Content Marketing Statistics That Show ROI

Why are content writers always on the go, continuously working and trying to enhance and lay out a very well executed, infrared and effective content marketing strategy? What is it all for?

Well, to begin with, in 2019, approximately 25.8% of internet users use ad blockers on their devices so as to not be exposed to them. This is going to continue to increase, making ad targeting more complex with the initiation of new privacy regulations and the use of Apple and Firefox led cookie-blocking technology. This will not only make it more complicated but also more costly. Furthermore, consumers favor content rather than advertising.

Did you know that 70% of people prefer to obtain any information regarding a brand or a company or learn something from an article or blog post rather than from a traditional advertisement?

All across the industry, good and quality content are becoming more and more vital. It doesn't matter if it's self-created content, aggregating ones from experts or using UGC, content can add a lot of exponential value to your marketing efforts.

Here are 15 content marketing statistics that will remind you why content is so essential in today's day and age.

  1. Knowing and understanding your target audience and their preferences are exceptionally crucial for content marketing. For example, just a mere 22% of millennials would like to open and look at an email from a brand that they like, while, on the other hand, 57% of people between 45 and 54 years of age do. (HubSpot)
  2. At the same time, 52% of millennials would prefer to watch a video from the brands that they support and just 25% of those between the ages 45-54 do. (HubSpot)
  3. 71% of a B2B respondent pool expressed that they evaluated a blog while they were deciding what to buy. (Demand Gen Report)
  4. It has been found that 32% of consumers going online and look over a brand's social media presence before going on their website. (Animoto)
  5. 64% of B2B respondents praised podcasts claiming they're an effective content format that would work in the early stage of the buying journey. All that it would lack would be infographics (76%). (Demand Gen Report)
  6. Today, people interact twice as much with brands on their mobile phones than on any other platform. (Think with Google)
  7. Cisco has declared that by 2021, over 80% of all its digital traffic will be video. This calls for the need of a video content strategy for brands. (Cisco)
  8. Research shows that 87% of users actually want more videos from the brands they support. (Hubspot)
  9. The platform that is exponentially increasing today in both popularity and content marketing schemes for the purpose of enhancing purchases through videos is Instagram. (Animoto)
  10. Upon being questioned about which way one would like to know the most about a new product in the market, 68% (more than two-thirds) of consumers chose short videos, with text-based articles trailing behind (15%), infographics, and presentations and pitches at 4% and finally, 3% said e-books and manuals. (Wyzowl)
  11. 65% of B2B content consumers genuinely believe that they prefer reliable content from industry influencers. (Demand Gen Report)
  12. 73% of users have let a brand or company's presence on social media affect their decision when making a purchase. (Animoto)
  13. For every dollar, content marketing generates 3x more leads. (Kapost/Oracle Eloqua)
  14. Content marketing generates more than thrice the amount of leads as compared to outbound marketing. It also costs 62% less. (Demand Metric)
  15. Calculated on an average, content marketing is 41% cheaper in relation to a paid search.

If you still feel overwhelmed about content marketing and aren't sure what you want to create or where would be the best place to distribute, you are not the only one. In fact, according to CMI/Marketingprofs 2019 B2C Research Study, only one-third of the total B2C marketers surveyed had a well laid out content strategy.

53 Blog Post Ideas So You Never Fall Short

With this ultimate list of blog post ideas, say goodbye to spending hours thinking about what you should write next. You can also try creating a list of some linkable assets that can be used as creative backlinks.

Fit relevant topics into any of the ideas listed below for your business or blog, and you’re good to go for a long time. Ready to deep dive? Let’s get started!

Valuable Blog Posts

These blog posts are useful and are aimed to improve your audience’s life. These posts are usually informative and help your audience build a trustworthy relationship with you or your brand. So be careful with your tone and the information when you put it together.

1. Listicles

Like this article that you’re reading! Listicles are probably the most common type as they’re useful, and people love to read them. Their concise nature and added pictures and gifs with each item keeps the blog post interactive and fun to read.

Create a list of whatever you think your audience would like to read and know about. For example, in my niche, I could create a list of top 10 or 20 best content writing blogs.

2. “How To” Blog Post

A how-to post is a sort of step-by-step guide that typically intends to help people to complete a task or use a tool to do it. It’s like a manual. You can use images, videos, or audio to make it more understandable. Example: How to boil an egg.

