Even if you have the best article with the most significant points on it, it will be wasted if no one looks at it. Content marketing is in constant evolution and has already reached its present state through significant developments.
Previously online business and inbound marketers were viewed as a class within the traditional marketing domain. It was considered as simply another effective marketing tool.
But, things have changed rapidly in the last few years. The perception of marketing has shifted towards the digital world, and every marketing aspect is viewed digitally.
For any type of business-related promotional campaign, digital marketing gets the maximum share, thus highly escalating the role of content in marketing.
Gary Vaynerchuk rightly pointed out that if the content is the King, marketing is the Queen (Source: garyvaynerchuk.com). Planning plays a key role, and business growth depends equally on great content and its proper marketing.
So, in 2015 a content marketer should focus on every possible way to improve upon content marketing.
The Significance of Content Marketing Strategies
Content marketing is all about having the right strategy, the right tools with precise triggers, and an apt marketing framework.
If you take a good look at the statistics, you will find that with content marketing. You can generate three times more leads in comparison to traditional marketing at 62% less cost (Source: hubspot.com/marketing-statistics).
To support content marketing, as many as 35% of the content marketers follow precise, documented approaches and marketers who emphasize blogging enjoy 13 times better ROI. Further, lead generation using content marketing is the goal of 83% of B2B marketers.
For the last few years, content marketers' persistent challenges are to produce engaging content. Digital marketing, with the help of appealing content, is getting more significant day by day.
At the same time, the marketing strategies to distribute these contents through different channels and relevant, beneficial tactics are expanding at a rapid pace.
At this moment, marketers are allotting more financial digital marketing in comparison to traditional ones.
More than 83% of the global marketers have planned to expand their digital marketing spending or maintain it in the current year. (Sources: HubSpot, MarketingProfs, Demand Metric)
Essential Tools For Rich Content Production
For both marketers and search engines, good content plays a vital role. The effort is time-consuming but extremely valuable and gives incredible results in the long run.
All you require is proper planning and execution. You have to promote your content carefully through various means (blogs or webinars or maybe podcasts), applying the right tools and techniques.
The right strategies for marketing your content
Now that you figured out your audience's requirements, it is time to set up the right strategies to reach out to them and build a successful business campaign through digital marketing.
Here content plays the ideal solid base on which your marketing strategy will blossom.
Follow the below-mentioned tactics to give your business the required boost in digital marketing.
- Gather knowledge to understand your market and its audience
- Always make strategies and planning in advance
- Build your pipeline
- Think regularly for innovative ideas
- Take the help of modern technologies
- Be ready with Active Personalization
- Use your social media presence wisely
- Be open to expert opinions
- Use relevant and contextual contents
- Merge interactive visual and applications
- Never spam or use plagiarized content
- Keep improving
Attend networking and editorial events, seminars, or workshops. Align your content marketing team properly.
So, the above points will undoubtedly help you provide the all necessary boost to the growth of your business and sustain the fluctuating trends in the market.
Organizing Content for Digital Marketing to Increase Influence
Runaway production and content management can draw a lot of time, energy, and resources from any organization's marketing teams.
Therefore, today's digital marketers expect to administer an organization of contents at the same time crafting relevant content of high quality for each team of the organization.
Moreover, the task gets more challenging as the teams often focus more on their studies, ignoring the timely sharing of marketing materials, campaigns, and plans.
A B2B organizational success usually depends on efficient communications with your customers as well as clear and effective internal communication among the employees. Let us have an insight into a few tactics that may help you manage the digital content.
Find out your intended audience
It is essential to know whom you are writing your content and what section of the market users and audiences will value your content. Moreover, understand the products for which the contents are aligned for.
Ensure whether it is a corporate overview or made for some specific services, campaigns, or products.
The contents must be up to date and relevant
Never waste time on content that does not provide the required impact and value to your customers or audiences. Make sure you are wasting organizing pieces of stuff that are up to date and relevant.
Contents that can compete better and possess benchmark data, providing you enough advantage and proving your product and service to be higher performing are the ones to keep.
Always keep records of the original owner of the contents of the content marketing
Never forget to keep updated records of the actual creator of the contents you are organizing. A well-managed content policy should have a clear idea about the person and the department responsible for creating the content.
Keep an account of the source file
In case you have hired help from any outside consultant or agency to create content for you, you must also keep an account of the source file from which they are made.
It is always better to have the source file as you may not know when you will need them, and at that moment, you may not have access to the actual person responsible for the content.
Have Clear Plans before Being Creative
It is not easy to have a mentality of one team when the least priority is given to the organization of digital content. Therefore, to keep digital marketing assets in order and avoid chaos, you need to have a clear idea of what type of content needs organizational efforts.
Have Easy Access to Content
To organize the contents, you need to have easy access to them and have a clear idea about the different efforts for social media and other marketing campaigns.
Having the Knowledge of Content Gaps
Every stakeholder regarding content creation, such as customer service, sales, and marketers, should share their content to quickly judge the gaps in ranges and respond accordingly by filling the voids during crafting future content.
More straightforward additions such as templates for content can help maintain an organized appearance and save time in a digital marketing endeavour.
Finding the common objectives
A B2B organization's strength lies in connecting and resonating with different kinds of customers deciding to make purchases through the unique sales pipeline you are offering.
Therefore, every internal team has to get the bigger picture regarding the overall sale process and understand how their roles are getting into it.
Digital Marketing: The Points To Remember
What are the digital channels you are using while making communications with your customers?
If any means of tracking and reporting the digital assets' results are in place and how they are looping back to the sales pipeline's precise position.
