Did you know that over 70% of businesses use content marketing as part of their marketing strategy?
Although content marketing has always been a thing, the “modern” content marketing has just become a thing as of the 1990s.
This is when content marketing took more of a digital turn. Content marketing helps to create a relationship with an audience, which is a bit more interactive than direct mail marketing or a type of marketing that existed before.
Most content marketing now takes the form of blog posts, social media updates, videos, webinars, podcasts, and more. These platforms allow businesses to incorporate information and content that resonate with their audience rather than just promoting a product or service that they sell.
The goal of this is to drive action to generate more leads. But there are reasons that this works. Keep reading to learn how content marketing can help you build a relationship with your customers to increase leads and sales.
Build Trust
When you spend time with content marketing, you are spending time building a relationship with customers. When you do this, you are automatically increasing trust with your customers.
The more trust that you build for your business, the more you will continue to generate leads throughout the years. This will add to the success of your business over time.
When customers have more trust, they will also be more likely to continue to purchase from you. Instead of bouncing back and forth between one business to yours, they will stick with yours because of the brand trust you have built with them.
Not only that, but they will be more likely to refer others to you. This means that your business will continue to grow with more customers.
Establish Authority
As you continue to establish trust, you will start to establish yourself as an authoritative expert in the field. This means that your audience can eventually turn into customers when they buy from you.
When you are an expert about what you sell or products that you have, you will rise into the position of having a pull over people in regards to what you sell.
Once you spend time building this authority, this will stick with people.
Generate Leads
If you are not using content marketing, you are significantly decreasing the odds that you have to reach many other people. The more content marketing you do, the more people you will reach. Statistically speaking, if you reach more people through a marketing campaign, you are going to generate more leads and customers.
As you generate leads, you will be able to keep track of these leads so that your marketing and sales team can reach out to them later to keep up with them. This means that you have warm leads that you can turn into customers with a little more of a push after they see the marketing content.
Ultimately, when this happens, you will increase your sales.
Improve SEO
The more marketing you do online, the more you are going to improve your SEO.
Search engine optimization is crucial when it comes to marketing and getting the word out there about your company. For instance, without it, search engines such as Google or Bing are not going to push your content forward. The more you optimize your site for SEO, the more likely you are to have your site and some of your content on the first few pages of Google.
So how do you optimize for SEO?
Choose the Right Keywords
Keywords are one of the most important aspects of SEO. You need to have a keyword that is popular enough but not overly used on the web. You want people to be searching for your keyword, but if everyone is using that keyword in their content, then yours can get easily lost in that.
There are many different tools out there to help you find keywords that work with our content.
Use Links
Additionally, you also need to make sure that you are using links in your content. This includes both internal and external links.
Internal links will link back to other content that you have on your site, social media platforms, or other portfolio that you want to be seen for your business. This will drive more traffic to your sites and continue to increase brand identity and awareness.
However, you also want to have external links. External links are credible websites that gives your content more credibility.
Other Ways to Improve SEO
There are many other ways to improve SEO. Paying attention to making sure that you content is mobile-friendly, creating relevant content, and optimizing the site for pictures will ensure that your SEO is as strong as possible.
Although this can be a tedious process, the more that you focus on SEO, the more you will increase your rankings. When this happens, you will have further reach, and hopefully, more of a chance to generate leads and gain customers.
Increase Brand Awareness
The more you use content marketing strategies, the more you will also increase brand awareness. This means that more people will find out about you and your brand.
However, you have to make sure that your content is shareable and relevant to make an impact on people who see the content.
The more people are aware of your brand, the more you will be top of mind for your product or services. This may even make you more top of mind than competitors.
The more you increase your brand awareness, the more likely you are to get more sales.
Types of Content Marketing
There are obviously ample benefits to increasing sales with content marketing. However, what are the different types? Let’s dive into that a bit more so that you know how to diversify your marketing strategy.
Social Media
Social media is one of the biggest and most popular forms of marketing in today’s age. In fact, over 4 billion people are on social media, so if you truly want to expand your reach, social media is the way to go.
This can include platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and more.
If you choose one type of content marketing to focus on, social media may be your best bet. This is especially true because there are so many platforms you can choose to use. This within itself can take a lot of time and effort to market.
If you are just starting out, choosing one or two platforms will make it easier for you to keep up with it all and stay consistent. This is what will help you to build your brand image and identity.
The key to using social media is consistency. Without it, it’s harder to showcase who you are and represent your products and services to your audience. To make sure that you stay consistent, it can be helpful to have a content calendar so that you stay ahead of the curve of posting.
However, this can be difficult to do. That’s where hiring an agency that can take care of the ads and the posting for you is helpful. This can free up time for you to do other tasks in your business.
E-books
Another great type of content marketing that is increasingly popular in recent years is E-books.
These are books that are written on a specific content that are typically cheaper or even free on the web. These can either exist on their own or be used to generate more leads toward other services or products that you have.
For instance, you may have an online course about how to market appropriately for your travel business. You may want to generate an E-book that talks about your online course and generate leads that way.
Podcasts
Podcasts are audio recordings.
These are great to provide information about a product or service, or even just general information, entertain people with humor, or promote products or services.
Podcasts can be posted on a company’s own website as well as other various podcast platforms such as Apple.
If you choose to do a podcast, you could look for sponsors to help you keep it running. This means that you will get money when you post when you talk about their business. You could form a mutual relationship with this sponsor to help you out in the future as well on other platforms or marketing campaigns.
Videos
Videos are all the rage now that we are in the year 2023. There are all types of videos, such as short form videos as well as longer videos. Both are popular.
Videos are a creative way to showcase a company’s products or services.
They can be used to entertain as well as educate to capture an audience’s attention. Combining information, value, and entertainment value into one video helps to market a product or service.
It is always important to make sure that your videos incorporate at least one of pathos, ethos, or logos to speak to your audience. You could even use a little bit of all three to really speak to your potential customers. This is what can help you to generate more leads.
Webinars
Webinars are similar to E-books. They are typically made to generate leads back to other products or services you offer – they are not the end goal.
They are online presentations that can be used to educate or provide value to an audience. Typically webinars are pre-recorded and then shown to an audience on a social media platform or through an email signup. However, they can also be live.
If you do a live webinar, this is a great way to generate leads for some of our products or services. You can even do a live question-and-answer session at the end of the webinar to help people make the decision about purchasing or not. This will increase the odds of their brand trust and likelihood of generating leads.
Blogging
Blogging has been around for quite some time, and it is not going to go anywhere anytime soon. Blogging is great for getting information out to customers and your audience.
For instance, if you are a travel company, you can have a travel blog all about tips and tricks for destinations, hotels, and more.
When you increase your audience for your travel blog, it is more likely that these people will become customers as their brand trust for you increases.
Content Marketing for Your Business
When it comes to content marketing and your marketing strategy, content marketing is a must for your business. If you have a limited budget, this is something that you will want to allocate part of your budget toward.
The more you start to do this and stay consistent with content marketing for your business, the more success you will see and sales you will generate. Since that’s the goal, you definitely don’t want to forego the content marketing or ever push it to the back burner!
However, saying that you need to spend time on content marketing is much different and easier than actually doing it in real time. That’s where Latitude Park comes in to help. We want to help you with your content marketing so that you can focus on other parts of your business.
If you are ready to get started with a content strategy, contact us today to get the help and advice that you need!
