If you’re reading this, you’re either a business owner who wants to drive organic traffic to their website, or you’re a marketing buff. Ready to get into the world of valuable content that actually converts?
Let’s start with a short case study of one of SLINKY Digital’s clients.
Let’s call him Alex.
Alex had a background in coding and had founded a small tech startup. He struggled with marketing and pushed back on our idea that he should start writing informative content about his expertise.
A year later, his blog was driving 60% of the company’s leads.
How’d he do it? Let’s start from the beginning.
What Content Marketing Is All About
In simple terms, creating and sharing valuable, relevant content that attracts and engages an audience, and makes them directly respond with purchase intention, is content marketing.
What content marketing isn’t? It’s definitely not about sales pitches and offering the product/service. It’s about creating genuinely helpful information that would benefit your audience.
The content you create is packed with information that speaks to them about specific issues they face, or general queries they have. By becoming a source of valid, factual information, content marketing aims to build credibility — and a relationship with the consumer.
INSIGHT: Did you know that according to the Content Marketing Institute, 91% of B2B marketers employ content marketing approaches to reach their customers? In fact, it costs 62% less than conventional marketing strategies, and generates almost 3 times as many leads. That’s the value.
Know Your Audience
How well do you know your audience, or your target customer? You need to know exactly what your audience is searching for — and deliver it.
For Alex’s tech startup, we created detailed buyer personas. Whether it was conducting interviews with existing customers, surveys via our email list, or analytics data, we dove deep. In fact, despite what Alex believed, we discovered that Alex’s primary audience wasn’t “small business owners.” Tech-savvy millennials about to start their first business in the e-commerce or digital services space was a massive market.
Our content strategy was then based on their pain points, goals, even the kind of humor they appreciated. Our content sounded like it was written exclusively for them — in a way, it was.
From my experience, some great ways to get to know your audience is to interview your existing customers, engage with your audience on social media and ask the right questions, conduct surveys and polls. Moreover, turn to your website and social media analytics to extract information. Google Analytics can be a great source of understanding consumer behavior.
For value-packed targeted content that actually engages your audience, know your audience.
Types of Content
Content content content. Do you just pick a mix of content you like and get started?
Actually, the content is for your audience. What do they want? What kind of content is better suited to your brand personality. Finding the right mix for your audience and your brand could be tricky. Here are some popular types:
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- eBooks and whitepapers
- Case studies
- Webinars
- Social media posts
For Alex’s startup, long-form blog posts and how-to videos performed best. That specific audience drooled over detailed, step-by-step guides that were aimed at solving specific tech problems.
The point is, experiment with different types of content. What resonates with your audience is what you focus on.
Your Content Strategy
You know your audience and the types of content you want to create — it’s now time for strategy. Creating a detailed strategy allows you to focus on what matters, and not lose track halfway through execution.
Your strategy should include:
- Goals: What do you want to achieve with your content? Increase brand awareness? Lead generation? Higher sales?
- Content themes: What topics will you cover?
- Content calendar: When and where will you publish?
- Distribution plan: How will you get your content to your audience?
- Measurement plan: How will you track success?
For Alex, our goal was lead generation. Our content calendar focused on common problems faced by that specific audience: a weekly blog post, and a monthly video tutorial. Apart from the blog, we published on Alex’s YouTube channel and created an informative email newsletter. Finally, we measured success by tracking website traffic, email sign-ups, and product demo requests.
The Art of Phenomenal Content
Now you know the serious stuff, so we’re ready to talk about truly amazing content. Here are some tips to make your content shine:
- Start with a bang: Your intro needs to grab attention
- Make it scannable: Use headers, bullet points, and short paragraphs. Remember, people often skim content to see if it’s worth a read
- Incorporate visuals: Images, charts, and videos can break up text and communicate key points better
- Tell stories: As humans, we’re wired for storytelling. Use anecdotes and case studies to make your content more engaging and memorable.
- Offer actionable advice: Give clear steps they can take to implement your advice.
- A clear call-to-action (CTA): What do you want the reader to do next? Make it clear and compelling.
