Grow Your Business With Content Marketing

Do you want to grow your business? Most business owners do! Which is why I want you to understand how you can grow your business with content marketing. 

Content marketing is a $300 billion market, with 90% of organizations using content marketing. Those who use this approach get three times the leads from content than from other forms of marketing. And 66% of business owners are increasing their content marketing spend this year. They’ve seen how content marketing can help their businesses, and they want to continue that growth.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is creating and publishing content targeted to a customer segment. The content is typically free and engages with your customer to get them to buy a product or service.

To be effective with content marketing, you have to know:

• Customer Segments. You have to know who you’re selling to so you can communicate with them. 
• Conversion. You need to know what you’re trying to get them to do. What do you want customers to do as a result of reading your content?

You have to know those two things before you can create content. You certainly have to know them for your content to help grow your business.

Grow Your Business With Content Marketing

So, now that you understand what content marketing is and why it’s important, how do you create content to grow your business?

Start With Strategy

You don’t start publishing content, cross your fingers, and hope it works. You need a data-backed reason for what you’re doing, which means creating a strategic plan. Create a plan that defines your audience and outlines the type of content you’ll use to reach them and how you’ll distribute it.

Once again, if you don’t know your audience, you can’t know what to create to reach them or where to reach them. So you need good data on who you’re trying to reach. You also need to consider where they are in their buyer’s journey to know how to reach them. Once you know where they are in their journey, you can consider the best type of content to reach them. 

Once you have a plan, your content marketing comes together more seamlessly.

Set Your Goals

You have to set a goal to measure success. Otherwise, you don’t know if your strategy is reaching who you want, and they’re receiving the message you desire. Your goals depend on what you’re trying to accomplish for your brand. You can base goals on increasing things like traffic on your website, conversions, newsletter sign-ups, engagement, or even brand awareness. Those are just some things to consider. The essential thing is to know what you want to achieve and why. Set a measure around it, then monitor progress.

Consider Resources

Here’s the thing… it takes time and expertise to grow your business with content marketing. You have to know how to do it right. So whether you’re outsourcing content marketing or investing in your team to do it, you will need to allocate some resources. Writing blogs, producing infographics, and editing videos require time, talent, and money. Give content the resources it needs to succeed.

Think SEO

Search engine optimization helps people find your blog posts when they’re searching for information about a topic, product, or service. You need SEO to make your content marketing work for your business. But SEO doesn’t need to be frightening. 

Search engines are increasingly looking for high-quality content. You have to be talking to humans with your content. What SEO is all about is thinking about your audience, what they need, and what words will get them to your site.

SEO can be incredibly valuable and add to your other efforts. Still, you have to continually make sure you’re not making it so complicated and, if you need to, find a trusted person who is going to treat it the right way.

Create a Content Calendar

It’s essential to create a content calendar when you’re in any content role. You have a lot of content going out. You don’t just wake up one morning and say, “I think I want to send an email out today.” Your content efforts need organization, but the system doesn’t have to be fancy. A simple Google sheet will work. But there also are resources available, like this one from CoSchedule, to help you plan your content efforts.

Track Results

If you set goals, you should be able to track them. Goal tracking helps you recognize the successes of your efforts. You have to see which pieces of content your audience wants to engage with to do more of what they want and less of what they don’t want. 

Key Performance Indicators are only effective if tracked and reported over time. A lot of content, blogs especially, can increase in value over time, so it’s important to keep an eye on how the KPIs are evolving long-term.

Social media and email give us immediate feedback. Don’t forget what gives you long-term results, like blog posts or e-books. We want to know what serves us over the long term.

Let Content Journey Help

You can grow your business with content marketing, and many business owners are. But we also understand that it may be too much to think about while you try to run your business. Schedule a call if you’d like to talk about how content marketing can help your business and whether Content Journey might be a good partner for you.