3. Series Post

For topics that can’t fit into one post, you can divide it into a series of posts, linking them as you go forward.

4. FAQ Post

When you search for a query on Google, have you ever noticed that small ‘People Also Ask For’ snippet that shows questions with unfoldable answers? When you create a FAQ post, you also get a heightened opportunity to feature your post indirectly on Google.

Also, you can backlink to other blog posts that have more detailed answers respective to the questions.

5. Problem/Solution Post

You can find a problem (or create one), put that into the post’s title, describe it in the opening paragraph, and write the solution in the rest of your post. This post can also be framed as a how-to or ultimate guide format.

6. Ultimate Guide Post

Ultimate guide posts are comprehensive posts on a topic that covers it entirely. It can also be a tutorial that explains the topic clearly. For example, a beauty blogger can write an ultimate guide post to explain the use of different shades on a makeup palette.

7. Case Study Post

A case study is a detailed review or study of a project or process and results in a story-driven format. You can use this to highlight the success of your product or service. Example: How a baby started drinking milk again with XYZ feeding bottles.

8. YouTube Video Cut-Up Post

You can either do this for your own video or a popular video that got a lot of traction. People love to read these kinds of posts. All you have to do is turn the video into a blog post with text and images with probably a little more information than the video itself to make it informative.

You can also embed the video (if it’s yours, it’s a bonus because it will also gain more views) take screenshots from the video.

9. Questions to Ask Post

Similar to an FAQ post, this post recommends the questions that your audience should ask but generally don’t.

10. Definition Post

Definition posts don’t have to be very long; you can provide a post answering a ‘what is...’ question for them.

11. Research Post

You can publish a study you’ve conducted that can be useful to your audience. These posts can get you a lot of referral traffic through social shares and backlinks.

12. Statistical Post

The statistical post is also like a research post, only that you use relevant numbers and figures around your blog’s topic to explain it more clearly and comprehensively.

If you can’t come up with internal statistics for one topic, you can combine different statistics from different posts to make one. Just be sure to give due credits.

13. Checklist Post

This is also like a how-to post. You can create this kind of a post by giving your audience a list of actionable steps to take. The only difference is that your audience will be able to cross items off the list, which is interactive and engaging.

Fun Blog Posts

Fun blog posts have to be creative. This is an open window to be as creative as you can be with your ideas and share them with your readers or viewers.

14. Narrative Post

You can narrate your own story, which is a great way to keep your readers entertained.

15. Illustrated Post

Blog posts often require illustrations such as images, videos, gifs, and comics that can get your audience giggling and thinking at the same time. These kinds of posts can sometimes prove to be more valuable than the ones without such illustrations.

16. Meme Post

You can use memes for your post, and make a post out of them. These kinds of posts have the potential to get a lot of shares or saves, especially from millennials, who we know just love them memes!

17. Satirical Post

If you got that humor and satire, you could make people laugh and get your post shared by all of them. Anything that incites an emotion is shareable, and you get to enjoy the traction.

18. Parody Post

Parody post is also similar to a satirical post, but it is different in the sense that you get to imitate a well-known brand or person in your niche. You can turn them into a funny character and narrate their story.

Personal Blog Post

Personal blog posts can show your audience that there’s a real human behind all the content they have enjoyed so far.

These blog posts can add to your lineup and produce a different kind of variety to your content.

19. Personal Experience Post

This is like a narrative post, but one where you describe a personal experience that your audience might have experienced, too, and end up hitting the relatable factor with them. Whether you succeeded in the told experience or failed, this post will still humanize you as a publisher.

20. Off The Public View Post

It’s interesting to read about a topic that presents a different thought process than ours, because this gives us a chance to look at things that we might have missed while being biased to a certain flow of thoughts.

21. Rant Post

You can rant about a topic that your audience is currently thinking about, and discussing it can be quite engaging, especially if you make a coherent argument. However, it depends on your brand voice, and won’t always work for everyone.

22. Inspirational Post

Inspiring content is often considered engaging because we all look for inspiration from numerous sources. Inspirational posts can be presented as a profile post, a story post, a quote post, a narrative post, or anything that you find inspirational - chances are others might as well.

