How to Use Content Marketing to Grow Your Business

What is content marketing, and what is its real purpose?

How can you spend hours laboring over long blogs to generate an income for your business? In this blog, I’ll explain why investing your time and resources is an incredibly high-value area and how to use your content marketing efforts to grow your business. Most online marketers will have heard of content marketing, which has become increasingly popular over the past decade. But what do we mean by it?

Content marketing is about creating and sharing online material to grow your traffic through organic search, such as Google, Bing, etc. Sadly, nothing comes easily, and content marketing is the same. Earning your positions takes time and effort; sustaining them with constant site optimization and link building requires persistent work. But it’s worth it!

Now that you know the purpose of content marketing, let me break it down into seven steps so you can create and promote content quickly to deliver value to your business.

1. Identify Your Target Audience
2. Carry Out Keyword Research
3. Identify and Allocate Resources
4. Create a Content Calendar
5. Create Content
6. Promote Your Target Market
7. Measure Results
8. Identify Your Target Audience

It’s best practice to start developing customer personas in this situation.  If you haven’t already, you can complete this by analysing your site’s quantitative data (e.g., Google Analytics) and qualitative data (e.g., feedback, surveys, etc.).

By pulling these two information sources together, you can quite quickly build up an image of who your customers are. This should include the following:

• Demographics
• Psychographics
• Motivations
• Site Behaviour
• Purchase Propensity
• Average Order Value
• Lifetime Customer Value

Carry Out Keyword Research

Once you’re confident in who your customers are, it’s time to work out what content is relevant and valuable for them, which will also help your business.

This is done by conducting and analyzing keyword research.

What is keyword research? 

It’s an analysis of the keywords and topics people search for. Retaking the vegan restaurant example, if you don’t utilize this step to formulate great ideas and opportunities, everything on the menu may be cale! Use the information you’ve gathered from your identified customer personas to brainstorm several content ideas that would be relevant and valuable to them.

Why do I keep mentioning the words relevant and valuable?

For any content marketing strategy to be successful, it must meet both criteria and create an impact on your target audience.

For instance, if you produce content that is neither relevant nor helpful to them, why would they become your customers

Once you’ve completed brainstorming for your content ideas, you’ll want to start identifying the keywords and phrases your users are searching for associated with these ideas.

The two main tools I suggest using for this are the following:

• Free Tool – Google Keyword Planner
• Premium Tool – SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool

Why use both?

Simply, it helps you find as much robust information as possible about what people are searching for—I always find two sources better than one. With these tools, you enter the content ideas you’ve brainstormed into each tool and analyze the results by combining the data.

The things you need to look out for are the following:

• Keyword Volume – what is the average monthly search volume?
• Trend – is the keyword consistently searched for, on the rise or decline?
• Competition (‘KD %’ in SEMrush) – how likely you will be able to rank for this keyword with your content?

For example, you may notice that ‘Vegan Cuisine in London’ is a topic searched for in several different ways from your keyword research (e.g., ‘Vegan Food in London,’ ‘London Vegan Hotspots,’ ‘Best Vegan Food in London’).

You would then use the overarching topic of ‘Vegan Cuisine in London‘ as your article heading (or include it at the very least in a more extended title) and break down the sections within your article or blog with specific keywords users are searching for such as the following:

• Cheapest Vegan Food in London
• Best Vegan Restaurants in London
• London Vegan delicacies
• Vegan Sample Menus in London
• London Vegan Delicacies

As you can tell, I know nothing about Vegan food!

Identify and Allocate Resources

Next, you’ll want to map out who will produce your content. Suppose you have a marketing or content team, great! If you’re a smaller company or an individual, it’s time to dust off the cobwebs and get out your ergonomic keyboard! By this point, you will have identified your customer personas, planned the content you want to produce, and mapped out the structure.  Now comes the hard part – producing it.

Again, I hear many people saying they’re no good at writing content and need more time to spare from other activities. Fear not! There are other options. For instance, freelancers like myself can be incredibly quick and capable of taking your homework and writing it up. Some other great online resources for finding highly qualified, experienced, and capable writers with expertise in on-page SEO are  Fiverr and Upwork.

