What Is Content Marketing?
To start, let’s focus on the fundamentals. Content marketing essentially involves using content to promote your brand. The beauty of content marketing lies in its adaptability, scalability, and most importantly, its effectiveness.
Organic marketing, such as content and SEO, may take some time to realize its maximum potential and yield outcomes, but it functions as a growth engine once established. Although paid advertising can be utilized to complement organic efforts, it is not always essential, as organic marketing primarily serves as a form of inbound marketing.
Content marketing offers endless possibilities in terms of the types of content that can be used. Whether you prefer to stick with a simple blog or explore more creative options depends on your imagination and financial resources. You have the freedom to create engaging viral videos, start a podcast, request user-generated content from your most loyal customers, or even design visually appealing infographics. The beauty of content lies in its versatility and adaptability to suit your specific goals and requirements.
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing is a process that requires effort and perseverance. If you are unsure about its value, we assure you that it is worthwhile. However, don’t just rely on our opinion. Let us explain why content marketing is important.
Content Is Central to a Successful Digital Strategy
When considering each individual step, content can be seen as a network that connects nearly all of your additional marketing endeavors. Engaging in a lead generation campaign? Consider what content you will offer as a lead magnet. Concentrating on email marketing? Reflect on the content that will be included in your emails. The concept is evident: content serves as the unified element that binds together all of your various digital marketing strategies.
High ROI
Tracking ROI for content can be challenging since it interacts with your audience at various points in the customer journey and each stage of the sales funnel. Content conversions do not always result in sales as they can also include actions like downloads, newsletter signups, or click-throughs.
When you consider it carefully, content has a significant return on investment if you monitor the appropriate metrics. Content, particularly when coupled with SEO, can enhance your website’s traffic, potentially resulting in increased conversions. It can also amplify social media shares and engagement, thereby influencing overall brand awareness.
When it comes to content marketing, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to begin, making it especially beneficial for startups or SaaS brands that have a lengthy sales cycle. The majority of your spending will go into content creation, but once you have it, you can make the most of your investment by refreshing and repurposing it for various purposes.
Improve SEO Results
To enhance your SEO performance, it is essential to have excellent content. It is important to create content that is search engine optimized, making it easier for search engines to find your keywords. Moreover, ensure that the traffic directed to your website through SEO is attracted by compelling content that satisfies their search intent, encouraging them to remain on the page and ultimately convert.
Simply put, the correlation is that the more valuable content you generate, the greater your website’s ranking will be. As your ranking improves, the number of visitors to your site will also increase. Consequently, the more visitors who have the opportunity to view the exceptional content on your site, the more successful conversions you will experience.
Build Trust and Authority
High-quality content serves a purpose beyond driving traffic; it also establishes a connection with your audience. When recipients receive valuable content, your brand not only gains authority, but also earns their trust. Once they recognize your reliability in providing useful information, they will regularly return for more. Consequently, your brand’s reputation strengthens as a result.
Generate Better Leads
To obtain high-quality leads, nothing is more effective than utilizing content as you progress through the stages of your funnel.
By using content marketing, you can generate a greater number of leads, as well as attract leads that are of higher quality. This can be achieved by creating lead magnets that are irresistible, developing email campaigns that yield positive outcomes, or designing gated content that appeals to more motivated contacts.
Gain More Visibility Through SEO
Understanding exactly how SEO works is necessary in order to make content and SEO effective for your brand. Content is beneficial for increasing your brand’s visibility to both potential customers and search engines. As mentioned earlier in this article, content and SEO are an ideal combination.
Your Competitors Already Use Content Marketing
According to a Semrush survey, content marketing is currently being utilized by 97% of marketers as part of their overall marketing strategies. This indicates that it is highly likely that your competitors are familiar with content marketing. Therefore, it is important for you to identify the types of content they are employing in order to determine when you should produce superior content or gain an advantage by creating content that addresses the shortcomings in their approaches.
Now that you are aware of the significance of content marketing, let’s explore the ways in which content and SEO can be integrated to enhance your endeavors.
How to scale your content marketing in 3 steps
Step 1: Build a content strategy
The first step on this list is not to hire more people for your content team.
Why is it necessary to rephrase the following text step by step? The reason for this is to maintain the same meaning of the text without adding or removing any information.
If you decide to employ additional individuals, the only consequence will be an increase in your workforce – simply more people.
If you don’t have a strategic approach, you won’t be able to effectively direct those individuals in generating high-quality content on a large scale.
It’s as straightforward as this: You are unable to expand without a pre-established plan. This is because, fundamentally, a content strategy is a blueprint that outlines the implementation of content marketing.
If you don’t have this action plan, you will lack essential components that enable scaling in the first place.
- Who are we creating content for?
- Why are we creating content for them?
- What do we hope to get out of content marketing?
- Who is in charge of our content? Who plans, who writes, who publishes, etc.?