Lifestyle Blog Posts

Similar to personal blog posts, lifestyle posts can also humanize you or your brand. You can use these types of posts to get people more engaged with your blogs and build a trustworthy relationship with you.

23. Holiday Post

How was your holiday? You can describe your holiday, give your audience tips and tricks, and make them feel like they were a part of your holiday too. This can also influence them to pack their bags and take a break from their hectic life.

24. Behind The Scenes Post

A 'behind the scenes' post can be incredibly engaging for the most loyal of your audience. People love to see what things look like from the other side of the spectrum.

Show them how you finalized writing about a certain topic, give them an office tour, or describe a recent experience at an event - this is all good behind the scenes content for you to create.

25. Fashion Post

You can create content around current fashion trends that you love or hate or you can introduce your audience to your fashion sense by getting them to wear your brand’s logo T-shirt. This works as free promotion for your brand, along with increased sales for your brand merch!

Timely Blog Posts

People read the news to be aware, which is exactly what the purpose of timely posts is. This is essentially a source of trending information that goes live regularly.

26. News Update Post

You can choose to make a new post every time a major current event happens. It can be relevant to your audience or be a general blog. Remember that you don’t have to be the first one to write about it, but make sure that you present it in a way that people find it valuable.

27. Review Post

You can write a review post on a weekly or monthly basis, reviewing services, products, events, or anything else released in that period. Don’t just highlight the positives; the safest you can play is by giving honest reviews.

28. Trendspotting Post

You can flaunt your trendspotting ability by making a blog post of trends that you predict could soon be popular and piggyback off their increasing appeal and interest.

29. Survey Post

You can survey your audience about a trending topic through email, social media, online survey tools, or in-person and present the results in a blog post and comment on them to make an engaging, informative blog.

30. Concerns Post

If you can think of the current challenges that your audience might be facing, address them, and recommend a solution. This can be very valuable to them.

Authoritative Blog Posts

Someone else’s authority can be leveraged by promoting them on your blog, and can help you to be promoted in a similar way later on. It’s a great way to build relationships and backlinks in the future. When you do this, make sure to do some blogger outreach and let them know they appeared in your blog post.

31. Crowdsourced Post

You reach out to influencers and get a unique quote from each of them to make a blog post. You can email them and ask them to answer a question in, say, 100 words or less.

32. Blog Link Roundup

This is a great idea if you love to read others’ blogs. You can curate a list of blogs that you love and create a topic around them, explaining each with links and a brief description.

33. The Best “_” Post

For example “The Best Video Calling Apps!” or whatever you think your audience would be interested in. It’s similar to roundup but has more of a reviewer’s tone to it.

34. The Best “_” to Follow Post

The best podcasts, the best influencers, the best Youtube channels, or anything that is relevant for your audience to follow.

35. Profile Post

Have you seen those mini-profiles of influencers and celebrities in magazines? You can do a similar post for someone relevant to your audience, just make sure whoever you profile knows that you’ve profiled them. They’re highly likely to share it with their network and in turn help grow yours.

36. Interview Post

Interviewing someone and creating a blog post out of it is a great idea to get your audience to familiarize themselves with someone they might love in or out of your niche. You don’t necessarily have to call them to your office or meet them at a cafe; you can simply call them over Skype, Zoom or a similar app. And if you record a video of the interview, transcribe it and publish the video with the transcription.

37. Quote Post

You can take a topic and frame it as a question, and answer it by aggregating a list of quotes from related influencers.

38. Viral Content Aggregator Post

You can aggregate viral content around a topic and make one post out of it. You can do this on a weekly or monthly basis, and chances are that you too will get as many shares as the viral content is getting.

39. Weekly Pick Post

You can make a short blog post detailing a piece of content, tool, or a resource that might be valuable to your audience. It can be something from your site or some other site - what matters is what your audience would like to see.

Controversial Blog Post

Write a controversial blog post to pique your audience’s interest in the topic you write about.

40. Critical Post

Critical posts can get very controversial, and consequently, you have to be very careful while writing such a post. Just make sure that you’re justified and confident in your criticism of the event, company, or influencer so that you don’t end up being the loser. Keep in mind that given that this kind of post can turn out to have a polarizing topic, it can get people on your side, or completely against you.

