CONTENT MARKETING
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING
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THAT'S WHY CONTENT MARKETING IS IMPORTANT
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HOW DOES CONTENT MARKETING WORK?
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ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF CONTENT MARKETING
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GOALS OF CONTENT MARKETING
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CREATING A CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY
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IMPLEMENTATION OF CONTENT MARKETING
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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INBOUND AND CONTENT MARKETING
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HOW CAN SUCCESS IN CONTENT MARKETING BE MEASURED?
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IMPLEMENTATION OF CONTENT MARKETING
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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INBOUND AND CONTENT MARKETING
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HOW CAN SUCCESS IN CONTENT MARKETING BE MEASURED?
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1. What does content marketing mean?
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?
The focus of content marketing is not the product, but the target group and their concerns. Accordingly, the Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as a strategic marketing approach that focuses on planning, creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content that is intended to attract a clearly defined audience and bind them to the company. This approach ultimately serves to encourage interested parties to purchase a product or service.
This definition includes the following aspects that characterize content marketing:
- Strategic direction: Like any strategy, content marketing requires a concrete plan and actions that help achieve the set goal.
- Planning, creating and distributing content: Content marketing is all about relevant content that offers consumers clear added value. Classic content formats include blog articles, white papers, or videos.
- Attracting a clearly defined audience: In order for content to have its full effect and actually attract potential customers, it must meet the needs of the target group. This means that the content is primarily geared towards the target group and not the product itself.
- Customer loyalty: In addition to attracting potential customers, high-quality content also serves to strengthen customers' trust in the company and thus ensure their continued loyalty to the company.
This definition looks at content marketing from the perspective of corporate communications. The exact definition can vary depending on the area of application. For example, from an SEO perspective, content marketing mainly serves to improve search engine rankings.
2. Why content marketing?
THAT'S WHY CONTENT MARKETING IS IMPORTANT
Anyone who surfs the Internet is bound to come across a variety of advertisements. The word "bound" hits the nail on the head: Internet users are usually looking for very specific information and do not want to be disturbed by flashing advertising banners with irrelevant content. Added to this is the fact that there are numerous advertisements on almost every website, which in turn leads to an oversaturation of information. The result: Internet users are becoming more and more adept at ignoring advertisements or turning them off completely using ad blockers. This makes it increasingly difficult for you to reach potential customers through traditional advertising.
How can you ensure that your message reaches the right people despite banner blindness and ad blockers? Content marketing provides a suitable answer to this. By providing useful content that your prospects are looking for on the Internet, you attract potential customers. Since your content also offers real added value and underlines your expert knowledge, you build a relationship of trust between your company and your potential and existing customers. The content is always based on the stages of the buyer's journey and, above all, answers the question of how your product helps to solve a specific problem. This works best if you not only talk about the product itself, but also provide information about how to use it and present other topics related to the product.
A well-known example of content marketing is provided by the company Dr. Oetker. As early as 1891, the company had recipes printed on the packaging of its baking mixes. This gave consumers helpful tips and inspiration on how to use the product most effectively.
USING CONTENT MARKETING
We support you in introducing content marketing measures in your company.
3. How is content marketing used?
HOW DOES CONTENT MARKETING WORK?
Content marketing follows the so-called pull principle, which means that potential customers approach your company of their own accord. In contrast to push marketing, which includes classic advertisements, content marketing reaches interested parties precisely when they already have a need for what you have to offer. You support this need by providing helpful information, which is ultimately satisfied with a purchase.
The question now is how you can identify and correctly classify the needs of your potential customers, because this is the only way you can provide the right content and achieve the desired effect. The answer is to look at the individual status in the purchasing process. The flywheel helps here, a model that is used in inbound marketing to describe the development of a prospective customer through to becoming a customer. The development is divided into three phases, each of which uses different content:
- Put on: In the first phase, the interested parties do not yet know your company and do not know exactly how to solve their problem. Accordingly, the attraction phase is about making the interested parties aware of your company and providing basic information, for example in the form of blog articles or social media posts. Search engine optimization (SEO) also ensures that your texts are found on the Internet.
- To interact: Now the potential customers have an idea of your company and the solution you offer them. Now it's about building a relationship with them. This happens via contact details that particularly interested visitors to your website have left in exchange for further content. Such further content includes white papers or eBooks, for example. Once a prospective customer has left their contact details, they become a lead. If a lead signals continued interest in your company, for example by opening emails, they will be sent individually tailored information about specific products. This process is known as lead nurturing. If a willingness to buy is evident, the lead is passed on to sales.
- Inspire: The relationship between your company and customers doesn't end with a successful purchase. The delight phase ensures that your customers are satisfied and therefore more likely to consider another purchase. A satisfied customer will also recommend your company and attract more potential customers, closing the loop and keeping the flywheel moving.
To ensure that the content sticks in the memory of your potential customers, the preparation of the content is crucial. The information should be sensibly structured, easy to understand and, above all, presented in an appealing way.
4. What are the pros and cons of content marketing?
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF CONTENT MARKETING
In today's world, where the customer journey takes place largely online, content marketing has proven to be a successful communication strategy. However, alongside numerous advantages, it also has a few disadvantages that you should be aware of before you consider integrating content marketing into your marketing strategy.