Whether you are creating the content in-house or outsourcing, make sure that you have a process that covers the following parts:

• A person to manage the content creation
• Any tools, information, or documentation required to create content
• Resource time and costs (if outsourcing)
• Content publishing workflow – e.g., creation – publishing – promoting
• Additional assets required (e.g., images, infographics, videos)

Create a Content Calendar

This part is straightforward but highly effective for mapping out how to drip-feed your audience and showing Google how active you are. A content calendar doesn’t need to be remotely complicated. It just needs to organize and spread out the promotion of your content and take advantage of key dates, times, and trends if possible. There are two primary benefits to employing this approach.

Firstly, it allows you to nurture your audience and entice further prospects. By regularly promoting content, you’re demonstrating to the user how active and engaged you are, making you a more relevant and valuable resource (see what I did there?). Put yourself in the user’s shoes. Would regular production and promotion of content make you more engaged with a brand than a massive dump of it at irregular intervals?

Secondly, Google loves to see websites continuously tweaking and producing. Google wants you to create and promote new content and regularly update and optimize material.

Why?

It simply shows that you are an active resource and have not stopped producing new material. And Google loves content! It’s also worth noting that Google can consider even simple modifications to existing pages on your site to be refreshed content. Generally speaking, the more regularly the content is refreshed, the more favorable Google will consider your website, as it almost appears brand new when re-crawled. Always think of enticing your users as well as Google.

Create Content

Now, this stage might seem overly obvious, and well, it is.  However, there is a difference between simply creating content from the homework you’ve done and formatting it correctly to meet the criteria needed for on-page SEO. Before you even think about ramming in the keywords you’ve uncovered and trying to game the system to favor your blogs and articles and help them rank, keep it simple—write for people.

This may seem obvious, but I see online writers repeatedly trying to write their headings, title tags, meta descriptions, and even alt Text for search engines rather than people. If this idea is in your head, chuck it out. It’s people who will read your content, and it’s people who will fundamentally be the judge as to whether it’s worth reading, sharing, or acting upon. 

Thus, everything from your tone of voice to structure, readability, and flow should focus on making it engaging, relevant, and valuable for the reader. You will earn the edge by structuring your content into clear sections under the overarching topic you identified in your keyword research. If you can, run it by a colleague to quality-check, or if not, read it out loud until you are happy with everything, from the information given to the tone and style of your writing.

Promote Your Target Market

You made it! Your content is relevant, practical, and, most importantly, written! The next part is about successfully blowing your trumpet and positioning your fantastic content to the right users. Here’s where you want to be innovative. In any good content marketing strategy, all the content you produce should be your net, and you are responsible for what you do with the prospects you catch and how you nurture them further.

I will break this down for you. It’s wise to use the apparent methods of the digital marketing mix to amplify the visibility of your new content, which should include some or all of the following methods:

• Organic Social Media Posts
• Paid Social Media Posts (budget dependent)
• Email Marketing (e.g., Newsletter and include in any DRIP campaigns)
• Influencers – if you’re working with others, get them to promote the content, also

These are all self-explanatory methods for drumming up some views, but you want to learn how to commercialize these users for your business. Here are two methods I suggest you try:

Nurturing Users

When a user lands on your site, you want their journey to continue by simply taking your information and returning to the internet void. Instead, you want to start building marketing qualified leads (MQL). First, you want to ensure you employ relevant advertising or social media pixels on your site, most notably on your content and high-conversion pages.

These include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Ads, Adroll, Criteo pixels, etc. If you’re using an advertising platform that doesn’t have one, use another. You can easily set these up with Google Tag Manager or edit your site’s HTML code directly. If you need clarification, email or comment below, and I’ll explain how.

If you set these up on your pages, your cookies will capture each user who opts in ( as long as they accept them). You can re-engage users who clicked on your content into your more comprehensive marketing funnel. For example, say they land on a new piece of content about ‘the best budget digital cameras in 2020′ – you can set up several retargeted ads scheduled to be visible to these newly acquired users across multiple platforms (e.g., social media and other advertising networks).