41. Reaction Post

Have you seen those reaction videos on Youtube that gain a lot of traction? The basic element in that type of content is a personal opinion. Perhaps people enjoy seeing things from a different point of view and therefore find reaction posts engaging. You can react to a blog post, a video, a course, an event, or whatever attracts you. Embed videos or social media posts and react to it as a way of doing this.

42. What if Post

What if posts can be written by revolving around a topic stating the things that could’ve happened. Such posts can also generate debate because people think differently. You can do this by stating your own opinions and mentioning that those are just assumptions, or by providing apt facts to support your statements.

43. Persuasive Post

You can present your side of the argument to persuade your audience to think like you. If you have an argument against yours too, present that side in the same post, and people will go with what they relate more to.

44. Prediction Post

Just like trendspotting posts, prediction posts are all about predicting the future. While you discuss what you think might happen in the future, people will both agree and disagree, and your post can turn into a debated one because of being controversial in its approach.

Promotional Blog Post Ideas

You can use your blog to promote your brand. The only thing that you should keep in mind is not to annoy or frustrate your loyal readers with poorly written copies. Keep producing valuable content even in your promotional blog posts.

45. Product Tips Post

This is a great idea if you sell products or services. You can create content around tips and hacks for your products or services to make sure that your audience gets the most out of them. Writing such a blog post won’t only get you more engagement, but also give your customers a better experience of using your product or service.

46. Project Log Post

If your company is working on a huge project, keep your readers updated and excited about it by timely updating them on its progress. It will keep them aware of your new product or service without letting them forget it and also create a hype of sorts.

47. Best Of “...” Post

Make a list of the best products, services, or whatever your brand is about in your blog and introduce your readers with what you sell and why you sell.

48. Company News or Product Update Post

You can release a newsletter that shares company news for your loyal customers and give the details about product updates that have recently been scheduled.

49. Comparison Post

Comparing your product or service with other available solutions can help your potential customers with a clearer view of why they should prefer your product or services over others’.

50. Income Breakdown Post

Your income breakdown report could be an intriguing blog post. Your customers or audience could actually be interested in knowing the business model of your company, what your sources of income are, and how much you’re making. However, if you’re not interested in income breakdown, you can simply share your traffic and traffic sources with your audience.

Audience Engagement Blog Post Ideas

You can engage your audience with the following blog post ideas:

52. Challenge Post

Have your readers participate in a challenge. You can do this by participating in it yourself and sharing your experience that can get your audience interested in it even more.

55. Question Post

Ask your audience a question in a blog and get answers from them.

54. Answer Post

By promoting discussion on your own blog, you can have other people make interesting content for you. Post a question to the audience and ask them to answer it in the comments section, which you can use as raw material for your new blog.

53. Giveaway Post

You can give away something that your audience would love for free. Describe what you’re giving away and what they need to do to get it.

Conclusion

Getting ideas for your blog should not be a random process. Doing a little research can help you to validate blog topics that are already popular in your niche. You can even make a list of the ideas that you would like to write about in the future, depending on the seasons, events, and festivities.

Just make sure that your content is high in quality and not just randomly written to fit into the SEO. In fact, the best SEO practices don’t focus on exact keyword matches, but rather on semantic searches that can only be written thoughtfully, keeping relevance in mind. Don’t create posts just for the sake of it - plan, create, organize, and post. Don’t forget to interact with your audience through emails, comments, messages, and more tools.

How to Generate Leads with Content Marketing

Are you struggling to generate leads for your business? If you’re looking for one of the best and most effective ways to generate leads for your organization, then content marketing is the right choice. Demand Metric revealed that content marketing alone could generate three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.

However, executing content marketing the wrong way can lead to poor results and frustration. In a recent study by CMI, only 30% of B2B marketers said organizations achieved successful results after implementing content marketing.

In terms of SEO, there is a massive demand from users/customers for high-value content for lead generation. If you meet that need and answer their questions, your users will trust you with whatever social media marketing you throw their way.

Aside from traditional advertising, blogging is the primary avenue through which both B2C and B2B marketers today generate leads in different social media marketing channels like blogs, videos, podcasts and social media sites.

Here are six practical ways you can start implementing to generate leads with content marketing.

Step 1: Create a buyer persona

Capturing the wrong leads is equivalent to capturing no leads. In fact, it’s worse because you’ll end up wasting your resources on a lead that’s unlikely to be your customer. When it comes to lead generation, it typically means generating the right leads. And to do this, you need to specify the type of people or audience you want as your leads.

