Reasons to invest on Content Marketing
- June 7, 2021
While it may seem that content marketing is a recent fad or a post-pandemic trend, it is in fact a technique that wasn’t born yesterday. Quite the contrary, for over 15 years we have been talking about Content Marketing. Even before the creation of Google, back in 1997, the paradigms of Digital Marketing began to change. With the appearance of the first blogs, and then with the boom in social networks, publishing and sharing information immediately began to be very simple. The algorithm became more and more demanding, creating a battle to generate relevant content.
Nowadays, we can say that content is the backbone of marketing. Why? Because SEO content is not just blogging! When talking about “content” we are thinking about everything that a website presents to users. Let’s explain it better then.
How to define content marketing?
Content Marketing is a set of strategies focused on creating useful, relevant and free information for users with the main objective of attracting them and generating brand awareness.
Why do I need to invest in good content?
- Improves brand image
- It’s cheaper and more profitable
- Improves search engine positioning
- It creates a closer relationship with users, as you are supposed to write thinking about them -and not only with search engines on your mind
- It turns out to be a long-term investment
Content Marketing Challenges
The best content is one that offers valuable and useful information to users, so it’s not just about filling our site with words or keywords. There are some challenges we have to face:
- Sufficient content: the ideal situation would be to make periodical publications. If you “run out” of ideas, you can always go back to what you already have and improve or update it.
- Quality content: considering the essentiality of the previous point, it is not worth writing for the sake of it. The final product has to make sense for both the users and your purpose.
- Variety of content: if you have a topic that worked really well, you can always use it on new platforms or improve it, but don’t exhaust the resource! Try to find a way, and produce on a variety of topics.
- Innovative content: this is perhaps the biggest challenge. Finding a “virgin niche” or a topic that hasn’t been developed to date is difficult. However, you can always try to improve what other sites have already published. So it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.
- Get a budget: we all have ideas and messages to say and share. However, not all of us have the necessary skills, whether it’s writing an article or making a video. Invest in content marketing. Look for qualified staff for your objective. It is better to do little and do it well than do too much and do it badly. Investing in content marketing is important, although the results may take some time to be evident.
Different Types of Content for an SEO Positioning Strategy
As we said, content is not just a blog. To diversify the audience, we have different formats where we can develop our productions:
- Vídeos
- Images
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Ebooks
- Podcasts
Choosing one format or another will depend on your objective in a campaign, or even at what stage of the content funnel you are focusing on. And since we are talking about the funnel, we can name 4 types of content marketing campaigns.
Content Marketing Funnel
- Traffic generation
- Lead Generation
- Lead nurturing
- Customer generation
Pssss! You still don’t know what leads are? Read our article about what are leads and why are they important to increasing online sales.
Why do some content “do not work”?
Whether some type of content works or not depends on several factors, but most of the time, the basic mistake is writing just for the sake of writing without having a vision of who is reading us. Nobody talks to the air -or at least not consciously, right?- In this sense, we often make the mistake of thinking only about SERP, and we end up developing super unattractive texts, without a clear objective and without an audience in the head.
Giving a good user experience is the key to the issue
Google is increasingly focused on satisfying the needs of those who do the search. At the 2021 SEO Summit, Rafael Rez, Co-Founder of the Nova Escola de Marketing, explained that Google is increasingly understanding more and more the customer journey. In this sense, our main issue will be “to create content that helps the customer along this journey, and that responds to what this customer needs and then Google will prioritize your content along this journey”.
Therefore, it is essential to understand what users want: do they have a doubt, a desire, a need? Based on this information, we will have a production objective and a specific platform for each type of publication. Of course, this is directly related to the funnel we detailed above.
However, there are also other reasons why a content type is effective.
5 other factors to consider when writing:
- Audience or target audience: as we’ve already said, it’s very important to have a defined audience and produce with them in mind. It is essential to write based on providing valuable information.
- Language: it is essential to be homogeneous. Language is part of your company’s or product’s identity. Do you have a more informal image? How do you address your audience? These are details you should be aware of.
- Context: this is simple. Certainly, Facebook’s audience is not the same or has the same interests as Tik Tok’s audience. Adapt to the context. Don’t post too much text on a platform where the audience likes videos best or vice versa.
- Goal: as already mentioned, always think about the following questions: do you want to inform? Do you want to ask questions? Whenever we speak, we expect some kind of response from our interlocutor. In this case, it’s exactly the same. It doesn’t make sense to make a “step by step” video to send to someone who hasn’t purchased a product yet, for example.
- Resources: a video without music or an article with giant paragraphs sucks, right? Try to produce content that looks “appealing” to users’ eyes. Divide the text with subtitles for good reading organization, use bullet points, quote from reliable sources, use good quality images, infographics with easy-to-read font size, etc.
Scheduling for a good strategy
We already know that the content that works best is the one that provides value to users. And not only. The fact that a message arrives at the right time is also important. Different types of content require different times and frequencies (for example, you don’t want to drown your potential customers with daily emails or fill your followers with repeated posts).
Having an editorial calendar offers a lot of advantages. Not only in terms of organization but also to have an overview of the type of content, publication channels, and goals. This will make it easier to create varied content for both a blog and social media.
By having a calendar, it is possible to increase the number of visits, as it will be easier to be constant in the creation of new topics for social networks or for our website. If we offer high-quality content, it is more likely to receive frequent visitors who are interested to be updated on our latest news.
On the other hand, scheduling helps you not to forget the important dates and have the content ready for those types of dates. Imagine having e-commerce and not updating it for a Black Friday? And by saying this, we are not just thinking about sales. Not forgetting important dates also shows interest in our audience: to send congratulations messages or remember historical events will also help to reach the emotionality of our followers/readers/potential customers.
The strategy is working, and now what?
If you have content that works, analyze it and pay attention to what you might be doing well. Is it the keyword choice? Is it the topic? Is it the resource, for example, a video? Take advantage of what you have to re-use this without falling into repetition of content.
Keep an eye on what competitors are doing, and keep an organized calendar. However, never forget that the most important thing is to think about the users. After all, you are one too, and you know how you like to find what you’re looking for on the net.