Which of the metrics such as social shares, downloads, qualified leads, or click-through ratios defining the campaign success.
Building and Maintaining a Master Calendar
A master calendar, even though not a glamorous option, can be considered as a potent and effective B2B organization tool.
You have to host the calendar in a shared repository, allowing every team to supply information about their plans and specific campaigns in one place.
Simultaneously, this allows every team to have a clear vision of the organization's overall activities and plan their campaigns effectively.
Additionally, it alerts the team of marketers regarding the need for any specific content. It increases collaboration within the groups, saves time, and builds a more organized functioning of sales by looping back to shared objectives.
Maximizing Social Influence through Digital Marketing Campaign Organization
While developing content, organization the most helpful things are the timelines and the content themes. Creating content for a specific service or product has three primary stages.
Crafting and then giving the final touch each spaced out in a timely manner to produce the highest impact. Follow this principle for every campaign, and it will bring fruits.
Thus, the organization of contents is essential in every organization to successfully run digital marketing campaigns. Having a master calendar makes the management of all the marketing efforts and ongoing campaigns easier.
One can identify and make the necessary tweaks as required as well as implement innovative opportunities for cross-promotion. The organization of digital marketing campaigns also makes it possible to perform more specific A/B tests and relate the results much quicker.
The organization of digital content also enables seamless assimilation of every digital marketing endeavour in an organization. Integration of organized content with marketing campaigns can give you a clear idea about working right and what needs more attention.
How can Small and Medium Business Utilize the Power of Content Marketing
When you think of content marketing, the first thought that usually comes to mind is a typically well-designed website with great content promoting a large brand's services and products.
Content marketing has always been thought of as a domain for huge global brands, and small and medium businesses must stay out of it. However, perception is far from the truth.
In fact, content marketing is for everyone. Its beauty lies in the fact that it is pretty scalable even by small and medium businesses in the present digital-savvy era.
Importance of Content Marketing for Small and Medium Business
As mentioned, content marketing is not just for large business houses but also small and medium businesses. Earlier, this marketing type was running through magazines or direct mail, but this was an expensive proposition for SMEs.
But today, every business can use the power of content marketing with the help of social media and blogging. Here are some reasons citing the importance of promotional videoco marketing for small and medium businesses and why it must be a part of their marketing plans:
Web Traffic
Having a website is very important in today's time when everyone is going digital. People like to check out the internet before going out to shop. In fact, a significant portion now buys online.
Therefore, SMEs need to increase the web traffic to their online portals through content marketing. They can take the help of blogs and articles that give their products and services the required lift.
Brand Awareness
Content marketing, especially commercial video content helps small and medium businesses because it spreads the name of their brand more quickly than other media. When customers talk and share their business or other products they find suitable, the brand name automatically spreads.
Therefore, business owners can reach a broad audience without spending anything on advertising.
Build Reputation
If business owners can establish their brands well, they might be viewed as the leaders in their domain. It adds credibility to the brand and builds the company's reputation.
Loyalty Generation
With fresh content posted on the website, business owners can be in touch with their customers. They can build relationships and maintain regular contact with the clients offering them personalized service. This goes a long way in establishing brand loyalty.
Lead Generation
Content marketing might not be beneficial in direct sales, but it definitely helps in generating leads. If customers are offered genuine and valuable content, they will not shy away from sharing their contact details.
These details can be collected and used to follow up the prospective clients and convert them to actual customers.
Content Marketing Strategies for Small and Medium Businesses
There is no denying the fact that small and medium businesses would benefit from content marketing in several ways. However, what these owners lack are the resources.
They may not be able to outsource their content marketing requirements to professionals due to price constraints or other aspects. Here are some tips on how they can start the process in-house or use the services of freelancers:
Team of Writers
Not everyone is a born writer. However, an organization, whether small or large, has some people who have ideas. They may not be able to write a prize-winning story, but they can put forth unique and exciting ideas that can benefit the organization.
These people can be trained and assisted in creating articles that are unique in their own sense.
Use in-house talent
Every organization has some employees who have been there since its inception or a long time, while others are new entrants.
The management can use the senior employees to write content related to the business's history, while the new employees can be made to put in their views regarding the company. This way, you have a mix of ideas that can help in promoting the company's culture.
Start a newsletter
Email marketing is an essential part of content marketing. Therefore, small businesses should either start a newsletter or revamp their existing one to make it more dynamic.
Use the newsletter to know about the problems that the customer is facing. This information can then be integrated into the articles, FAQs, and tips.
Create content that pops
It has been seen that website users do not spend more than a minute on a given page. Therefore, the page's content should be impressive enough to make the visitor wait and take note.
However, experts also recommend creating content that pops. This way, the user is intimated about the brand or product immediately. However, care should be taken that the page does not have too much popping content as it could irk the visitor, and he/she may move on to another webpage.
Search engine optimized
The content available on a webpage must be search engine optimized. This means that the content should be such that it uses keywords and phrases that enable it to be ranked highly in the search engine rankings. With high rankings, the chances of it being visited would be higher.
Have backlinks
Having backlinks to the content is always helpful as it becomes more valuable for the search engines. To create backlinks to the content, marketers must respond and leave comments in relevant blogs, articles, and forums with a backlink to their blog URL or website.
Make the content social
The importance of social media in business marketing is undeniable. Therefore, small and medium business owners need to promote any new content they post through social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The posting should be such that it generates interest for the user.
Conclusion
As an overview, it can be stated that content marketing is significant for small and medium businesses. Managers can ensure that all the content marketing components work to achieve the business's overall marketing objectives, keeping in mind the budget constraints. The point is to understand more about the customers and to provide them better services.