The power of content marketing

It is often said that content is king in digital marketing, and this is true. The reason for this is that without content, a lot of other areas of marketing just wouldn’t perform as well. SEO and social media perform better when you have great content for consumption.

Without content, there is nothing to meet Google’s requirements for subject relevance, and there is nothing to optimise that could help improve your organic rankings. Without content, you have nothing to share on social media. You would probably find that you struggle with a backlink building campaign, as it is relevant and good content, that gains good links.

On top of all of this, content is a great way to engage with existing customers or a brand new audience. Connecting with your audience through helpful, relevant content not only adds to your brand recognition, it also improves customer engagement for long-term retention.

The purpose of content marketing is to act a little bit like a sales funnel, as follows:

• To attract potential customers and make them aware of your brand
• To encourage them to become familiar with your brand, think positively about you and to trust you
• To influence them into deciding to take the action that you want them to take

We specialise in creating practical content strategies that can be shared across multiple channels to help achieve your business goals and objectives.

Content marketing statistics

The value that content marketing can add to your digital marketing efforts is often incredibly high. To support and prove this, we’ve put together a few useful stats as an introduction:

• 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day. Source: eMarketer
• Content marketing typically costs 62% less than traditional marketing and tends to generate about 3 times as many leads. Source: DemandMetric
• 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing. Source: CMI
• 60% of the most effective B2C marketers have a documented content strategy. Source: CMI
• 82% of marketers who blog see a positive ROI from their inbound marketing. Source: HubSpot
• Conversion rates are nearly 6 times higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs 0.5%). Source: Aberdeen
• 39% of marketing budgets are spent on content marketing by the most effective B2B marketers. Source: TopRankBlog

User research for successful content marketing

The first step of a successful digital content marketing plan is to research your audience and identify subjects that concern them. Then you need to consider exactly how these subjects fit into the buying cycle. Finally, a strong content strategy needs to relate subjects to issues, and issues to assets.

We create assets that address all stages of the marketing funnel for B2B and B2C businesses. Whether it’s creating awareness for potential customers, creating content about a product and service you offer, or looking after customers post-purchase, our content marketing services effectively connect with all levels of decision making.

Relevant, shareable and reusable content

For content creation to be successful, it needs to be reusable across multiple channels, relevant to your audience and engaging enough for your audience to want to share on social media.

The content team at Coast has extensive experience producing lots of different content as well as carrying out a variety of content audits. They don’t just do this for our clients’ marketing activities, we also use exactly the same team to produce and audit all of our own content too. These include assets such as:

• Blogs
• Videos
• Infographics
• Case studies
• Guides
• FAQs
• Webinars
• Email newsletters
• Lists

When delivered effectively, the benefits of content marketing speak for themselves. By bringing in more traffic, driving conversions and building your brand awareness, great content is the key to success.

Measuring success

We know that being able to measure the results of any marketing efforts are key to proving success. The measurement of content marketing depends on a range of factors, and depends on what your goals are.

To introduce you to the possibilities, we’ve created a list of goals and explained how they can be measured:

• Brand awareness: Website traffic, page views, video views, document views, downloads etc
• Engagement: Blog comments, social media interaction etc
• Lead generation: Form submissions, downloads, email subscriptions, conversion rate etc
• Sales: Online sales, offline sales etc
• Customer loyalty: Returning customer interaction stats, renewal rates etc
• Upsells / Cross-sells: Sales for new products etc

Based on all of the information above, you should be able to see how important content marketing is. Want to find out more about this service (or any of our digital marketing services)?

FAQ – Content marketing explained

What is content marketing?

The goal of content marketing is to attract and retain customers by creating timely, relevant and valuable content, all with the intention of influencing customer behaviour. It’s an ongoing process that is best integrated into an overall marketing strategy.

Is it the same as SEO?

Content marketing forms part of your search engine optimisation strategy, but isn’t the whole picture. While your content marketing efforts and optimised content will impact your site SEO, it isn’t the whole picture. To find out more about SEO, please visit our SEO page.

Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing is important because it’s one of the most versatile tools at a digital marketer’s disposal. Content can be adapted to fit a range of various objectives and audiences. It can also drive visitors to follow your call to action and support your conversion rate.

What’s more, each piece of content you create can also fuel other marketing channels. It can also help you to connect with potential customers and build an audience for your brand.

What is a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy consists of four core stages:

1. Planning
2. Creating
3. Implementing
4. Monitoring

A solid content strategy should factor in an asset’s usability and structure. It should also be crafted to align with audience information and data gathered during the planning and research stage.

Why would I want to give my customers the information they may need to buy from my competitors?

This is a common question from clients, and is completely valid. It can feel wrong to create a piece of content that may help your customers to purchase from a competitor. However, remember that each piece of content is created to match a step in the buyer’s journey.

Creating content that helps customers helps to build trust and position yourself as an expert in your area. This makes it more likely that customers will come back to you when it comes to convert.

To learn more about how content marketing works, or for advice on how to use content marketing to grow your business, contact us today.

We know that industry jargon can sometimes be tricky to understand. For the ultimate list of A-Z industry terms, check out our Digital Marketing Glossary.