Content Marketing

Win Over Your Audience with Effective Content Marketing

Content is now a crucial connection point between brands and consumers. It's where your appeal, value and industry authority are first established and reinforced. By honing in on effective content marketing, you can engage and delight your target markets to increase conversions, boost revenue, establish yourself as an industry leader,…

By Shrishti Jain
October 15, 2022

Content is now a crucial connection point between brands and consumers. It's where your appeal, value and industry authority are first established and reinforced. By honing in on effective content marketing, you can engage and delight your target markets to increase conversions, boost revenue, establish yourself as an industry leader, and more! Read on to get a bird's eye view of content marketing strategies and everything they can do for your business:

Relevance is Key

Relevant content shows potential customers that you are catering to their specific needs at a particular point in their user journey. Everything else is noise and so will usually be ignored. Users who found the content relevant and useful said content helped them achieve their goal 91.5% of the time, which is more than 15 times as often as users who found the content neither useful nor relevant. Google examines links and their anchor text to evaluate a page's content and, therefore, relevance. Connecting your pages with relevant internal links in a content hub helps build semantic relationships between your content. When you optimise content with targeted keywords relevant to the user, and that same content goes into the appropriate depth to answer the search query, the topic will be rewarded in high-ranking SERPs.

Focus on Value, Not Promotion

While boosting your brand presence shall be one of the goals of your content strategy, it shouldn't be the only goal. To develop trust with your audience, aim to provide value. Provide honest, valuable advice. Give your audience high-level tips and tricks, how-tos and practical strategies that can be used on day one. This makes your content and brand much more memorable. Promoting your brand offerings before a potential customer in the consideration phase is a big no-no. Instead, use blogs and social media as your top-of-funnel strategy. Let your followers know that you are a thought leader in your industry. Survey your audience if unsure of the best way to add value. This is a great way to identify their concerns. Content marketing experts must ask thoughtful questions to get to the root of their challenges and find a way to meet them where they are.

Prioritise Authenticity

It's imperative to look at it as an opportunity — if you make authenticity an element of your brand's DNA, your content marketing efforts will mirror that. When it comes to consumer engagement, a lack of authenticity may hurt your bottom line. A survey found that 90% of consumers value authenticity when deciding which brands they want to support. A strong brand voice is key to a compelling narrative. Focus on highlighting the qualities that describe your brand. As you develop your editorial plan, ensure your brand voice aligns with your content. To honestly build relationships with customers, you may need to go a step further. This includes being responsive across all your owned and operated content channels and personalising the CX.

Share Customer Stories

Who better to highlight your value than customers who use your product/services every day? The most powerful way to execute this is through social proof points. Social proof points can include reviews, social media comments and even testimonials. The key is to find innovative ways to integrate them into your content strategy. Research shows 61% of users' buying decisions are directly influenced by customised content. To use online content marketing most efficiently, focus on nurturing relationships rather than conversions. A brand's intrinsic values help drive purchase decisions. Social impact story-telling is a must as it not only boosts revenue but also helps educate prospective customers; that's a win-win.

Finally, Measure your Efforts

Measurement determines the content ROI for campaigns, enables brands to determine which pieces of content are effectively engaging audiences, and eventually tells the brand if the content is serving its intended purpose. By choosing the proper Key Performing Indexes (KPIs) for the right goals, you can analyse how your content is changing users' perceptions of your brand in real time. KPIs reflect whether or not a user performed an action that would provide value to your brand. Sentiment, as a KPI, is the last piece of the puzzle regarding content measurement. It supplements the quantitative with the qualitative, showing you why a piece of content got views and why a user chose to become a customer. Of course, your content marketing strategy won't unfold overnight. However, monitoring metrics at regular intervals will make your efforts calculative and forecast future gains. Strategy + Quality + Consistency = Content Marketing Success