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In the business world, there are so many different forms of marketing, which it’s often hard to know where to start. It can be particularly daunting if you’re just starting out in business. When you’re new to operating your own company, and you’ve never dealt with any marketing before, you may not know what kind is going to work best for your business. But, you’ll soon realize that some options are more expensive than others, and some are more effective than others. So, for this reason, let us talk you through the reasons why content marketing could work for you.
Content marketing is a relatively new form of marketing. An SEO expert is going to help you to ensure that your content is seen and is easy to access online. You should want to appear on the first page of the search engine results pages and that means looking at how an SEO strategy can make your business stand up and out! Compared to advertising, PR and even good word-of-mouth, it’s practically a newborn. But, that doesn’t mean that it should be underestimated or classes as ineffective, it’s totally the opposite. With the way that the modern world is changing, and the way that we do business changing, it’s a viable and valuable marketing technique in its own right. So let’s take a look at exactly what it is, why it may work for you, and exactly how you’re going to go about setting up your own forms of content marketing for your company.
What Is Content Marketing?
First of all, let’s look into what exactly content marketing is. There are lots of definitions that you can find for it, but the best and most basic way to think of content marketing is the way a business uses different forms of valuable content to target and engage with their intended audience. To do that, businesses will use a strategy, just as they would with any other form of marketing. So, every aspect of content marketing that is done will also come with an objective and an expected result.
Why Is It Important?
If you’re wondering, why content marketing? then you won’t be alone. With so many different options, why should you choose this? Well, content marketing is a great way to raise awareness of your brand and provide valuable information to your target audience. In doing so, you may also find that you get a lot of beneficial results with regards to your brand image, your influence, and even your profits.
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What Does It Involve?
Content marketing isn’t actually just one form of marketing. It’s more of the name given to a collective group of marketing forms that are all considered to be content. So, if you’re looking to find out a bit more about what content marketing involves and what is classed as a form of content marketing, here are some key examples below;
Blog Posts
Blog posts are probably the most well known and recognized form of content marketing. Although any and all web pages can be classed as content, it’s blog posts that tend to stand out the most. This is often due to the type of content that is used in posts. Creating a great blog post often means that you’re informing, inspiring, or entertaining a reader. With creative content, your posts get traction, and you then start to tick off some of your goals.
Infographics
Another highly popular form of content marketing is infographics. An infographic is a form of graphic design that will contain relevant and interesting information, statistics, and even charts on the topic in question. They’re often long and vertical in shape. Infographics are a great visual way to portray the information you’re looking to share, and are a great way to get a message across to a time-poor audience.
Videos
But there’s also video to think about. So far, we’ve talked about word-heavy content and graphic-heavy content, so of course video-heavy content is going to be another key contender in the content marketing realm. The popularity of sites like YouTube only shows you that you need to be creating video content to access the right audiences. Regardless of your business or the industry you operate in, there are great video content ideas you can produce to engage your audience.
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What Are The Benefits?
So now you know a little bit more about content marketing and what it involves, you may want to know how it’s going to benefit your business. There is a range of different ways that content marketing can contribute to the successes of not only your entire marketing strategy but your business as a whole. Although there are more, you’ll find an outline of some of the most important below;
SEO
First of all, content marketing can be great for your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By now, you probably know just how important your SEO is, but you may not have realized how content marketing can help with that. When you use a search marketing expert like Rankology Marketing, they’re going to do the bulk of the hard work for you, but you can still benefit your own SEO with content. With content, you can increase your ranking and domain authority, and earn inbound links.
PR
But that’s not all. Content marketing can also be a great form of PR too. PR is often all about building the right image and managing your reputation, both of things you can do with content marketing. By producing relevant, engaging, and quality content, your audience will remember you, relate to you and above all else, trust you. When you’re creating killer content, you have the power to boost your own brand, as well as engage with your audience.
Traffic
Another way that content marketing can be seriously good for your business is thanks to the traffic you can generate. When you’re creating content, you’re building links, and we all know that link building is great for your website. But that’s not all, with content, you can utilize keywords to get your traffic, as well as coming up with unique and different ideas that haven’t been covered before.
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How Do I Get Started?
By now, you should be pretty much briefed on all things content marketing, so it’s likely that you want to know how to get started. Although you may be excited and want to get stuck in, hold off. Because first, you need to create your own content marketing strategy if you really want it to work.
Am I Skilled Enough?
If you’re starting to worry whether you can do this, stop. Don’t panic. Content marketing doesn’t have to be as complicated as it sounds. Instead, you can simply work through each stage in your own time. From creating blog posts and infographics to starting video, it may take time, but if you have the determination, you can do it. Alternatively, if you don’t want to work with an agency, you can opt to use remote workers to help you out. Freelancers can be great to create your graphics if you need them, or even handle an entire content area for you.
Is It Measurable?
If you’re starting to think about your Return On Investment (ROI), you’re probably wondering just how you can measure your content marketing efforts. Although the process differs to the more traditional marketing methods, they’re definitely measurable. As long as you set your objectives from the start, whether they’re related to views and likes or traffic and sales, you can use analytics and tracking methods to measure almost everything.
What Does It Cost?
Finally, to follow on from the idea of measurement, you may also want to think about cost. If you have a tight budget, you can certainly create and execute your own content strategy. When it comes to hiring professionals or even an agency, you will find that those costs substantially creep up, but it will all depend on the budget you have available and what you’re looking to achieve.
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