A buyer persona is a fictional document that contains the details of your ideal customer or end-user. Some of these details are their: name, age, income group, gender, location, ambition and solutions they’re looking for. Your buyer personas should be as detailed as possible. You can have a few buyer personas depending on the product or services you provide. Your buyer persona can help attract the right type of people. You can preferably use the Facebook Audience Insights tool available through the Facebook Ads Manager to find more details about your ideal buyer persona or audience.

Step 2: Leverage content syndication

Having valuable and relevant content on your company blog or website can automatically bring in many leads for your business. But what if you have an obscure blog that nobody reads? The content you’ve invested a lot in would underperform and all your efforts would be wasted. A way out of this challenge is content syndication or content re-publishing.

What is content syndication?

Content syndication is the process of re-publishing your content on third-party websites that are more popular or have a higher domain authority than yours, in an effort to reach a much bigger audience. Syndication in the social media industry is nothing new. Before the internet, newspapers and magazines with large circulation and readership often published syndicated content provided by freelance writers and smaller publication house. Both benefited in the process. The smaller player gets a greater audience and exposure, whereas the large publication house gets good content, they can use to satisfy their audience, without having to invest resources in creating it.

In the age of the internet, it’s the same story. You can ‘recycle’ or ‘reuse your online content by syndicating it. And if it performs well, syndication can go a long way to promoting your content online, reaching a wider audience, driving traffic to your website and hopefully turning some of them into conversions. When you syndicate your content with the sole purpose of capturing leads to a website with your ideal audience - it’s a massive opportunity to capture many more leads. Companies like Netline offer such content syndication services. They syndicate your content in their B2B lead generation networks, helping to improve your lead acquisition efforts.

What about the big issue of duplicate content or plagiarism though? Syndicated content, as we know is duplicated content, and it can wreak havoc with your SEO. When ranking for SEO, Google is smart enough and will not rank multiple versions of the same content. According to Google's algorithm, it will only index one, and it is more likely to choose the version that appears on a high-traffic website. But most syndication companies use canonical tags to tell the search engines that your website content is the preferred version. This automatically eliminates the possibility of attracting a penalty.

Step 3: Provide lead magnets and content upgrades

Every business needs a lead magnet. Nowadays, you might have noticed people being too reluctant to share their contact information because their mailboxes are already full of junk. In order to capture that lead, you have to first provide value and lead magnets that can achieve that.

In simple terms, a lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their mobile number, email address or other contacts. Lead magnets help to solve a problem for your buyers and serve as a reason for visitors to release their personal details. Lead magnets usually offer a small piece of digital, downloadable content, such as a free PDF checklist, ebook, report, whitepaper, video, course, quiz, webinars etc.

What makes a good lead magnet?

Content Upgrades

Another similar concept in content marketing is the content upgrade. Content upgrades are pieces of content offered to a page visitor that are relevant to the page content. Or a bonus content matched with the topic of a particular article on the blog the visitor is reading. Technically, they’re a type of lead magnet, but they have proved to generate higher conversions because they’re closely related to what the visitor is currently reading.

In some cases, this could just be a PDF copy of the present page the visitor is reading or another format of the page content that readers may need for future reference.

What type of results can you expect from content upgrades? Blogger Brian Dean implemented a content upgrade and achieved a remarkable 785.01% increase in conversions just within a month. Yes, the figures are true; you get more subscribers by using the content upgrade technique.

 

Step 4: Creating high-converting landing pages

Most landing pages on the internet do not perform well and they may only occasionally get a few opt-ins. There are a lot of underperforming landing pages that aren’t maximizing leads and converting them into customers, which is essentially just a waste of resources.

The first thing that you need to understand is the anatomy of a perfect landing page. The page should begin with a compelling headline, have a captivating opening and then build interest as readers scrolls down through the copy. This format will help you create more compelling content for any social media channel you choose to release on. What you need to take note of is that the focus should be on the usability, not the aesthetics. When people click from social media channels, such as Intagam or Facebook, you want them to have a pleasant user experience. The landing page should therefore be designed to ensure the page is strong, persuasive and professional for all visitors opening the website page.

