How Content Marketing Works

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” – Tom Fishburne

During a recent sales call, I had a conversation with a prospect who didn’t understand how content marketing works and how it could help their brand. At the end of that call, I made a note to create a post that contains all the necessary details about how content marketing works so that I can refer people to it. We’ll be discussing some tips for creating great content and some distribution strategies to make content marketing work for you. I hope you’re ready. Let’s get into it!

Definition Of Content Marketing

For you to effectively execute a content marketing strategy, you need to first understand how content marketing works. As discussed previously, content marketing is a strategy that uses stories to drive a narrative that will lead people to purchase a product/service or perform a specified action. It involves the creation and distribution of online material like blog posts, images, videos, infographics, and guides to attract, engage, and educate readers about a topic, product, service or business. Some distribution methods for content marketing are social media, paid advertising, and search engine optimization (SEO).

How Content Marketing Works

Content marketing works by targeting different stages of the sales funnel (awareness, consideration, and decision) with different types of content topics and formats. This can be achieved through the creation of relevant content in different formats, like videos, images, blog posts, ebooks, checklists, infographics, and other tools.

One of my favourite content marketing quotes that drives what I create is “What helps people, helps business.” by Leo Burnett. As much as you want to create content, you should endeavour to create what will provide value to your audience. In turn, they (your audience) will be willing to work with you (and help your business).

Benefits Of Content Marketing

The benefits of content marketing to your brand are numerous and include:

• Building brand awareness: Sharing valuable information with your audience helps them to get familiar with your brand when they spend time consuming that content.
• Reach your target audience: Sharing relevant information can help you improve your brand’s reach to your target audience and give them the information they need to move through your sales funnel.
• Generate more leads: Content-based lead generation leads to more conversions than traditional marketing.
• Increase your close rate: Content marketing materials can be used to create a content library that can be shared with qualified leads to help close the deal.

Types Of Content Marketing

The easiest type of content marketing that people think of is blogging. And while blogging is an effective way to create and share content, there are other mediums of content marketing, such as:

• Blogs,
• Videos,
• Ebooks,
• Guides,
• Webinars,
• Infographics,
• SEO content, and
• Newsletter.

Using a variety of these formats can be instrumental in keeping your content fresh and exciting for your audience.

Getting Started With Content Marketing

There’s no one way to do content marketing right, but when content marketing works, the results can be monumental. To effectively execute a content marketing strategy, you need to:

1. Define your target audience

Before you start creating content and executing a content marketing strategy, you need to know who you’re targeting.

Don’t know how to define your target audience?

Start by defining your audience’s attributes. Look at the type of people who have been interacting with your brand’s physical and/or virtual locations. Make a list of their characteristics, like:

• Demographics,
• Socioeconomic status,
• Buying habits,
• Interests,
• Hobbies, etc.

When you know your audience better, you can create more personalised content for them. Look at the types of content that they interact best with and provide them with valuable content about those topics.

2. Consider your target’s purchase  journey

If you want to know how to do content marketing, start by looking at your audience’s purchase journey (also known as buyer’s journey). The content marketing purchasing funnel stages are awareness, consideration, decision and loyalty. Creating different pieces of content that are tailored to your audience’s different stages in their purchase journey will help you guide your audience on their journey through your funnel.

How can you do this effectively? Let’s discuss this based on the different stages.

• Awareness stage: For this stage, you could create a video about the causes of the problem that your brand solves and ways to resolve this pain.
• Consideration stage: For this stage, you could create articles and infographics that highlight the benefits of your solution, how that solution works and why getting the solution from you specifically is what’s best for them.
• Decision stage: For this stage, you could create videos with reviews about your solution, highlight the features of your product or service, and create a call to action (CTA) that invites users to purchase from you.
• Loyalty stage: For this stage, you will need to continuously create content that reinforces the solution that your brand provides.

These different types of content will help provide information for people at every stage of the funnel, allowing you to engage people no matter where they are in the funnel. When you prioritise the buyer’s journey, you’ll be able to better develop an effective content marketing strategy.

3. Brainstorm content topics

Now, it’s time to start creating content and it begins with brainstorming content ideas. Here, you want to create a mix of different subjects that your audience would like to see from your brand and trending content ideas. This might be tricky to do initially but don’t get confused.

Focus on generating ideas about your industry. This will drive the right traffic of relevant leads to your page as opposed to content about only trending topics not related to your industry. You can use tools like AnswerThePublic to see what types of questions people ask about a topic so that you can create relevant content that people need.

Conduct thorough research about industry-related topics and create a list of keywords that you want to rank for. Keyword research tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush are great for this. This will help your website and social profiles appear in relevant search results. 

