Do you want loyal customers, ones who will fight your corner on social media and recommend you over a beer with friends? The love for a brand starts with content.
What is content marketing?
The definition of content marketing is marketing that focuses on the consistent creation and distribution of valuable and relevant content. Its goal is to captivate the target audience, keep their attention, and make money.
In other words, content marketing is all around you. Everywhere you look, you see content someone has created with a specific aim – to entertain, sell or engage.
What falls under content marketing?
Content marketing includes all videos, blogs, articles, case studies, infographics, testimonials, emails, social media posts and other types of content.
In practice, content is a money-making show
Red Bull has been delivering great content marketing for many years. When Felix Baumgartner jumped out of the stratosphere and landed safely on Earth in 2012, the whole world was watching. Besides him, spectators could clearly see the Red Bull logo, the company that had financed the entire $50 million show.
The benefits of this worldwide attention, the profits from the sales of the broadcasting rights and the sale of the product itself are now estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The organisers captivated audiences and created content that the whole world was talking about – along with the advertising.
Content marketing saved LEGO
By 2003, LEGO had amassed huge debts, sales were falling, and the outlook for the Danish company seemed really grim. 12 years later, LEGO became one of the most powerful brands in the world.
They reversed the bankruptcy by moving into the online world and utilised content marketing.
- They joined forces with a game developer to create their first LEGO Star Wars video game, which quickly became a hit.
- They later added their own animated feature film as well as other apps.
- They created high-quality content that boosted lego sales while generating more and more revenue.
How does content marketing work?
Even Bill Gates said that content is king, and since the 1990s, this has helped change the way we look at digital marketing. It doesn’t matter how big or small a business or online store you are. The most crucial step is to start and not give up.
However, you should not compromise on quality. Create digestible content that interests your target audience (articles, videos or other formats – in the case of the LEGO brand it turned out to be video games).
The audience will repay you by coming back time and time again, possibly even leaving a good review.
According to a Semrush survey, up to 91% of marketers achieve success with content marketing.
You are building a brand
With content marketing, you will bring traffic to your website and build brand awareness. This is how you gain loyal customers and fans.
Magazines or newsletters created by large companies work in a similar way. In Slovakia, O2 (Soda) or CURAPROX (April) have their own publications. The Michelin guide, which maps top gastronomy, has gained fame worldwide.
The content published in these magazines is not created by companies just for fun. Instead, it is part of a well-thought-out marketing strategy.
Quality content will earn you trust
Customers search for answers to questions on Google. If you have quality content that resolves the query, Google will push you to the top of the search. In return, you gain the attention and trust of your potential customer.
Here at Dexfinity, we also care about the quality of our content, and that’s why we have created the Beyond Ecommerce magazine. We write about news and trends and answer questions from e-shoppers, as well as novice or experienced marketers. For a number of keywords, we organically rank in the top spots.
Increased numbers of better and more educated customers
Companies that run a quality blog get on average two-thirds more customers than those that don’t. Plus, customers who read a quality product description or blog are better informed.
This means they are much less likely to reach out to customer service as they know what they are buying. This will save you time in dealing with enquiries and, at the same time, reduce the number of returns.
You will improve sales
With good content, you will also convince many more site visitors to make the desired conversion. Nearly 88% of people admitted that brand video content played a part in their purchase decision.
If you are really persistent and consistent, success will come, and you will start selling a lot more. Unfortunately, content marketing, much like SEO, is a never-ending process. Once you start, don’t stop.
Expect to wait a year or more for results.
How to get started with content marketing?
Determine who the target audience is
When creating content, you need to know to who you want to show it. Don’t just focus on age, demographics or geographical location. Investigate the customer much deeper. Figure out what concerns them, what kind of life they live, where they go to find out information, and what they read and watch.
Distribution is 80% of success
The Pareto Principle also applies to content marketing. Perfect content is only a fifth of the overall success.
