Why Content Marketing Should Be Central to Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Many businesses have earmarked digital marketing as a crucial aspect of their overall marketing strategy, and you probably have too.

The reason for this isn’t farfetched. The internet has become a part of most people’s everyday life. And with digital marketing, your business can feature at the right place and time to attract attention and convert it to revenue in the long run.

However, the high profitability of digital marketing isn’t matched by its simplicity. It’s a complex structure with many components, and content marketing ties these parts together.

You can think of it as the force that drives the success of your online marketing efforts. It performs this role in many ways. Let’s look at some of these functions and why they are crucial to your overall digital marketing strategy.

What is Content Marketing?

Many choose to adopt a content marketing vs. digital marketing approach when trying to explain both concepts. They treat them like two distinct marketing tactics.

But content marketing can be considered as an aspect of digital marketing when the medium of its execution includes online channels. It involves creating and distributing useful and relevant information to attract, engage, convert, and retain a specific audience.

Content refers to the pieces of information content marketing distributes. It could be in the form of text, video, graphics, audio, etc.

Depending on the stage of the buyer’s journey the piece of content is intended for, the information offered to your audience may or may not be to promote a product or service. It may be for teaching, entertaining, or inspiring people. These objectives might appear to be unrelated to common business goals like making sales and generating leads, but that’s just on the surface.

The internet has greatly altered the way consumers relate to brands. Today, people gravitate towards businesses that offer value upfront before pitching their products or services.

It turns out that providing valuable information is one of the best ways for brands to build trust and attract a following. So the objectives of some of these content aren’t as unrelated to broader business goals as you probably thought. The teachings, entertainment, and inspiration are vehicles to achieve goals like:

• Building brand awareness
• Generating leads
• Nurturing leads
• Driving engagement

It’s Central to Your Digital Sales Funnel and Integral to Guiding Prospects through their Buyer’s Journey

A sales funnel details the consistent experiences you provide to get leads and nurture your relationship with them. It’s examines the sales process from the seller’s point of view. Your activities fall into five stages: attract, engage, capture, nurture and eventually convert your prospects into customers.

You can also assess the sales process from the buyer’s perspective. The result of this is what’s called a buyer’s journey.

It refers to the stages that prospects go through right from when they discover they have a problem and to when they identify a way to solve it. The steps you outline at every point in your sales funnel should align with your buyer’s journey. 

Your sales funnel strategy needs to include procedures that will guide prospects to the point where they become customers. No digital marketing tactic can play this role better than content marketing. Let’s take a look at the buyer’s journey stages and how content can be your tool for guiding prospects through each one of them.

Awareness Stage

Your prospects are just identifying their problems at this stage. It would be best to educate them on the nature of their pain and draw their attention to your business.

Promotional messages will be mostly ineffective at this stage since people aren’t interested in making a purchase just yet. They simply want to understand their situations.

In this digital age, people’s instinctive reaction in the awareness stage is to go online to research their problems. With content marketing as the crux of your digital marketing efforts, you can deliver answers to people’s questions through helpful and informative content and attract quality leads. You’ll need content forms like blog articles, infographics, short videos, social media posts, ebooks, and podcasts to do this. 

Assessment Stage

Prospects in the assessment stage now understand their problems. They then move on to researching the available solutions.

The best way to engage leads at this stage is to educate them on how they can solve their issues. This is the stage where your focus is to provide value to build trust and nurture the relationship. At times you may offer relevant details of your product or service that prove its value. 

While trying to prove your product or service’s value, aim to differentiate your solution from the competitor’s. The key to doing this is quality content. You should consider using content types like, FAQs, How-to guides involving your solution, product descriptions, etc. 

Decision Stage

Leads at this stage are ready to make a purchase. They would have whittled down their options to a couple of solution providers, including you.

Your efforts then should be geared at getting these people over the line. This can be through reiterating the value you bring that differentiates you from your competitors or by making them an irresistible offer. You want to show that you can be trusted to deliver on your promises, and your content will come in handy in doing that. 

For dealing with leads at the decision stage, you’ll need content forms like customer reviews and testimonials, case studies, sales emails, webinars, product comparison sheets, demos, “About Us” web pages, etc.

To learn about how to map out your customer’s journey, check out our blog post here. For how to nurture leads in each stage of the buyer’s journey, please click here.

Content Marketing Offers a Cost-effective Way to Reach a Large Audience and Keep Your Pipeline Full

The best marketing and sales strategies aim to keep your sales pipeline full at all times, so you never run out of customers. Many of these strategies require a massive budget to run consistently, but this is not the case with content marketing. It has several unique features that ensure it can keep pulling the right prospects into your sales funnel at very affordable costs. 

For one, it appeals to the needs and pain points of the members of your target audience. As such, you wouldn’t have to spend marketing funds ongoing after prospects. Instead, they will come to you as long as you have valuable content. The interesting thing is such marketing collateral can continue to yield returns long after its creation. 