These ads can surface in the user’s Facebook feed, Twitter feed, and even on display advertising space across multiple different sites (e.g., Google Display Network). By doing this, you can retarget advertising at users who are more likely to become customers. Offering them a series of messages about your products and services related to what they read about on your site or engaged with is a powerful way to drive conversion value from the content you produce.

The best part is that once this is set up, it will all happen automatically and within your advertising budget constraints.

Gated Content

Gated content is a little bit more obvious. Instead of simply allowing users to visit your site, read your content, and leave without taking action, why not make it a fair informational transaction?

You only allow them to access your content if they enter their details (e.g., name and email address). This can be a great way to build mailing lists and bolster your prospects within whichever CRM system you use. By gathering this information through pop-ups or specific site pages, you can promote relevant associated goods or services or other related content to your highly engaged users.

Seems like a fair trade, right?

However, when you re-engage with your new prospects,  nurture these users. Don’t simply throw product messages at them immediately and assume they’ll buy from you because they read an article. Instead, a great way is to introduce these users to specific email DRIP campaigns relevant to the content they engaged with on your site.

For instance, offer them regular follow-up emails with your latest news, a content roundup, and your latest articles and brand messages.  If these users continue to click and engage with your emails, create a trigger within your email marketing DRIP campaign to introduce higher-value converting emails (e.g., product or service offerings, discounts, etc.).

My point is to remember to bring these customers through the funnel. Don’t push them too quickly with the heavy sales, or you could miss out on new business by failing to nurture and convert your prospects into customers.

Measure Results

A marketing strategy could only be considered a success with precise measurements.  This idealistically should include a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarking.

Now, I know this is easier said than done for some businesses. If you need more resources to manage your content, promotional channels, and analytics fully, tasks like this can fall by the wayside. This is why I will highlight the significant metrics to look out for and why they’re essential.

Google Analytics

If you will use only one source of data to measure your campaign successes and failures, look at Google Analytics. I say this because Google Analytics can pick up all relevant on-site data, conversion data, and a vast amount of social and email data (if set up correctly).

To save time, when measuring the success of new content, keep a close finger on the pulse for the following metrics:

• Pageviews – measure the number of page views your content gets
• Avg. Time on Page – how long users spend on average on your content (the longer, the better!)
• Bounce Rate – the percentage of visitors who enter the site on your content and don’t proceed to any other pages (usually, you want this as low as possible)
• Exit Rate – the percentage of users who exited from your content page only (again, it’s usually best for this to be as low as possible)

Social Media Analytics

Social media is a fantastic channel to increase your content’s speed to market and initial visibility.

New content and regular promotions are also great ways to continue building your audience by being active on various platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.). 

Promoting new content is a bit of a two-bird scenario.

Here are the main metrics you should try to keep on top of from platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn:

• Impressions – the number of times your post/ad was seen (whether engaged with or not)
• Clicks – the number of clicks your post/ad received
• Comments – the number of comments your post/ad received – responding here will help boost your overall engagement, so stay active!
• Landing Page Views (paid posts only) – number of people who clicked onto your content from the ad link
• Cost Per Landing Page View (paid posts only) – the cost for each click you receive from your users to your content

Email Marketing Analytics

Email marketing is notoriously the cheapest way to drive online business value once set up correctly.

Again, like social media, emails are a fantastic channel to boost visibility to new content at a meager cost (depending on the level of sophistication you have set up and the size of your existing audience).

The main metrics to keep on top of should be the following:

• Open Rate – the number of times users opened your emails.
• Click Through Rate – the percentage of users who clicked on your links (e.g., content page link) against the number of emails opened.
• Unsubscribe Rate – the percentage of users who unsubscribed from your email marketing as a result of the email received

Conclusion

Content Marketing is an incredibly effective way to grow your business. If you follow the steps in this blog and keep working the hours, you’ll see a return on your investment over the long term. Always ensure that everything you write is relevant and valuable to your audience and that you continuously produce more great material.

The more relevant and valuable you are to your audience, the more useful you will be to Google. Casting out regular nets to draw in prospects is a surefire way to develop a solid and robust marketing funnel.