Now that you have a list of keywords, do an internet search to see what people are writing about those topics. It will help you brainstorm ideas for what you can write and what types of content matter to your audience. This way, you’ll come up with more valuable content ideas you can use for lead generation and retention.

4. Focus on quality over quantity

Content marketing done right begins with a focus on quality. To the best of your ability, you need to aim to publish high-quality content over filler content. This is the most effective strategy. This is because low-quality content does not drive engagement.

Why?

Because low-quality content either doesn’t answer your audiences’ questions at all or doesn’t answer them thoroughly enough. This will discourage them and indicate that you’re not invested in helping them to find a solution to their problem.

At the end of the day, creating high-quality content will drive better results.

5. Publish regularly

Consistency is the name of the game here. It’s not enough to create a blog post once every quarter and expect results. Except you’re looking for bad results which no one does, right? Effective content marketing requires that you regularly publish content. This way, you can continually drive traffic to your website (or social media), keep up with competitors, and help people discover your brand.

Publish often and about a range of topics in your industry. So, instead of bringing in traffic through one content topic, you’ll be bringing in traffic from multiple topics. This kind of approach to content marketing allows you to reach more people and get them to discover you and your brand.

To be successful at this, you need to create a content calendar. This will help you stay organised and know when you’re posting content. It will also let you be aware of content gaps (areas where you don’t have content) that you need to fill.

6. Optimise your website for users

You can have great content on your website, but if your audience can’t access and/or interact with it easily, they’ll go to your competitor’s website. So, if you’re going to be posting content on your website, the least that you can do is make sure that your website is user-friendly. You can do this by:

• Improving your page speed: If your site doesn’t load quickly, your audience will get frustrated and leave. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights or page speed services to check your site load time.
• Making your website mobile-friendly: Most people will read your content on smartphones and tablets as 50% of the global internet traffic comes from mobile devices. So, when designing your website, prioritise mobile-friendly responsive designs to help your content adjust to every type of device for a better user experience.
• Including white space in your website’s design: Create a balance between the texts, photos, and videos on your website to avoid overwhelming your audience. This will make it easier for them to view your website and interact with your content.
• Use colours tastefully: When you design anything like the infographics and guides that you’ll include in your content, be careful with your colour choices. Don’t use too many colours or too many bright colours that will make your infographic unreadable. You need to create a visually pleasing balance.
• Include relevant keywords: For people to enjoy your content, they need to be able to find you. To find you, you need to integrate those keywords that they’ll search for in your content to help it rank in the right search results and show users that your page is relevant to their search.
• Use smaller paragraphs of text: If you’re text-based content like blogs, ebooks, or guides, you need to break up the text on your content. Walls of text discourage readers while two- to three-sentence paragraphs attract them. Why? Because they can easily read or skim your content.
• Write for humans: Focus on creating content that your audience will understand and love as this will guarantee that you get the best results.

Content Marketing Tips To Get You Started

Content marketing can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Understanding how content marketing works and creating an effective content marketing strategy will set you on the path to achieving great results.

Although I provided some content marketing tips in this previous post, here are some more content marketing tips to help you achieve success:

• Promote your content: Yes, most of us are scared of promoting what we do. However, content promotion will help you reach more people who are interested in your business. I’m sure that you already have a social media profile. Start with that. Share blog posts, videos, and infographics about your industry and what you do.
• Optimise your headlines: Your headline is the first thing your audience will see when your content comes up in search results. Your headline will help them to determine if they want to view your content or not. So, use a descriptive and informative headline, so your audience knows what to expect when they click on your article.
• Prioritise evergreen content: Evergreen content is content that’s timeless and typically focuses on answering common questions in your industry. It is valuable to your business because of it is sustainability in terms of relevance over time. This also means that you can continually drive traffic to your content, which helps you rank better. Just remember to constantly update them with new information as your industry changes.
• Create a sustainable schedule: Start with a short-term (3-6 months) plan then scale up from there. It’s easy to get carried away and develop an over-ambitious content marketing plan. However, you need to be realistic. Your plan should have content elements that fit into your budget and resources. Keep track of how long it takes you to create each piece of content so that you can build that time into your schedule.

As always, there are many more content marketing tips available on the internet. Invest in learning as much as you can (or hiring a content marketing expert like me) so that you can create and execute successful content marketing campaigns.

Hopefully, this article is insightful and gives you an idea of how content marketing works, what you need to do to excite your audience, and how to drive successful organic results.

Do you have any questions about content marketing? Leave a comment below or DM me on Instagram!