Also, great content gets shared on a large scale. If your content delights your viewers, they will share it willingly with their network. That’s free publicity for you. This way, you can get in front of more people, drive brand awareness, and generate quality leads consistently. 

Content Marketing Ensures You Can Build Trust and Nurture Relationships

While engaging your audience, all your activities are geared towards doing one of two things: establishing trust and retaining patronage. Achieving the former is pivotal to you getting new customers.

The reason is that people only do business with those they trust to a certain extent. Relevant and well mapped out content ensures you can build trust in many ways. Your options include demonstrating your expertise, establishing yourself as an authority, showcasing your solution’s unique features, and displaying your results through customer stories. 

Apart from getting prospects to trust you enough to do business with you, you also want to retain these people after they become customers. A digital marketing strategy built around content marketing makes this possible.

You can keep customers engaged with regular blog posts and newsletters that offer value. Not to mention the opportunity to drive conversations on social media and stay in touch with your loyal customers.

While you can build your relationship with existing customers through content, you can also leverage that bond for the growth of your business using content too. An example would be to use email newsletters and other content forms to encourage customers to bring in referrals.

Content as the Engine That Drives All Digital Marketing Strategies

Content plays an integral role in the operations of all your digital marketing strategies. Here’s how it facilitates the running of some of them:

Website

Your website is your digital marketing hub, and it runs on content. Prospects head to your website to learn about your solution and your company.

By carefully structuring your website content according to the stage your readers are in their buyer’s journey, you can drive more results. This content could take several forms, including text, graphics, video, and audio files.

To learn about the benefits of blogging and how it helps your business, check out our article here.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While several factors affect your website’s rank on search engine result pages, content is the primary determinant. It’s what includes the keywords for which your site ranks. Depending on the stage of the buyer’s journey the content is targeting, you may aim for various combination of short and long tail keywords.

SEO has evolved over the years because Google has continuously made updates to the search engine’s algorithm. The new updates prioritize relevance of content above many other factors.

Keyword stuffing is also now a thing of the past. Delivering high quality content isn’t only a tool for getting your readers to come back to your website, it’s also the key to a long-lasting SEO strategy.

To read more about the history and the future direction of SEO, check out our blog post here.

To learn about how to set up a SEO content strategy, please read our our blog post here.

Pay-per-click (PPC) 

PPC includes paid ads like social media ads, search engine ads, third-party website banners, and promotional pop-ups. However, these ads do not convert leads on their own. They are driven by landing pages designed with relevant and persuasive content.

Having content designed specifically for your PPC campaign is also crucial for driving conversions. More conversions to you could mean increasing your email subscriptions, creating brand awareness, generating more leads or converting more leads to sales.

For more information about online pay advertising, check out our blog post here.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful tool which drives one of the highest engagements. This is only possible when you can communicate the value of your offer effectively. This can be done through well-crafted content that speaks to your audience’s needs and goals.

When done effectively, email marketing can help you in building your relationship with customers, encouraging referrals from them and also nurturing leads. While attempting to convert leads, it’s advisable to that you create email copies for each stage of the buyer’s journey. This would increase your conversions.

To learn more about getting started on email marketing, please take a look at our blog post here. To learn about the dos and don’ts, please click here.

Social Media

There’s no doubt that you’ll find your target audience on one or more social channels. The question then is, how do you engage these people and cause them to notice and interact with your brand? Simple, you use content. Bits of valuable information tailored to each platform will help you initiate relevant conversations. 

Having well designed content tailored to the specific platform will encourage higher engagement; thereby making your social media efforts more effective. Your social media content can also function as the incentive to draw people to your landing pages and website.

Conclusion 

Digital marketing offers several avenues to achieve your business objectives. All these strategies have the potential to deliver an impressive return on investment. However, their success depends mainly on how well integrated they are with content marketing.

And with content marketing, you can tie all the digital marketing strategies together into a holistic plan. As such, focusing your attention on building a solid content marketing core will help you leverage the strengths of each platform to get more results.

Have you tried content marketing before? What is your experience with it? Comment below and let us know!

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to get similar articles delivered to your inbox and don’t forget to share it with your friends.

Other Related Blog Posts:

• 13 Steps To Creating A Comprehensive Content Marketing Strategy
• Creating Effective Customer Journey Maps: A 4 Step Guide
  
• How to Nurture Leads at Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
  
• Why Blog? 4 Reasons Why Blogging Can Help To Grow Your Business
  
•  The History and Evolution of SEO
  
• 7 Simple Steps to Setting Up a SEO Content Marketing Strategy
• An Introductory Guide to Online Paid Advertising
• Email Marketing Made Simple: Getting Started
  
• 9 Email Marketing Dos and Don’ts