By: Kan, Chief Wordsmith, Social Wave.
In 2021, if you still think marketing refers to billboards and business cards only, there’s a good chance you might need to revisit your marketing plan to include your online platform and presence.
We all know the catchphrase, “content is king,” and it couldn’t ring more true. Content marketing can increase the volume of quality traffic to your website and generates approximately three times the number of leads that traditional marketing incurs.
Strategised and well-executed content has the power to pull viewers to your website where they can convert into leads and, eventually, sales.
Here’s everything you need to know about content marketing to generate leads for your business.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is significantly different to traditional marketing in its approach.
The major difference is that content marketing focuses on the consumer rather than the brand. Instead of tooting your own horn and providing the consumers’ solution outright, content marketing addresses the problem, while focusing on value, relationship-building and trust.
Traditional marketing focuses on the “in your face” approach of pushing out promotional messages; on the contrary, content marketing enables consumers to find you where you’re at thanks to search engines.
Content marketing focuses solely on the creation and sharing of online material. These don’t explicitly promote a brand but rather hope to stimulate an interest in their products or services.
The variety of platforms sharing content relevant to the company creates brand awareness, giving consumers a sense of familiarity and trust. Leads are more likely to convert into sales if consumers trust your brand.
What Are the Different Types of Content Marketing?
Many different types of content can be created for digital marketing purposes, and some may be more relevant to your business than others.
For example, creating TikTok videos could be appropriate if you have a make-up brand aimed at young adolescent women but might not be apt if you’re targeting property investors.
We’ll discuss a few types of content marketing techniques relevant to businesses across the park that can be beneficial no matter what genre you fall under.
SEO
Search engine optimisation is the difference between regular content on a webpage – and a webpage that’s marketing content.
But, marketing content doesn’t refer to the traditional sense of the concept. A webpage marketing content for a personal trainer’s fitness guide doesn’t mean ad banners and pricing guides. It means blog posts discussing fundamental exercise movements, the best gym equipment for home workouts, and how many steps we should be taking each day and why.
SEO focuses on answering consumers’ questions, so the better your blog can do that, the more hits it will get. The more hits your blog gets, the higher search engines will rank your blog because they’ll notice that your content is appealing.
Hits turn into leads if you have a good call to action at the end of your blog post, and leads turn into sales. SEO is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to boost your business.
Videos
Videos are becoming increasingly popular, from lengthy and in-depth tutorials on YouTube to aesthetically curated bites of information on TikTok and Instagram.
They can be utilised to personalise your brand and show “the face behind the name.” Videos give today’s consumers the ability to connect with and gain insight from people in the company, such as the CEO, who would otherwise never be communicating with consumers.
Videos should have a catchy title and a caption for SEO purposes, and these can be embedded in blogs and emailers and posted on social media platforms.
Podcasts
Because podcasts are available on platforms different to search engines, they give you visibility in a whole other world – primarily iTunes and Spotify.
Many people say they had never heard of a particular brand until they stumbled upon them on iTunes, thanks to the massive reach they provide.
While podcasts are free for consumers to listen to, subtle calls to action can result in direct sales of books, signups for courses or subscribing to an emailer.
Podcasts can be transcribed to create written SEO content, and they can even be filmed and posted as video content too. This way, all three streams of audiences are reached.
Case Study: Pay Cat
Pay Cat is one of Social Wave’s clients, a leading cloud payroll consulting firm specialising in taking business payroll processes and transforming them from manual to automated.
Many Australian businesses find it challenging to ensure their business is 100% payroll compliant due to the complexity of payroll lows. So, Social Wave curated a comprehensive inbound content marketing campaign focusing on SEO to drive lead traffic and awareness to their brand and services.
Social Wave got straight to business and worked on positioning Pay Cat as the Wikipedia of Australian payroll. Guides, articles and ebooks were developed for payroll managers and business owners in colloquial language without the jargon.
With the comprehensive strategy, Pay Cat experienced:
- a 15x increase in specialised organic search traffic,
- a 48% opt-in rate for lead magnets,
- over 300 leads generated in a single month, and
- rankings on Google’s first page for over 600 keywords.
Key Takeaways
Content marketing is a more subtle, soft-sell approach to marketing. It’s about the value that a brand can offer a consumer, leading to trust and ultimately sales.
Any type of business can benefit from content marketing if it’s done appropriately to their brand. Three types of content marketing include:
- SEO,
- videos, and
- podcasts.
Employing an effective content marketing strategy can increase search traffic which results in more leads being generated, amongst others, as demonstrated by Pay Cat.
Author:
Kan is the chief wordsmith of Social Wave who helps businesses refine and articulate their branding and messaging. He believes that a holistic approach to a business’ digital marketing strategy is integral to creating an ecosystem of content to drive brand awareness and sales.
After travelling the world for a year while freelancing, he set about establishing Social Wave as the pre-eminent content marketing agency offering affordable services for small businesses.
