Content marketing, a subset of marketing in both digital and nondigital media, is the process of planning, creating, and delivering content from the business to the user as a way to grow a client base. This blog post you’re reading right now – yeah, it’s content.
Here are some types of content that could be included in content marketing:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Infographics
- eNewsletters
- Webinars
- Games
- GIFs
- White Papers
- Online Tools
- Memes
The list goes on and on!
All of these pieces of content marketing are used to grow a company’s client base. How exactly you ask? Well, first of all, if a company is active in pushing out content on a regular basis, there is more of a chance that people will become aware of their brand. This increase in exposure results in an increase of awareness. And people have to be aware of a company’s brand before they can buy from them. Only when consumers are aware of your business can you have a chance to grow your client base.
Growing your client base can also come from increasing your level of engagement. Content is a great way to educate consumers about your industry, products, services and such. More engagement means a healthier following because you are providing useful information to people and they have the opportunity to respond and engage further.
Creating awareness and engagement through content marketing can, in the long run, build trust and authority as a business in your industry. This trustworthiness leads more consumers to buy your products and/or services.
Know your content marketing goals
While we’ve made it clear that growing a company’s client base by way of awareness and engagement is a main goal of content marketing, let’s break it down a little further. What are some of the more detailed, or less broad, goals that can be part of a company’s content marketing strategy? Here are some that we’ve thought of:
- Gain more traffic to website
- SEO link building
- Generate more leads
- Sales of goods or services
- Leadership in the industry
Each of these goals might relate to a different kind of content. For instance, you might decide to create a video with the goal of it “going viral” and generating a lot of views. Or, creating a list of free insider tips that is only accessed by signing up could have the goal of building an email list.
How do you measure your success?
Because there are many goals and many types of content to be created, sometimes it can be tricky too, 1) remember to measure your success, and 2) know how exactly to measure your success. Why would we have to measure you ask? Well, if you take time to set goals, you should take time to see if you’ve met them. And sometimes knowing the results of your efforts is not black and white when it comes to digital marketing, so we use certain metrics to measure.
Here’s a few that could be measured:
- Unique visitors
- Pageviews by visitors
- Pageviews of content
- Shares on social sites
- Ad clicks driven by content
- Comments made on content
- Time on content pages
- Bounce rate on content pages
When planning your content, make sure you jot down which metrics you can use to measure this specific type of content’s success. Use this later to see if that kind of content worked for your purposes, and adjust if necessary the next time you create that kind of content.
Keeping the main goal of increasing a client base through awareness and engagement in mind, don’t forget to delve a little deeper when it comes to content goals. Understanding what all your goals are and the many relatable content types – as well as how to measure each one of them – is essential if you want a successful content marketing strategy. Knowing the goals gives you clarity and focus, and understanding how to measure them can help you find out what works and what doesn’t. This will ensure that your content marketing strategy is doing its job in the growth and health of your business.
