10 Reasons to Focus On Your Content Marketing Process

When it comes to your content marketing process, are you doing enough? It’s more than just providing a blog post about why your business is awesome. It needs to deliver value.

Value among content is vital for not only organic growth, but also for connecting with your customers. If what you created makes a reader shed a tear or laugh, they’ll remember you.

Branded content is much more than slapping your logo on a quote. It’s about making your customers feel something.

It’s time to take the “brand” out of “branded”. Not sure where this is going? Read on to learn how to up your content marketing process.

What is Content Marketing?

With so many business terms out there, it can get confusing to know which one means what. Content, as you likely know, means to provide customers with useful information. Marketing is promoting that information to the right audience.

Combined, it’s the key to a thriving business. Customers these days are looking for businesses and brands to create more than what they’re known for. They want to be astonished by something they read or watched.

When they do, they’ll share it with friends and family. That is called organic sharing.

The more people that share it, the more it’s seen by others. But great content doesn’t just happen overnight. It needs to be thought out and planned in advance.

What are customers itching to know more about? This can be found out through marketing research or by evaluating the needs of your target market.

To begin, you’ll need to know the different types of content marketing. This leads us to our next topic in the content marketing process.

What is an Example of Content Marketing?

Let’s say you own a moving company. Business was booming at the initial launch. However, now that you’re a few years in, it’s slowed down.

Itching for more customers, you decide to create a blog for your website. You (or your team) takes the time to write thought out blog posts with keyword-rich content. Blog posts, when done right, can be useful for SEO purposes.

People searching for a moving company come upon your blog posts. They read a couple and learned something new about how to pack fragile items. When it comes time for them to move to a new area, they decide to schedule movers from your company.

Landing customers through content marketing is a step-by-step process. Customers find your content. Then, they read or view it, share with others, and then come back to buy from you.

This establishes trust. Without having a content marketing process, your business has a slim chance of succeeding in the virtual world.

What else is there besides blog posts?

Examples of Content

Not all content needs to be utilized. It depends on the type of business you have, and the customers you want to reach.

Some will react better to blog posts, while others would prefer to watch their content. Use these examples as a guide for what is best for you. Here are the best ones for gaining more traffic.

• Infographics
• Video
• Tutorials
• Lists

Now that you know what content marketing truly is, it’s time to talk about your content marketing process. Need more convincing? Here are the best reasons why you need to focus on it.

Content Builds Trust with Customers

As stated above, the way to establish trust with customers is with valuable content. People trust those who prove to have expertise in a certain field.

If you can teach them something, sometimes that’s worth more than landing a sale. People remember those who taught them useful things, thus they’ll remember your brand. Soon after you continue teaching your audience new things, they’ll see you as an expert.

You need proof. The more you keep writing blog posts or posting videos, the more chances you have of attracting new customers.

A Good Content Marketing Process Helps with SEO

The hardest part of having a business in this digital age? Having a poor SEO game.

SEO is the heart of any website. It’s how users find you through search engines. The best way to go about having a strong SEO strategy, is with the right keywords.

Without the keywords, search engines wouldn’t know how to find your site. They can still crawl it, but without knowing how you want users to find you by using selective keywords, it’s a dead end.

Remember every time you write a blog post or a description for a video that it should use keywords. This way, search engines can easily “read” your website. Repeating keywords increases the chances of a search inquiry showing up with your business.

The minimum amount is based on how many words are typed. If it’s a lengthy blog post, for example, you can sprinkle the keyword in more.

You’ll want to make sure it sounds like a human wrote it, of course. If not, it can dramatically hurt your Google ranking.

Your Brand Becomes Established

A good content marketing process comes with benefits. Your brand will become more known.

The more you keep providing amazing content, the more buzz it’ll get. People start liking, sharing, and following.

With this comes recognition. People will know that you’re the one helping the polar bears by donating a percentage of proceeds.

The more good you do for either the world or for the people who know your business, the more people will begin to take notice.

Customers like standing behind businesses they know they can trust. Whether they’re helping the planet or donating to charity, people will support them. This sometimes prompts them to want to buy from them as well. They can feel like they’re helping a good cause.

Everyone Loves a Good Story

Much like with establishing your brand, telling stories is a great way to capture an audience’s attention. With businesses focusing more on making a fat check rather than focusing on their content marketing process, it can hurt them.

Businesses are run by humans, right? Then why do so many businesses sound robotic?