Moreover, your landing page also has to be super fast. In fact, recent statistics provided by KISSmetrics show that a one second delay in landing page load time will most likely reduce conversion rate by 7%. So, ensure that your landing page is super fast.

Here are some of the best practices when designing a landing page.

Remove the navigation bar

One of the major mistakes marketers make is that they distract their landing page visitors from converting. The visitors should not be provided any opportunity to click away from the landing page. In fact they should only have the option to click away from the landing page without converting.

A landing page visitor should only have two options: either to close the page or convert.

The navigation bar from the landing page should be removed. By adding this feature, Yuppiechef increased signups by 100%.

Make the CTA button visible.

The color and position of your CTA button needs to stand out on the landing page. You want your visitors to click it, and so it should grab their attention in order for them to do so.

Run A/B tests

Landing pages are never perfect. Therefore, you need to keep testing to improve your conversions constantly. Using the A/B test, you can test different elements on your web page and track their effects on conversions. Some page elements you can test are page copy, call to action, images and number of form fields. Here, it’s important to note that while testing, you should only test one element at a time. This will help you to track the changes, actually affecting your conversions.

Step 5: Use guest blogging to capture leads

Guest blogging is a valuable activity to improve brand awareness and gain good quality backlinks. Guest blogging is a great way to reach out to other blogs and steal some of their loyal members to your blog, so leverage it. However, one advantage that most marketers fail to make use of is capturing leads through guest posts. How can that be done?

Most websites allow you to leave a link in the author bio section after a guest post. Taking advantage of this option, you can leave a link to the landing page by providing a lead magnet to your guest post readers rather than a normal link to your home page. The key here is to make your lead magnet relevant to your guest post. You can also share the link in the body of your post where it is relevant.

Step 6: Target long-tail keywords with the right intent

If you run a mid-size business, then targeting long-tail keywords is the way to go. Firstly, it’s easy to detect these long-tail keywords. Secondly, there’s low competition for these keywords. To win the SEO game, targeting long-tail keywords is a good option as they tend to rank higher in Google’s search results. It’s all about targeting keywords that your competitors have either neglected or don’t know how to discover and use themselves. Tools like SEMrush can be used to carry out keyword research, and can effectively help you find the long-tail keywords a potential lead might use in search engines.

Once you have shortlisted long-tail keywords, you should create your content to target these keywords. Furthermore, you should also try to optimize your website page for these keywords. This includes adding the keyword to the headlines, url, first few paras, subheadings, image alt text, and image name.

How Content Marketing Can Help You

Do you ever hear your colleagues or friends or someone in your family talking about content marketing and try to understand what all the hype is about? If so, you’ve landed on the right page.
Content marketing is now both at the top of priorities of marketing and experts, and virtually everyone in the business world.

There were times when marketing was all about direct sales, telemarketing, email marketing, and so forth. But we’ve evolved, and so has marketing. Sure, we receive marketing emails, and we aren’t ashamed of calling them spam, because that’s how many view it.

But why spam? They are trying to sell their goods and services, which could be helpful for us. They could be selling us the one vacuum cleaner we’d always wanted. They could be about giving us a credit card that fulfills all our needs. But it is the very nature of these telecalls and marketing emails that makes us wanna ignore them.

Just when presumably these marketing strategies were about to collapse, and experts could think of nothing else, they remembered how video-based advertisements helped in marketing and sales.
What do some advertisements make us not want to skip them? We have post-five-second-skipper ads running before most Youtube videos, and we skip all but a few. Those advertisements have some ‘value’ to offer. In the world of content and content marketing, this ‘value’ word is of utmost importance.

The value we are discussing - whether emotional, sentimental, informational or, for that matter, whatever else - gives us, the viewers, an incentive to watch the full advertisement. The whole video-advertising scenario opened the door to content marketing.

Defining Content Marketing

You know that if you want to market something, you need to generate leads. So, when you want to sell your goods and services by creating or producing content that holds some value, congratulations: you have landed in the world of content marketing.

You can develop all kinds of content - video, audio, written, infographic, webpages, and even books - you just have to strategize and plan how you’re going to do it.

Content strategy plays a significant role here. Strategists plan the content, the content type, and the goals of the content.

This content is consumed by prospects and creates awareness, after which, if they find your product or service useful enough, you can make them convert. When your firm’s goals are met by your content campaigns, your content is said to be performing well.

