In the competitive SMB landscape, content marketing has become a top priority for 53% of marketers. It is a proven method of boosting audience engagement, inspiring customer loyalty, establishing a recognizable brand, and driving sales.
Here is how to use content marketing to grow your business.
1- Increase Industry Authority
Producing informative, authentic, and data-backed content will help you gain your audience’s trust and position yourself as an authoritative industry resource. This is a chance for you to demonstrate your expertise in your industry and provide straightforward answers to your target audience’s questions.
The content on your blog should teach readers something new and help them solve real-life problems. Include the latest industry statistics. Explain the hottest trends. Provide easy-to-understand tips for users to follow.
Use tools like Buzzsumo to identify the hottest topics on the web and create comprehensive articles that are 10X better than similar content.
Avoid keyword stuffing. Instead, optimize for keywords organically. Make your content to-the-point and fluff-free.
Break up textual content into smaller paragraphs to make it easier to follow. Use headings and subheadings to help users skim through your articles. Create visual and video content to engage audiences.
In other words, focus on user experiences, not rankings.
There are many benefits of creating valuable, user-centric content:
- Retaining users: Seeing the value your content brings, your website visitors will keep coming back to your website for more.
- Boosting user engagement: If you impress them, users will like, share, and comment on your posts on social networks.
- Maximizing exposure: More mentions, shares, and likes will boost your brand visibility and attract new visitors.
- Earning backlinks: Once industry experts notice your killer piece of content, they will gladly link back to it organically and share it with the public as a valuable source of information.
2- Contribute to Credible Blogs to Boost Reach and Rankings
Guest blogging is one of the most effective SEO tactics for several reasons.
First, it gives you an opportunity to boost your backlink portfolio. From Google’s viewpoint, backlinks are a major trust signal. They indicate the relevance and authority of your blog, telling Google to rank you higher.
Second, guest blogging will increase your reach. By contributing to a reputable blog in your niche, you will put yourself in front of their audiences and drive qualified traffic and leads to your website.
To boost rankings and grow industry credibility, you need to assess the relevancy of guest blogging opportunities. Check their rankings, backlinks, domain authority, and content quality. Make sure they are in the same or related niche and that they target the same audiences. Write articles for people, not for search engines. Similar to your blog posts, they should be informative, fresh, and relevant to the people reading them.
Read An Ultimate Guide to Write Data-Driven Content
3- Establish a Consistent Brand Image
Every piece of content you produce should reflect your brand’s personality, values, and missions. Talk to your marketing team about what tone, grammar, point of view, colors, and fonts to use to define your brand.
Next, ensure your content is on-brand, recognizable, and consistent by creating a brand style guide. This is a set of standards your content marketing team should use when creating and distributing content.
If you look at big brands, you will see what their brand messaging is consistent across all marketing channels they use. Dove, for example, focuses on empowering women. Their tone is emotional, personal, and motivational.
On the other hand, SaaS brands focus on aligning their software design with their marketing channels. For example, by hiring Infostarters to create custom-tailored icon design, Reportz managed to tell the story behind their brand and maximize brand awareness.
4- Build a Content Marketing Funnel to Boost Conversions
When visiting your website, customers go through the three stages of a sales funnel – awareness, evaluation, and purchase. You should diversify your content to appeal to users’ needs in every phase of their buyer journey.
Attract users
Create educational videos, infographics, and checklists, provide practical tips, and help users solve real-life problems. When they perform a Google search or scroll down social networks, such content will inspire them to click on your link.
Engage and convert
To build trust with users and convert them, create informative how-to articles, whitepapers, ebooks, webinars, case studies, and guides. Apart from publishing this content on your blog, you could also use it as a lead magnet – exclusive content you give for free in exchange for a customer’s email address.
Reviews, user-generated content, and testimonials will serve as social proof and inspire users to purchase faster.
To maximize conversions, insert persuasive CTAs to guide a visitor on what they should do next.
Inspire Brand Loyalty
Now that a user has converted, it is time to delight and retain them.
Social networks will help you nurture strong relationships with users and inspire loyalty. Apart from promoting your blog content on social, you should also create unique content for these channels, such as quizzes, polls, engaging chatbot scripts, videos, memes, GIFs, etc.
Conclusions
Content marketing is a key aspect of your business growth strategy. It lets you build strong relationships with your audiences, increase industry authority, grow your brand reach, and maximize sales. You just need to implement it strategically. I hope these tips will help you.
