The current trends in digital marketing revolve around content. Your customers, leads, and audience members want informative and valuable content from you and your brand. Not just that, this content needs to be put out in a way that reaches the audience naturally and organically rather than being disruptive.
Content marketing helps brands and businesses achieve exactly that. As a small business or a startup, you need to be on top of the game when it comes to digital marketing. Investing in effective content marketing services can result in increasing conversions, improving brand awareness, boosting revenue, and establishing your brand as a leader.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the process of planning, curating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content to reach your target audience. It helps a business improve its brand awareness, sales, reach, interactions, and brand loyalty.
Content marketing services help you create a narrative for your content, basically telling a story that the audience can relate to. Read more Why is Social Media important for Businesses?
Types of Content Marketing:
There are several types of content marketing that you can, as a small business or a startup, incorporate into your marketing strategy. The most common types of content marketing are:
1. Social Media Content Marketing:
With over 3.7 billion social media users across the world, social media content marketing is an essential content marketing service for a business.
Utilizing social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. should be a priority for any type of business in this digital age. Read more Top 10 Reasons Why Startups need Digital Marketing.
2. Infographic Content Marketing:
Infographics help in displaying content, information, and data in a graphical format that is easy to understand. It is one of the most effective content marketing services, that is a combination of clear images, simple wordings, and short statements that help a business to effectively communicate the content to the audience.
3. Blogs:
Blogs are powerful content marketing services that allow businesses to incorporate a high level of creativity. You can cross-promote other internal and external content in your blogs via links, social share buttons, and incorporating product information.
4. Video Content Marketing:
According to a study by Wyzowl, 69% of consumers prefer to interact with a brand’s product or service through a video. It is an effective content marketing service that helps a business in boosting conversions, improving ROI, and building relationships with your audience.
5. Paid Ad Content Marketing:
For a small business or a startup investing a large amount in a marketing campaign is not feasible. Paid ads can help businesses reach a broad audience and control the positioning of the brand.
They are cost-effective and customizable according to performance. This content marketing service provides high ROI and desirable results.
6. Podcast Content Marketing:
According to KPMG, India is the third-largest podcast listening market globally and is expected to be valued at INR. 17.62 Cr by 2023. This is the reason why major businesses started exploring podcasts.
Podcasts are content marketing services that allow a high level of creativity and give you complete control over the content and platforms where podcasts can be advertised.
How to Create a Great Content Marketing Strategy:
Having a strategy is always helpful. Implementing a content marketing strategy can help businesses derive the desired results. Here’s how you can implement content marketing:
1. Set smart goals:
The first step of implementing a content marketing service is to set up goals that are in line with your company’s marketing and goals. The goals should be clear and realistic so that the content marketing service can be effective. Some examples of a smart goal are:
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- Improve brand awareness
- Increase revenue
- Improve brand loyalty
- Attract strategic partners
2. Determine KPIs:
Key Performance Indicators are essential for improving efficiency. After setting up smart goals, the brand must set KPIs that are quantifiable data points used for measuring the performance against goals. Some of the KPIs against smart goals are defined below:
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- Brand Awareness: Site traffic, social media followers. Read more How to Increase Brand Awareness for Small Businesses?
- Revenue: Daily sales, site traffic
- Brand Loyalty: Returning customers, promoters, product reviews, referrals
- Strategic Partners: Backlinks, new partnerships, mentions
3. Decide the type of content:
The type of content that you want to put out there is the next step in implementing content marketing services. This depends a lot on the target audience that you are aiming to acquire and their personas.
Following questions about your target audience can help you decide what type of content will be best suited for your brand:
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- What does the target audience need from you?
- What challenges are they looking to overcome?
- How can your product/service provide value to them?
- Where do they spend most of their time?
4. Decide the channels:
Once the type of content has been decided, it’s time to decide the channels that you will be using to communicate the content. Content marketing services help you decide where to share your content and where it will be shared from. Different content marketing channels are social media platforms, websites, etc.
5. Set a budget:
This is an important step in effectively implementing content marketing services. You can consider the following factors before deciding the budget:
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- Do you need to buy software or technology for curating the content?
- Do you need to hire an agency for content marketing services?
- Do you need ad space?
- Do you need access to tools for analyzing your content?
6. Create and distribute content:
This step is the most obvious one. Creating and distributing content makes it available for your audience to consume. Social media calendars are effective content marketing services that can help you keep up with consistently creating content. You can schedule your content well ahead of time.
Consistency is the most important factor when it comes to publishing content for the target audience and as a business, providing quality content consistently on time can help you leave your competition behind.
7. Analyze results:
Last but not least, analyzing the results so that you can make necessary changes to improve the efficiency of your content marketing efforts and reach more audience members. Analyze your smart goals against your KPIs to determine the success of your content marketing strategy.
Conclusion:
Content marketing is a very crucial marketing strategy to reach your target audience and increase conversions. To be visible to a larger audience, a business must focus on content marketing services. For small businesses and startups, developing a content marketing strategy should be a priority.
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