If you are not utilising a content strategy for your business you are missing out on potential website visitors, leads and conversions. In this blog we look at why Content Marketing is so important.
What is content?
Content is simply the message your inbound strategy delivers. Content is also what you provide the engaging customer with, so this can be from blogs, videos and on any form of social media. Content is very important as without any content there would be nothing to deliver to people. It would be empty!
Content is all to do with the inbound methodology (which is pictured above) with the 4 stages attract, convert, close, delight.
Your content attracts the right visitors to the site, then converts them into leads but doing this will close them into customers and at the very end of it, it will delight them into promoters.
Content is part of all of these stages. This is because the strangers will get attracted to your content as they are promoting themselves on social media. Content is important at the convert stage as it transforms the visitors to leads. In the close stage, content is what builds the emails that your leads are opening, making them go into the delight stage as the content is what delights them becoming a promoter for them. Content is the fuel that keeps the inbound methodology running.
How to create the greatest content?
This is the kind of content that you want people to read, share and come back for more after they have seen some of your content already.
To create good content, you need to make sure that you can do something that will get someone’s attention. You need to think of a process, you need to set a goal if you achieve this goal with a good piece of content they will get better every time and you will start to become more successful with the content that you are putting together.
The content process = plan – create – distribute – analysis – repeat
You must plan your content that you are making, therefore you must know the purpose of what you are creating whether this is going to be getting people to visit your site or if you want your content to convert them to leads. You must then think about the format of your content, how you are going to produce the content that you have, this could be a video, case study etc. when picking the best content for you, you must make sure you think about your buyer’s personas.
You must think about the buyer’s journey which includes awareness, consideration and decision. It’s important to know the buyer’s journey as then you can find out what you want your content to be about and whether it will be relevant to the buyer’s journey or not.
When starting to think about what content you are going to use, you need to understand what you are going to write about before you put pen to paper. This will help you stay consistent.
After you have the content ideas, you need to make them into reality.
- But remember less is more, make it easy for them to consume your content
- Keep it educational, not promotional! This is because you don’t want to give them too much information as it shouldn’t be until the decision stage of the buyer’s journey where it should be discussed in detail
- Lastly, worry about the informational content first before the design content. ALWAYS prioritise what you write before what it looks like.
An important part of creating content is to promote it, as you need it to go somewhere so people can see the content that you have created. You need the promotion for your content to survive. You can distribute your content in many ways. This can be from social media, website pages, business blogs etc.
Lastly you must keep checking your content to assess how well it is doing. If it’s falling in numbers on how many people are noticing your content maybe you need to re think what you’re doing wrong, change where you’re promoting it or re-think the content you have produced.
But if you do all of these, your content will be remarkable!
For further insights and guidance, we invite you to explore our blog at 07hm.co.uk/blog. Here, you’ll find a wealth of information tailored to the needs and challenges of SMEs navigating the digital landscape. Additionally, if you have specific questions or need personalised advice, don’t hesitate to reach out to us via email at info@07hm.co.uk or telephone on 01702 410663.
