Content marketing involves a focus on high-quality and authoritative web content. It’s part of the overall discipline of inbound marketing, which revolves around generating content that brings customers right to your doorstep—engaging them through their own interest. And, as we’ll see, one of the best practices for managing a content marketing campaign is to be patient. You want to build something with lasting value, which will continuously bring new customers to your website for years.
Benefits of a Good Content Marketing Strategy
Visual content, more creative storytelling, and interactive content contribute to experiences that inform and create an emotional connection with buyers. Brands are still creating more content, but it’s held to a higher standard by customers.
Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Marketing
An effective content marketing strategy will help you to automate some practical solutions to several major marketing goals, producing results that gradually build upon themselves over time.
- Increase brand engagement: Effective content marketing draws interested persons to you through their own organic efforts, which increases the likelihood of converting visitors into customers. People aren’t just window-shopping: they’re looking for someone to provide them with something that they already know they want. All that remains is to prove to them that you are the one to do so—through a series of several brand interactions, not just one or two sales. According to Salesforce, it takes 6-8 touch points before a lead is even ready to buy.
- Boost your organic SEO: You can augment this flow of natural, organic web traffic through the use and distribution of content with relevant keywords and authoritative links. When this is managed effectively, people will link back to your content of their own accord. Strongly planned and written content leads to stronger, more authoritative websites.
- More on-site content: Your online presence will be richer, which creates an excellent impression on first-time visitors, and also helps to retain established customers’ loyalty. Content marketing works through impressing customers with your ability to provide what they want, or with your knowledge and understanding of how it works.If your website features material like instructional blogs, engaging interviews, and upcoming promotions, it will increase the amount of time customers spend on your site—making a purchase exponentially more likely.
How It Works: Advantages of Long-Term Content Marketing Campaigns
Great marketers have immense empathy for their audience. They can put themselves in their shoes, live their lives, feel what they feel, go where they go, and respond how they’d respond. That empathy comes out in content that resonates with your audience.
Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz, Moz
Here are a few of the many advantages which result from the effective implementation and management of a long-term content marketing campaign.
- Increase backlinks: Backlinks, or “inbound links,” are links which point back to your website from elsewhere on the internet, usually as a resource relating to a particular subject matter. If a website which is recognized for its own topical authority links to content you’ve posted, it provides a boost to your SEO. Good content marketing will draw progressively more attention to your online presence, resulting in more backlinks with time.
- Reuse valuable content: There are many occasions throughout the year for which it is common to run dedicated marketing campaigns. Valuable, high-performance content can be reused year after year, with only minor alterations. You don’t have to be confined to a particular medium either- Wordstream listed 11 ways to repurpose content from videos, Quora questions, blog posts, and more. Just because it’s out there doesn’t mean it no longer has value.
- Improve your ROI: With well-written copy and landing pages, you can increase the reach of your paid advertising efforts while simultaneously spending less money. Your potential audience consists of that group of people whose online behavior places them in a position to find their way to you via their own efforts.
More About Content Marketing
There’s a lot to learn about content marketing, and about its parent discipline of inbound marketing—without which, the content marketing mindset is unattainable. Here are a few resources relating to the wisdom of a long-term content marketing strategy.
- What does Inbound Marketing really mean—Arcalea
- 4 Benefits of a Long-Term Content Strategy—Column Five
- Why Content Marketing is a Long Game Strategy—Whitehardt
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