You need to get in front of the audience by:
- Finding out what social networks the target audience is on (whether they watch YouTube, spend time on Facebook, listen to podcasts or read tabloids),
- and copying the purchase funnel by creating content. This means that you first start with channels that have mass reach (social media) and then personalize the content (email marketing),
- making sure to fine-tune one or two distribution channels first and adding more later.
Publish regularly and don’t stop
Content marketing is not a one-off campaign but a long-term activity. You don’t stop creating content, be it after a year or five. Set a schedule and stick to it. If you decide to publish a new blog post every Tuesday and a video on Thursday, be consistent and don’t stop.
Set a measurable target
Content marketing is a long-term activity. This does not mean that it is not measurable. Set yourself smaller targets. They should be realistic and with a strict deadline for completion.
Examples of poorly set targets:
- Get new newsletter subscribers.
- Sell more stay packages.
Example of well-set targets:
- Get 1,000 newsletter subscribers by the end of December 2023.
- Increase the reach of Facebook and Instagram posts by 100% year-on-year.
What content should you create?
Experiment with themes
Don’t just write about yourself and your product. Sales texts and posts should only make up 20% of the published content. Fill in the rest with topics that interest your target audience.
For example, Lidl covers the topic of recipes exceptionally well and has long been producing content on cooking. Recipes are well crafted and cleverly photographed, and the fact that the list of ingredients includes only those from Lidl is part of the content marketing strategy.
In the same manner, a digital agency doesn’t just have to write about marketing but also about time management, stress management and so on. These are all topics of interest to its target group.
Over time, you can begin to charge for free content
The best test of content quality is charging for it. Put together your most-read blogs and make a book out of them. Turn podcasts and videos into an online course. Almost every form of content can be monetized in some way.
For example, a beer manufacturer started producing a world-record-breaking bulletin. Yes, the Guinness Book of World Records was indeed born in the mind of the owner of the Guinness beer brand. It has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide and is the second best-selling book after the Bible. Nowadays, the book no longer belongs to the brewery, but by the time the original owner sold it, he had made a tidy sum of money from its contents.
Evergreen content means more than trends
Go to the customer service department and ask your people what customers are most interested in. Create content from these topics.
If you must choose between recurring issues or trends, choose the former. That is where evergreen content is found, i.e. content that people search for regularly and not only at a particular point in time.
Write about trends only when you have sufficient resources and capacity.
Encourage social approval
The absolute winner is content that promotes social approval. This includes all case studies, video references, text references, awards, quality tests and so on. This type of content will sway undecided customers towards you.
How to create a lot of content?
You need a lot of content to be regular and consistent, but not every post needs to be brand new. Even with paid posts, your reach isn’t such that you couldn’t recycle and reuse the content.
This is not just about republishing updated content. Don’t be afraid to repurpose existing content into a different form. Turn an article into a podcast or infographic. Everyone recycles content, even the largest companies out there.
For example, Disney copies entire animated sequences, as the video below proves.
Content marketing will change your business
Content creation is no longer an option but a necessity. If you persevere, over time, you will naturally get better at it and attract a bigger audience.
However, content marketing doesn’t bring in money just like that. First of all, you need to know what content to create and which keywords to base it on .
All this is preceded by an SEO analysis of the site and keywords. With it, you’ll be able to create content on topics that are relevant. Without this analysis, you are writing purely based on feelings and without data.
Thanks to SEO analysis, you will get the following:
- an overview of the opportunities (what keywords there is weak competition for),
- information about the competition (which topics are already covered, meaning distributing the content will cost a lot of money),
- ideas for new topics,
- more precise content targeting,
- and better positions in search rankings.
Rank amongst the first in searches
Do you want your content marketing to have a clear focus and structure? Find out what content to create. Not just with SEO site analysis but also in line with the specific goals of your business plan.
If you don’t know what to do, or don’t have the capacity for such activities, get in touch and we will help you drive your business beyond any limits.
