Content Marketing Strategyis considered to be an easy task to accomplish. It is not not just writing random sentences and words. Content marketing involves a number of parameters to be considered before the content is published. There are a few common mistakes that people commit while opting for a content marketing strategy. This article highlights the same.

What is a content strategy?

Content strategy means managing substantial and real content that is being created and owned by you. It may be in various formats – written, visual, or downloadable with your signature or name on it.

The aim of this marketing is to realise who you are, where you stand in the market and the expertise you have in the domain. Normally, digital marketers emphasize on the importance of content for online marketing. Pushing the content in a strategic way in the market has the same priority. It is crucial for the growth of business. A well-planned purpose or scheme is the in-thing. This is what is called developing a content strategy.

What is Content marketing strategy?

Earlier, for marketing purpose, only a few old tactics could be adapted to have a good content marketing. These few options included bandit signs, flyers, magazines, advertisement in newspapers etc,.

Earlier wanted poster image(Source: eBay)

The above advertisement is a kind of advertisements that was used earlier. It contained words, sentences with a picture that overpowered the words. This layout was per the preference of the advertiser. Thus, it can be said that earlier, there were limited content marketing strategies, but the playfield to experiment, was vast.

Content Marketing has increased creating a broader and huge market value, and paved way for newer pastures for aspects related to strategy and marketing.

Present Day Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is a broader way of having an integrated marketing strategy. Content marketing always teams up with a strategy. Both content marketing and content marketing strategy come together because, without a proper guide and a plan, there is no perfect content. Succinctly put, content marketing strategy gives shape to the content marketing.

In simple language, we can say that a strategic approach towards writing a content and marketing the content is what content marketing strategy involves. Content marketing is a huge concept which requires developing of a content marketing strategy to make its presence felt in the marketing arenas. Not only content marketing, but also other marketing fields require strategies and techniques that should be incorporated to have better businesses.

The techniques involve the different ways in which content can be marketed to pull the customer’s attention towards business. Developing a content marketing strategy involves aspects like the journey of the customer, the life cycle of a customer, and the experience of the customer, while they visit the site. All these things grab the customers’ attention and sustain their association in the business for a longer time.

Content marketing strategy focuses on how content marketing can be utilised in a planned and strategic way, for the customer to get attention, increase the market value, and meet the set sales target.

content marketing strategy

The above is a list of Content marketing formats that should be followed these days. There are tons of options in Content creation these days which a writer can follow.

Why is Content marketing strategy important?

The reason as to why content marketing strategy is important, Is because it has become a crucial aspect in the digital marketing for all the companies in this globe.
People have different views regarding content. It is used for reasons that are very real and sustainable, than the Search Engine Marketing. This is the main reason why you should think about content marketing strategy in an organisation. Without a proper strategy, pushing the whole content and its marketing is a risk, and the risk doesn’t stop there. This can meddle with the goals of the company too.This is the biggest mistake that can take place and your company can even face a downfall.

A gross mistake that most of the companies do, is that, Instead of concentrating on this important aspect, they start concentrating on the lesser important ones.

Let’s discuss the reasons as to why content marketing is considered important.

BUILDING THE BRAND NAME

Building a brand name and attracting people through words and phrases is what a content does. If we follow a certain strategy and develop better content marketing strategies, then, as a whole, it helps in increasing the growth of the company. In today’s busy world, the market has turned towards digital platforms. It has become important that businesses establish and maintain a healthy rapport with the users and the leads. Building a trust factor can help in having a positive reputation and this helps build a brand name for the company.

Trust can be maintained with users and leads only with the help of good content. It is the content that when read by the users, creates an opinion about the company and the business in the minds of the users. If the content provided is informative, engaging and relates to the public, people will consider it to be a genuine site and start following it. The more informative and valuable the content is, the more helpful it is to seal the trust with the audience and that too in an easier and simpler way.

content marketing

Posting of effective content on the website at regular intervals, would make the brand appear more authentic and enhance the trust factor of the customers. This will impact the users’ thinking about you as an effective writer and also increase the number of followers to your blog site. Posting your content in the third party user blogs or sharing the content with them helps build trust with the customers.

IMPROVE CONVERSION USING CONTENT

Conversion statistics is an important aspect and a key parameter to be accomplished by a business entity. Content marketing should aim at bringing in effective leads, and, at the same time help in converting these leads to effective customers.

Here are a few points that will help in improving the conversion and tell us why content marketing strategy is important:

  • Compared to other digital marketing methods, content marketing helps in generating conversion 10 times more.
  • 70% of the online consumers buy things only after doing a thorough homework, reading reviews on the blog and analyzing the pros and cons. Mostly, they visit those sites and pages as recommended in the blogs and articles.
  • According to a recent survey, 74% of the company’s marketing leads have increased due to content marketing. Not only leads, but content marketing strategy has also helped in creating long-term relationships with customers.
  • Video content helps in delivering a 72% increase in the ROI and even increases the number of leas conversions.
  • Due to the efforts put by the content marketing, the inbound marketers can easily increase the average site conversion rate from 6% to 12%.

Content marketing strategy helps in improving the knowledge of more number of viewers, you can easily connect to the people. It’s not just about building the relationship and trust. It is also about encouraging the users by providing them with the information they must know before opting for the company and its products.

