find helpful.

Please book a complimentary appointment with us to discuss any of these topics. We are only too happy to help.