- What tools do we invest in to make our jobs easier? What resources?
- What broad topic area is our focus? What content topics will we cover under that umbrella?
- How often will we post?
- What will we post about next week? In 2 weeks? Next month?
- How will we measure and track our progress?
If you try to expand without establishing a solid base, you run the risk of completely ruining your content marketing. This is because producing more content puts a strain on every aspect of your operation, particularly your team members and processes.
If you think about it step by step, if you choose to increase the number of blogs you publish each week without proper planning, your production will become rushed and messy. This will quickly lead to burnout among your content creators and an increase in the number of small mistakes that occur. Here are a few instances to consider:
- You’re rushing to publish blogs each week, so you skip the final editing pass that would have caught small but detrimental mistakes like a missing link, a broken image, or misspelled words.
- Burned-out writers who feel trapped by impossible deadlines and a lack of guidance are more likely to copy and spin content – a huge issue that could destroy your reputation.
- Or, they might skip researching thoroughly and citing sources, so your content loses credibility.
- Since your standards slip, your brand voice falters and sounds off-key – a trust-breaker.
- Your team is too busy and rushed for much creativity (which needs time and space to simmer), so your content starts to sound samey and repetitive.
Simply adding more team members without addressing the underlying problem will not fix the root issue, which is a deficiency in strategy that effectively directs and guides your content marketing, processes, team, and roles.
If you scale without preparation and strategy, your content will suffer, leading to ineffective results.
Step 2: Put a content marketing team in place
Once you have established your strategy, you can proceed with either solidifying your existing team or assembling a new one.
In order to scale content marketing successfully, a strong team is crucial. Without a capable team, the endeavor is bound to fail. A capable team:
- Works toward a larger goal than just completing their individual tasks.
- Knows their roles, what success looks like within them, and how every other team role contributes to the whole.
- Can create content at scale without sacrificing quality.
When building a strong and efficient team, it is important to not only focus on recruiting individuals with exceptional talent. Rather than solely relying on talent, it is crucial to seek individuals who possess potential and the appropriate mindset. This implies that:
- They have some skills, but more than that, they have the potential to build those skills to leverage them toward your business specifically.
- They’re willing to learn and happy to grow with the brand/business.
If you already have individuals like this aligned with your cause, ensure that their specific roles within your team are well-defined. Additionally, consider that one person may fulfill multiple roles simultaneously.
In smaller teams, this is more frequently observed compared to larger ones. Furthermore, small teams lacking the financial resources to employ individuals for particular positions may require the support of freelancers temporarily until they have sufficient funds to expand their team permanently.
The following are the necessary positions.
- Content manager: Every content team needs a leader who guides the ship’s direction. This person oversees writers/creators, the content calendar, the brand voice and style guidelines, and ensures all content aligns with the brand’s goals and carries out the strategy.
- SEO specialist/strategist: This person ensures the website and blog are SEO-ready. They strategize to ensure SEO goals are met on- and off-page with keyword research and proper optimization.
- Content writer/creator: This role can be multi-faceted (or involve multiple people) if the brand creates more than written content. Writers write, designers create visual content and infographics, videographers create videos, etc.
- Social media/promotions manager: Who distributes content on various promotional channels after publication? Who’s in charge of social posts, emails, or even ads? This person.
Step 3: Set up content marketing workflows
For instance, having documented processes for each aspect of the content marketing picture makes scaling much easier.
- Your main content writer leaves the team. Your content manager must moonlight as a writer until you can find a replacement. They follow the content writer’s workflow to produce consistent content without missing a beat.
- You hire a new writer to help scale your content marketing. You give them the workflows and SOPs (standard operating procedures) your established writer uses to create content, streamlining the onboarding process.
What is the appearance of workflows?
To develop a writer workflow, these questions may be considered:
- How should your writer(s) go about writing content?
- What are the standard procedures they should follow as they research and write?
- What style should they use?
- What grammar rules?
- What resources?
- What tools?
- Should they follow a general outline for each post?
Simply put, a workflow consists of a sequence of smaller tasks and instructions that can be utilized by anyone to complete a larger task, such as composing a blog post, publicizing blog content, or investigating keywords and content subjects.
Workflows are beneficial because they ensure a consistent output from your team members during different tasks. For instance, by implementing a single workflow for all your writers, your blog posts will display a consistent style, tone, and quality, creating the impression that they were written by a single person in harmony with the brand’s voice, rather than multiple individuals.
SOPs are implemented to ensure that workflows can be repeated and utilized regardless of the personnel occupying a particular role. Consequently, even if the composition of your team alters, the processes will remain efficient and function seamlessly.
You have the option to be imaginative with workflows, allowing you to create individual ones for various content marketing tasks such as generating content ideas, conducting keyword research, and writing blogs. Alternatively, you can develop a comprehensive workflow for each team member’s role.