For Alex, we created a series of “Ultimate Guides” on topics like “Launching Your First E-commerce Store” and “Automating Your Business Processes.” These were comprehensive, packed with practical advice, and sprinkled with real-life examples from satisfied customers.
Make Your Content Discoverable With SEO
So you’ve got great content. How will people find it? Enter…SEO. Here are some SEO basics to get you started:
- Keyword research: Tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush help you choose relevant keywords.
- Optimize your content: Include your target keyword in your title, headers, and throughout your content (but don’t force it).
- Compelling meta descriptions: These show up in search results and massively influence click-through rates.
- Use internal linking: Link to relevant content on your site.
- Optimize for mobile: Make sure your content looks good on all devices.
For Alex’s startup, we settled on long-tail keywords that his audience was likely to use when they searched for solutions to specific problems. This strategy helped us rank for less competitive — but highly relevant searches.
Promote Your Content
Great content needs to be promoted actively and effectively to be discovered by your audience. For that, here are some promotion strategies to consider:
- Email marketing
- Social media
- Paid advertising (Facebook Ads or Google Ads)
- Influencer outreach
- Content syndication (republish on platforms like Medium or LinkedIn)
For Alex’s tech startup, email marketing and targeted Facebook ads were particularly effective. The weekly newsletter featuring the latest content quickly became a key driver of website traffic.
Data-Driven Content Marketing
We set all the right goals, but how do we know you’re hitting them? You measure. Some key metrics to track are:
- Website traffic
- Time on page
- Social shares
- Email sign-ups
- Lead generation
- Sales and revenue
For Alex, we used Google Analytics to track website metrics, and integrated it with their CRM. That allowed us to track how content consumption correlated with lead quality and ultimately…sales.
Measuring your content marketing doesn’t just let you know what you’re putting out is working, it also allows you to continuously improve. Use data to understand what’s working, what’s not, then adjust your strategy.
Repurpose Content Into Other Formats
High-quality content isn’t exactly easy to create, so once you have something that works, repurpose it.
Here’s how:
- A series of blog posts becomes an ebook
- A long-form article becomes an infographic
- A webinar turns into a series of video clips
- A popular social media post becomes a blog article
Remember those “Ultimate Guide” blog posts we did for Alex? Those actually turned into downloadable PDFs to serve as lead magnets. We also created short video tutorials based on key sections of these guides, which were shared on YouTube and social media.
Scale And Build A Content Team
You might start as a one-man/woman (you) ‘team’ for content creation. As you scale your content marketing efforts, you might need to build a team to help. This could include:
- Content strategist to oversee your overall strategy
- Writers to create content
- Designers for visual content and branding
- Video producers If video is part of your strategy
- SEO specialist to ensure your content is optimized
For Alex, it was just me and him. As his company grew, we brought on a part-time writer and a freelance designer — then hired a full-time content team.
This proves you don’t need a big team to start. Begin with what you can manage, and scale as your content marketing proves its worth.
Consistency Equals Long-Term Success
Content marketing doesn’t produce measurable results overnight. But staying consistent will absolutely deliver success.
What you need is a realistic publishing schedule. Now, stick to it. It’s better to publish one high-quality piece of content a week — than to publish daily for a month and burn yourself out.
For Alex, we published one blog post a week and one video a month. This schedule was manageable for our small team, it allowed us to stay consistent, and maintain quality. Ultimately, it worked.
Rising Content Trends — What To Do
The dynamic, constantly evolving world of content marketing. Trends are constantly changing, and staying flexible is a great way to drive consistent results. Be willing to experiment with new formats and platforms as they appear.
Some current trends to watch:
- Interactive content (quizzes, calculators, etc.)
- Voice search optimization
- AI-generated content (used responsibly and with human oversight)
- Increased focus on video, especially short-form video
From understanding your audience to creating compelling content, SEO to measurement — content marketing is anything but simple. But the work is worth it, because this multifaceted discipline can drive real results for your business.
But content marketing is a constant commitment. It requires ongoing effort, creativity, adaptation, and flexibility.
While you’re planning to harness the true power of content marketing for your business, I’d love to hear about your past/current experiences with content marketing. Please drop a comment below and let’s keep the conversation going!