OPTIMIZATION OF CONTENT IMPROVE SEO WORK

Content plays an important role in improving Search Engine Optimisation which helps in building businesses. The main work of SEO is to increase the visibility of your website on the internet platform. For meeting the purpose of increasing the visibility, it is important to optimize the content.

The top digital marketers even consider content marketing strategy as the most effective SEO technique. Even those business websites which have their own blog and write the content, have an average of 434% more and increase page rankings in Google, than those websites which don’t publish the content. If the word count of the article, in terms of content, is lesser the number of articles present, then Google does not index that in the Search Result.

A number of pages don’t mean you will have a huge traffic, but it increases the chances of getting traffic, the content has many keywords that help increase the rankings in Google. For example, creating blogs that have effective and different topics which are relevant, so that the attention of the audience can be grabbed. Content marketing strategy even gives more chances to rank higher, by using target keywords, which the people keep on searching in the search engine.

This creates a situation in which there is bulk of content on the website, giving the customers a number of reasons to visit the website. More content also increases the on-site time. This positively impacts the Search Engine Optimization of the Website by the user. As Google checks everything, it even checks the time spent by a customer on your site. If the time spent is more, it means you are delivering effective content, and if it is less, it means people are least interested in the content.

CREATING CONTENT IS COST-EFFECTIVE

Generating leads is highly crucial for every company, most importantly the smaller ones, as the smaller companies rely on the traffic, that is generated by continuous boosting and branding of the products and the company. Content marketing is not only crucial for making the company known, it is also cost effective.

On comparing content marketing with traditional marketing, it is found that the content marketing costs cost 62% lesser than the costs incurred in the tactics of traditional marketing, but generate leads 10 times more than the traditional way of marketing. All the small brands should use content marketing strategy to make their mark in the market. In fact, for them, it is an added bonus that the content marketing is cost-effective, and they can invest the rest of the money elsewhere, for more effective results.

However, patience is the key factor here. Content marketing is time-insensitive and it can take a good time to produce the results. It becomes accurate coming to the part of SEO. When a quality content is being prepared, it takes some more time to reach people. In fact, there are many marketers who opine that 81% of the increase in traffic can be viewed by just investing an hour a day, on the social media marketing.

You can see the relevance of the content marketing strategy, once you start getting the results and the returns. Creating the content, in reality, costs lesser and has a higher efficiency rate It helps small businesses, which see a huge Return on Investment on the content marketing. The result that you get by using content marketing, almost would be 4 times more than the amount you spend on it.

TOP COMMON CONTENT MARKETING MISTAKES

NO PROPER RESEARCH ABOUT THE TOPIC

This is one of the biggest mistakes that the content writers do. No proper research about the topic you wish to write. Once the content is written, you need to be curious to measure its impact on the people. Has it attracted the people? Have they liked it or not? Thus, proper post-research about the content also needs be done.

This usually happens if the people are new to the field, i.e freshers, or small companies. To rectify this, instead of choosing a subject that we like, it is always a better idea to choose a topic that the audience might be interested in.

Posting a content which you feel is interesting, doesn’t necessarily draw the customers’ attention. This might drive some traffic, but it will never drive the targeted people Hence, it is always better to go with the tide – with what viewers actually seek.

DOING EVERYTHING ALONE

Do the thing you are best at! If your niche is writing, just stick to blogging and don’t take everything into your hands. If you are a blogger, then do only blogging and writing, the rest of the optimisation would be done by SEO and other people who are best in their own fields.

Trying to take everything into your hands may spoil the things. There are cases where you are working for a small company and you have to handle a lot of things due to less number of employees. In such cases, it is always advisable to first take up whatever is your forte, and later take help for further work. This will improve your knowledge and also your grip on technology.

NOT USING DIFFERENT CONTENT FORMATS

Content writing doesn’t refer to the mere writing of words or content. It involves video content as well as visual content. If your content consists of only words and sentences, it is considered to be passive content.

To make the content attractive and catchy to the eye, it is always recommended to have visual content – at least one per article. This makes the content more attractive and increases the interest of the people, because a content without an image is more like a book on history.

canva infographic image(Source: Canva)

piktochart inforgraphic image(Source: piktochart)

Infographics, images and videos gain audience’s attention and make them stick to the content. There are a lot of tools available in the market, that help in generating free of cost infographics Canva, Piktochart, Venngage.

NOT CHECKING THE STATISTICS

Checking the statistics and analysing sounds very boring and drab. Well! this yet another major mistake people or the writers do.

Being a marketer, it is important to know the statistics like the click-through rate, bounce rate, and average time spent on the site. All these things tell whether the content you are writing is effective or not. If yes, you can see the growth in the number of people. If not, you can figure out the reasons that lead to a decrease in the audience visiting the site.

Checking statistics and acting accordingly, may sound very simple but technically, it is not so. Keeping a tab on on all these little but important parameters, definitely saves time. This is a very important that has to be kept in mind keeping in view the benefit to the company, as this plays an instrumental part in the growth of the company.

Varshita Muddana

Varshita works as Content Writer at Soft Script Solutions Pvt. Ltd. She writes about e-commerce, market trends, social media trends, and SEO. Her interests outside work are Exploring, Travelling, and Reading