They often lose their voices because they’ve lost their focus. Customers don’t want to be sold to all the time. If they are, they’ll leave. They want to be treated like humans. They want to know the person behind the business is one too.

Storytelling is an effective way to get that point across. This can be done in any form of content you’d like, just make it meaningful.

It can be a personal story of how you overcame the odds or the real reason behind the name of your business. Whatever it is, let it inspire others to walk in your footsteps.

From there they can become loyal followers and customers. Sometimes people don’t have to buy from you to become one. They simply support you by knowing you’re relatable.

Web Traffic Grows

As with any content marketing process, there’s bound to be growth. But the way you gain that growth is most important.

Search engines favor organic growth. This means you didn’t pay a company to find you social media followers or pay to be ranked on the first page of Google.

All the content on your website is indexed by Google. The more blog posts you write, the more Google will index all of it. This allows for a greater chance of someone finding you through search engines.

The main thing to take away from this category is that it needs to be well-written content. Quickly slamming words on your keyboard won’t get you very far. Google favors thought-out posts, and the longer an article is, the better.

Gain More Inbound Leads

Outbound marketing is the practice of having a company reach out to a potential customer to tell those more about themselves.

What worked years ago doesn’t quite stand up to the quality that is expected today. Potential customers will often disregard outbound marketing techniques. This is because it can seem desperate and intrusive.

They’ll wonder how you got their information in the first place. Not a good way to start building trust.

Instead of cold sourcing people, other businesses turn toward inbound marketing. The best part? You won’t seem desperate.

Inbound marketing techniques prove to be successful in a content marketing process because of its ease. It simply means people find your content through your other content.

For example, you wrote a blog post about how cats behave. Then, you wrote another blog post about your latest cat clothing collection. When you insert a link in one of those posts leading to the other, visitors will click.

And when they do, they’re still within your website, learning even more. It’s a good way to keep people clicking because they’ll be curious to read more.

Establish Authority Through Social Media Channels

You’re not done with that blog post just because you hit publish. What comes next is finding out how to let people know of this new post.

Do you send out an email newsletter? What about posting to social media as part of your content marketing process?

Social media is so much more than posting a status update about your latest project. It’s a world of opportunity. When done right, it can drive traffic to your freshly created content.

Facebook, for example, is a great platform to post your recent article. They create a preview of it where you can entice viewers to read more. And when they do click, it leads straight to that article.

Social media not only helps with content but also when it comes to interacting with your audience. You’ll learn more about them and what they like, making market research a breeze.

It also helps with SEO. 31% of online shoppers use social media when shopping. When you’re posting content on one of those platforms, they’ll see it, and that post will send them to your website. You’ll gain a new visitor and new customer at the same time.

Draw In Ideal Buyers

The whole point of creating great content is to attract customers, right? But you need to be appealing to the ones who are interested in your expertise.

A great way to go about this is to know what kinds of questions your audience is asking. When you do, you can create content solely based on that information.

Why do this when it comes to a content marketing process? Because when it’s targeted to a specific demographic or age group, those that qualify will find your content. This eliminates time wasted on following leads that are dead ends.

Your Customers Have Reasons To Come Back

The backbone of a good business is repeat customers. Without them, most businesses wouldn’t exist.

The way to keep customers coming back is through a great content marketing process. The more content you provide on a weekly basis, the more they’ll come back.

If you publish a blog post every Tuesday, customers will visit your site to see if it’s up yet. The worst thing you could do is to go on hiatus. The moment you start getting out of rhythm is when you’ll see a decline in visitors.

Your customers are counting on your for awesome content. Don’t let them down.

Quality Content Creates Backlinks

Remember when we said people will share your content through social media? Backlinking works the same way — except it’s on someone else’s website.

Let’s say you wrote a really amazing blog post with tons of information. It’s seen by other bloggers who are intrigued by it, and link to it from a blog post they’ve written.

It gets crawled and indexed by Google. When it does, it tells the search engine that your content is valuable because others are including it in their content.

Catch my drift? The more backlinks you can build, the better. But remember, when it comes to a content marketing process, organic is better.

Wrapping Up

A content marketing process is the backbone of any business. Ordinary content won’t do. It has to be something worth people’s time.

That way, when they find something they like, they’ll share it. When they share it, it all leads back to you and your business. That means more visitors, which turns into a high conversion rate.

Need some help gaining more traffic? How about more revenue?

We’ll go over your marketing strategy step-by-step to help you get where you want to be. Get a free digital marketing review today!