Content Marketing In-Depth

Assume that I am a producer of high-quality, ultra-smooth fountain pens that are liked by one and all. Imagine that you are a writer, and you have your personal collection of the best pens in the world. I live in the East, and you in the West. How on earth are you ever going to find the world-class pens that I’m producing?

Now, imagine that I start calling as well as sending you multiple emails to spread awareness about my pens. Is this going to entice you to buy? Or you’ll instead recommend to others not buy anything from me at all. Not good.

Now, suppose that I didn’t do what I wrote in the last paragraph, but I start blogging or vlogging or podcasting about pens, generate an audience at the same time. You start looking up good quality pens on Google and come across my content. You will be more inclined to learn more about pens, and more likely to visit the page where I sell my pens too. I think you’ll probably end up buying a pen.
This is the ‘it’ about content marketing.

Content marketers may or may not produce content around the products and services they’re selling. It all depends on who they are selling to, and why they’re campaigning or producing content.

Types Of Content

Like I’ve already told you, content can be of any type. Let’s discuss some types with examples:

Blogs/Webpages

Not all blogs and webpages are built to sell products or services. People blog and create websites for their own interests and passions. For example, The Beginner’s Guide To SEO by Moz is a blog that’s written to generate awareness about their SEO tools and services. Anybody looking up SEO-related stuff can land on this page to learn about SEO. This will in turn lead them to learn about their service, which they may or may not be interested in. But, in case the blog didn’t exist, finding their services on the ocean that is the internet would be close to impossible.

Simply Stacie is a lifestyle blogger who writes about everything that she wants to, like books she reads, household stuff, family & personal life, and recipes. Her motivation may or may not be to sell things, but her website is just a blog that people visit to read. And you won’t find a page where she asks you to buy her products or services.

Videos/Vlogs

Do you have access to YouTube? Do you like to check out what’s trending and randomly watch a video that’s recommended to you?

Now, take for example The Best Ever Food Review Show, they have close to 3M subscribers and get millions of views every day. The man created the channel because of his passion for traveling and eating foods from multiple cultures and cuisines. They aren’t promoting anything. Though they are making money, the channel isn’t producing content to sell.

On the other hand, Gary Vaynerchuk started his YouTube channel to promote his family’s wine shop. Through his videos and other online marketing tactics, he grew a $45M empire.

Videos and podcasts are historically a less preferred form of content marketing because they are thought to be hard and expensive to produce. Now that the cost of professional-grade equipment is falling, creating high-quality video/audio content isn’t as difficult anymore.

Simple video content marketing has been used in launching new dental products, blenders, and marketing Hong Kong visa consulting services.

You can create video content to sell your products in a similar manner too. You don’t have to worry about spending thousands of dollars on online and offline promotions either.

Infographics

Typically long, vertical graphics that have statistics, charts and/or other information are a great source of content marketing. If you want to go through some infographics on content marketing, you can click here. These 197 infographics have been curated by Michael Schmitz, the head of Content Lab at Publicis in Munich.

Infographics are effective, mostly attractive, and are small files that can be shared on social media and posted on websites for long periods.

You can also get professionally designed infographic by firms like Visua.ly. A decent infographic usually costs at least $1,000 for designing, but if you hire a contractor or agency to strategize and plan, the cost may increase by thousands.

The other thing is that you’ll also have to promote the infographic to bloggers and the media. You can also set up a board on Pinterest and curate infographics related to your business. That is also a sort of content marketing that costs nothing but time - and it worked for Michael.

Podcasts

Videos and blogs are still considered doable by most of the people, but the concept of podcasts is relatively new.

Michael Hyatt, author of the best-seller Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, can be a good example for you. His podcast This is Your Life is downloaded around 250,000 times every month. He gives valuable information and advice in his podcast for absolutely no cost, but his podcast’s popularity leads to increased sales of his books, invites for him as a speaker and signups for his multiple courses.

Books

This could be considered an expensive affair. But savvy marketers sell books as marketing tools.
Michael Port wrote the sales manual Book Yourself Solid for entrepreneurs, marketers and salespeople, but his book is actually a marketing tool for leading readers to his speaking and coaching services.

You can self-publish your marketing-book, and if you don’t find customers, you will still be called the author of your book!

