The only way to drive revenue growth is to make your brand visible everywhere your potential consumers are likely to be. And the engine behind a successful brand awareness campaign is content. The statistics are compelling.
- 72% of marketers say that content marketing increases engagement and the number of leads. (CMI)
- According to Twitter statistics, 66% of users found a new business on Twitter, and 69% of users purchased a product or service because of a tweet.
- 71% of B2B buyers said they consume blog content before purchase. (CMI and LinkedIn)
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and creates three times as many leads. (CMI and LinkedIn)
So let’s get started creating a winning content marketing strategy that will drive revenue growth.
What is 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. CMI
Neil Patel says that content marketing is “just a form of storytelling.” But not just a story. Your content needs to provide something of value to your consumers.
In other words, a successful content marketing campaign needs to be customer-centric. It’s not enough to produce lots of content that you throw around the internet and then wait for the results to pour in.
Content is King, as they say, but not all content is worthy of being crowned royalty.
Your content should give something of value to your audience.
Original, insightful, informative, and engaging content strengthens the relationship between your consumers and your brand. As a result, you’ll drive revenue growth by developing long-term relationships with your customers. As we’ve discussed in previous articles, business growth and stability depend not only on new customers but also on keeping the ones you already have.
What Types Of Content Drive Revenue Growth?
Readers consume content differently; what resonates with one may not with another. Therefore, you want to create and publish various content assets that resonate with your customer personas.
Content assets include,
- Blog posts/articles
- white papers
- e-books
- infographics
- podcasts
- video
- live streaming.
A HubSpot survey found that 54% of consumers want to see video content from the brands and businesses they support. And don’t think that video content marketing is limited to only YouTube or TikTok. Video is killing the metrics on Facebook, and it also performs well on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Thought Leadership Content
Thought leadership content will help you drive revenue growth. You’ll establish yourself as a thought leader and expert in your industry and build trust in your brand.
An Edelman report found that 48% of executives thought leadership content directly led them to give a company their business. In addition, 41% said they invited a company to work with them on a project because the thought leadership content was so compelling.
Every piece of content that you create should reflect your corporate values, mission, and services—your brand voice.
Your Content Marketing Strategy Needs to Evolve
An essential component of content marketing is developing digital assets that your target audience wants. But, you won’t know what your audience wants if you don’t understand who they are. A well-thought-out marketing strategy allows you to target the delivery of your message to those consumers likely to convert.
Times change, though, and so do the interests and needs of your consumers. As a result, your content strategy needs to be fluid. It’s crucial to stay on top of the latest trends and be prepared to adjust or pivot when your content marketing is not getting results.
For example, you might need to change your distribution channels as new digital platforms emerge and become mainstream. For instance, if you’re B2B, LinkedIn is the go-to platform. However, Facebook and Instagram still top the charts for B2C companies. But, TikTok is quickly emerging as a competitive channel and could take over the spot from Facebook. B2C brands are marketing the most heavily on TikTok, but B2B companies, especially SaaS startups, have hopped on and are successful with brand awareness and generating leads.
Don’t be afraid to be bold and experiment.
Constantly monitoring the needs of your target audience will help you create and publish helpful and engaging content that will grow your business.
A Content Marketing Strategy That Drives Revenue Growth
The first step in developing a content marketing strategy is identifying your goals.
Do you want to:
- Improve conversions?
- Build brand recognition?
- Establish yourself as a thought-leader in your industry?
- Increase the number of visitors to your website?
Once you know your goals, you can develop a winning content marketing plan.
How Do you Figure out What to Write About?
For this, you need to do a bit of research. Remember, the goal is to give your audience what they want–valuable, current, and engaging content. So here are a few questions and considerations to guide your messaging.
- Who is your audience?
- What kinds of issues and questions do they have?
- Identify the search habits of your audience.
- Check out what the competition is doing. And what the competition is not doing.
- Conduct keyword analyses.
There are many platforms available to help you find the answers to these questions. Quora, for instance, is an excellent platform for identifying the trending topics and questions consumers are asking. Google AdWords and UberSuggest are also good resources.
Conduct research to discover what keywords are most likely to generate sustainable traffic to your website. If your content is not attractive to your audience, you won’t meet your content marketing goals.
Keep In Mind The Buyer Journey
There are three simple stages in a typical buyer journey:
- Awareness
- Comparison
- Decision
The B2B buyer journey becomes more complex and cyclical, but we’re talking about a typical B2C customer for now. Customers at the awareness stage are looking for something to fill a need or solve a problem. Once they find brands, they’ll compare prices, services, reviews, and other elements that help them decide.
When creating your content, keep the buyer journey in mind and publish assets that reach them at these three stages.
But That’s Not the End of the Story
Be sure to include CTAs (calls to action) with your content. Getting your reader to take action is critical in driving revenue growth. Without a CTA, a reader won’t know what to do after she’s finished consuming your content.
But don’t just leave it at that. Interact with your readers. Respond to their comments and questions. Use the comments and questions as guideposts for future content creation.
Ask your audience what they would like to hear about. In addition to creating a two-way conversation, you’ll build brand loyalty.
Be sure to include sharing buttons so your readers can become mini ambassadors for your brand.
Consistently Boost Your Content
You’ve identified your target audience. You’re creating engaging, valuable, creative, and trending content of various types and are putting everything up on your website and social media feeds. Great. But don’t just leave it sitting there.
Market your content! It’s not enough to upload great content to your website or blog and hope someone will find it. Considering the vast amounts of digital content published every day, your content can quickly become lost.
You need to optimize, amplify and repurpose to keep all that great content fresh and in front of the eyes of your target audience.
Take snippets from your website or blog articles and post them to Instagram and Twitter.
Link all your blog posts to your Facebook page and LinkedIn profile.
Open a YouTube channel and upload your videos and podcasts. Create videos from your white papers, blog articles, or thought leadership pieces.
Depending on your consumer demographics, you might want to publish video shorts based on your articles on TikTok. If your brand is very visual, open a blog board on Pinterest.
With the billions of content floating around in the digital world, if you don’t implement a content distribution strategy, all your great work will go unnoticed.
Analyze The Performance Of Your Content
Use analytics tools to track and assess the performance of your content. At a minimum, you’ll want to measure
- Website traffic
- Shares
- Clicks
- Downloads
- Leads generated
- Conversions
Bottom Line
Creating and publishing informative and engaging content is an essential component of an effective marketing strategy.
To drive revenue growth, the world needs to know you exist. So even if you’re a small retailer with a local business, you still need a digital content strategy to keep your current customers engaged and grow your market share.
Content, especially digital content, is no longer an option. However, every business knows this. As the internet becomes more flooded with digital content and consumers become more tired of the noise, you’ll need to be more strategic about the types of content you produce and how you distribute it.
- Set your goals
- Identify your target audience
- Product helpful, engaging content that addresses the questions, concerns, and needs of your consumer audience
- Be consistent
- Experiment, assess, pivot if necessary
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