This buzzword has become an important part of marketing strategies for all sizes of businesses. 37% of B2C marketers have a documented content marketing strategy, and 61% of effective B2B marketers meet daily or weekly with their content marketing team.
When done correctly, content marketing can produce amazing results, and 2022 is the perfect time to plan your strategy. Consider these points as you plan and adjust:
- Go beyond just a blog
- Content marketing can benefit both B2C and B2B businesses
- Don’t be afraid to give away free information
- Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you measure the success or failure of your content marketing
- Ensure your online marketing is diverse
-
Go beyond just a blog
Infographics, eBooks, vlogs, webinars, and podcasts are all examples of content types that can be used in your content marketing strategy.
Facebook’s news feed had 3.6X more video from people and brands last year. Video is a popular form of visual content that is easy to share. Vlogging is a great way to let your prospects and target market into your world.
-
Content marketing can benefit both B2C and B2B businesses
You can use content marketing for both B2C and B2B marketing. While the concept is the same, you must tailor the approach to accordingly.
A business-to-business customer needs to see value and data-backed information in your content to be won over.
- B2C example: Budweiser’s Puppy Love commercial, which aired during Super Bowl XLVIII, won America’s heart. It has millions of views and has given Budweiser incredible brand exposure without even featuring their product.
- B2B example: A VoIP provider’s infographic highlighting the benefits of switching to cloud-based service. Performance gains, cost savings, and features can all be highlighted in a fun, data-rich visual piece of content.
-
Don’t be afraid to give away free information
Content marketing positions your company and you as an expert. Don’t be afraid to give away valuable information. After a while, those who have been consuming your content will start converting into warm leads, and then sales.
-
Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you measure the success or failure of your content marketing
Only 21% of content marketers say they are successful in tracking return on investment (ROI). It’s critical to identify your company’s KPIs before you start. Content marketing KPIs include:
- Total website visits: The total number of visitors to your website from a specific piece of content or campaign. Use Google’s URL builder and analytics to help.
- Bounce rate: A high bounce rate means that visitors land on your content and immediately leave without visiting other pages. This means your content needs to be more compelling to increase conversions and page visits.
- Conversion rate: What percentage of your content marketing leads become paying customers?
- Earned inbound links: Websites share and link to great content. These are the types of natural links that benefit SEO while adhering to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
- Cost-per-click (CPC): Assume you spend $2,000 to promote a piece of content via SEO, PPC, social media, email, etc. Your CPC would be just under 23 cents for 8,800 website visitors.
- Social shares: Look at the number of social shares to see which content performs best for you. Use content that gets lots of social shares as a benchmark — these are the topics and styles that your audience likes. Remember that Twitter has removed share counts, so your totals will not include Twitter shares.
- Number of leads generated: Every piece of content should track leads. Blog posts with infographics, for example, may generate three times the number of leads as regular blog posts.
- Downloads from content assets: If you use multiple content assets to drive traffic to a download offer, track the downloads from each content asset. Pull bad content and learn from it for future campaigns.
- Cost-per-lead (CPL): You must know how much your content marketing leads cost. With this number and your conversion rate, you can quickly assess whether content marketing is profitable for your company.
-
Ensure your online marketing is diverse
Content marketing is a fantastic way to grow your business, but you should never put all your eggs in one basket.
You should be using social media, email, pay-per-click, SEO, and display ads to build brand awareness and generate website traffic, leads, and sales. This way, if one of the channels suddenly stops working, your business doesn’t halt.