Other examples of content marketing may include ebooks, white papers, presentations, newsletters, and public speaking too. You can find entire books written on each of these to get deep into the world of content marketing.

The Entire Purpose of Content Marketing

When you want to sell your products or services, what do you need to generate first?

The first thing is need. A customer has to have a need that a marketer can cater to. Once they need something, they require a solution to fulfill that need.

The second requirement is awareness. The customer needs to be aware that there is a solution to fulfill their needs.

The next thing is research. The customer will research where they can find the solution. Your content plays the main part here. If they land upon your content and learn that you have the solution too, they’ll compare you with other sellers.

The customer will finally buy the product or service from either you or someone they find better according to your content because the content is what pulled or drove them.

Build awareness: through content, you can raise awareness of the solutions that exist in the market. Consumers usually get to know different products by interesting, engaging content, rather than learning about them from friends or on social media.

The main thing to focus on is the ‘value,’ whether your content is giving the consumer or audience the value that they are looking for or not. Someone who’s looking to buy lipstick could be looking for a smooth matte, but if your content doesn’t seem to mention matte even if you’re selling it, the consumer may move on. Your content may also add other value points like how that lipstick would help someone with low self-esteem. Such ‘value’ has a positive influence on consumers, which can directly generate sales.

Traditional sales tactics are often highly pressurized and ineffective. Through content, you’ve already built up the trust that you would build when you tell the customer voluntarily. Your well-performing content has already raised awareness and most probably converted regular visitors into your customers.
It is important to strategize and plan carefully and tactically to have exponential returns on investment (ROI).

Content marketing provides additional benefits as it supports other digital marketing platforms. Content marketing is directly related to better social media marketing and contributes to search engine optimization (SEO) by giving natural inbound links and buildup of quality content on your website that can get phenomenal search ranks.

It is also true that many companies put most of their SEO efforts on their content.

Getting Started

The easiest way to get started in the world of content marketing is blogging. What could be easier or simpler?

To know how to start and get tips for writing your blogs, you can go to Copyblogger.

But your content marketing journey doesn’t end there. When you want to actually get to the point of marketing your product, you have to be extremely good at the content you produce.

Quality Content

Recall every time you couldn’t watch a video or read a piece of content any further because it was just terrible? That is what most would call lousy marketing.

When you’re producing content that your company’s income depends on, you have to be extra good at it. So much so, that people should be willing to pay to read or watch your superb content on its own merits. It is a double bounty as you’ll also be generating leads through your content apart from earning traffic from your content.

Consider The Lego Movie. You may not have noticed, but it is one of the best and greatest examples of content marketing ever! Should I tell you now that the 100-minute movie was just an extended toy commercial? It couldn’t be a mere coincidence that Lego overtook Mattel to become the largest toy-selling company in the whole world!

You don’t need to have such a big budget to get through your content marketing strategy, but you can come with amazing ideas to sell your products by giving your prospects valuable, and in many cases, fun information.

The Recipe to Success

The only recipe to success in this vast content marketing world, as I’ve already said repeatedly, is value. Add value to your content. Nothing else will make up for it if your content lacks in value.
The attractive graphics and videos add nothing to your content if there’s just no value for the consumer.

Also, remember that this ‘value’ is highly subjective and relative. You can find value in content pieces that I may call garbage, because our interests are different.

I might like to read or watch about fashion or why the earth is round, whereas you may be interested in only cars. A video that talks about various car-parts may be valuable to you, a blog that tells me where I can buy the most trending clothes is valuable to me.

Whether your content generates sales or it under-performs depends largely on the strategy. You need to exactly understand who your customers are, what they are interested in, and how varied their interests can be. Someone searching for bags may be interested in traveling, so you can create content around travelling too. Someone looking up for frying pan could be interested in cooking, and you can sell your frying pans by posting recipes.

Content Strategy

Finally, your strategy has to be based on your goals.

What are your goals? Why are you creating content? What are the mission and vision of your company?
Are you generating content just to raise awareness about risks associated with pollution, or do you have a solution for it too? Do you want to know what your consumers' needs are, do you want them to land on your landing page and give you the information you need, or do you want them to buy your products and services?

There are designated content strategists for this purpose who strategize all the content that has to go online. If everything is confusing to you, you can rely on them for help.

But remember that your performance will depend on your content, and your content ultimately depends on your goals.