ADVANTAGES
- Content marketing provides added value: Content marketing offers potential customers exactly the information they are looking for and therefore real added value. This unobtrusive and useful form of advertising has a positive impact on the image of your company or brand.
- The content is customizable: The content can be individually adapted for each phase of the buyer's journey, allowing potential customers to be reached even more specifically.
- Content marketing focuses on sustainability: While an advertising campaign comes to an end and no longer generates visitors, a blog remains. Even older blog articles continue to attract an interested readership. The prerequisites for this are, of course, that the blog is well maintained and optimized for search engines. If these requirements are met, content marketing is even more cost-effective than traditional advertising.
- Promoting viral effects: If you manage to inspire your target group with good and relevant content, it will most likely be forwarded or shared on social networks. This automatically increases your organic reach.
- Better customer loyalty: Content that offers real added value strengthens trust in your company. Potential customers get to know you as a competent expert who can actually help them with their problems.
DISADVANTAGE:
- The implementation is complex: Successful content marketing is made up of various factors. A sufficiently large team with the appropriate skills is just as important as specialist knowledge. Regularity and consistent quality are also crucial, which means more effort.
- Success is only slowly becoming visible: Content marketing is not the right approach for those who want to achieve results as quickly as possible. First of all, creating quality content takes time. In addition, your expert status, which you use to convince potential customers, does not develop overnight. Once you have built a stable foundation, the effort is reduced and you are rewarded with consistent results.
GOALS OF CONTENT MARKETING
The overall goal of content marketing is to increase lead generation using content. The leads are then ideally converted into customers. The idea behind this is that the better the content, the more customers are attracted. Whether a content marketing strategy delivers the desired results can be determined by looking at the numbers. For example, the number of downloads of a white paper provides information about how well this content is received by the target group. This big goal can be broken down into many smaller goals:- building long-lasting customer relationships
- Establishment as an expert in your own field
- Increase traffic
- More leads and therefore more conversions
- increasing lead quality
- Higher sales
- specific (Sspecific)
- measurable (Measurable)
- reachable (Attainable)
- realistic (Realistic) and
- time-bound (Timebound)
6. How is content marketing applied?
CREATING A CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY
A suitable strategy is essential for successful content marketing. The basis of the strategy is your clearly defined goal. From here, you then determine the steps that are necessary to achieve this goal. A sensible content marketing strategy is always based on the buyer's journey, which leads us directly to the second step: analyzing your target group. In order to create suitable content, you need to get to know your target group and their needs in detail. Creating a buyer persona is a good way to do this, and you can align your content with it. A buyer persona is a fictional person whose characteristics largely correspond to those of your target group. It helps to make the target group more tangible and lively, making it easier for you to create relevant and appealing content.
The buyer persona gives you answers about where to best place your content so that it is read or viewed by as many people as possible. The time of day the content should go online and which format is most popular also come from the analysis of your target group and should be taken into account when creating a strategy.
It is also a good idea to take stock of both internal and external market conditions. Be guided by the following questions:
- What resources are available internally? For example, is there already a broad knowledge base in a particular area?
- In which areas does your company still lack experience? What other weaknesses (e.g. technical equipment) need to be compensated for internally?
- What external opportunities does your industry offer?
- Are there external risks? For example, is the competition particularly strong in your industry?
7. Content Marketing in Practice
IMPLEMENTATION OF CONTENT MARKETING
The concrete implementation of content marketing begins with researching suitable topics. Keyword research is a proven method for finding out which key words, trends and topics are most frequently searched for. This step lays the foundation for successful SEO.
The second step involves the precise elaboration of the topics and the conception of the content. You now know which formats are most suitable and which content belongs to which phase of the buyer's journey. You record all of this in a content plan. This states when and where which content will be published, as well as the respective employee responsible.
The third step involves the actual content production. Whether it is blog articles, white papers or podcasts, the content should always meet certain criteria. These criteria include:
- Added value: Is the content relevant to your target group? Does it provide a concrete benefit?
- Relationship-promoting: Is the content suitable for building trust in your company? Does the content encourage the potential customer to get in touch with you?
- Attractive design: Does the content follow a logical structure? Does it manage to reach consumers on an emotional level?
Once the content is finished, the next step is to publish it. This happens at the time specified in the content plan on the relevant platform. However, publication alone does not guarantee that your content will be found. So-called content seeding, for example via social networks, helps to make your content better known. Search engine optimization should also not be neglected in this context.
The last step is to review the published content. Which content performed particularly well? Where are there still problems? The review is done using defined metrics such as website visits or conversion rates.
8. How do content and inbound marketing differ
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INBOUND AND CONTENT MARKETING
Anyone who is involved in content marketing has certainly come across the term inbound marketing and noticed that there are many similarities between the two concepts. Nevertheless, content and inbound marketing differ from each other:
- The Content Marketing focuses on the planning, creation and distribution of target group-relevant content. It is therefore an important component of inbound marketing.
- Inbound Marketing In addition to content marketing, it also includes other strategic elements such as customer relationship management or lead management. It is not just about the content itself, but about making marketing processes effective (marketing automation).
9. Measure lead generation
HOW CAN SUCCESS IN CONTENT MARKETING BE MEASURED?
Certain key performance indicators (KPIs) provide information about whether your content marketing strategy is achieving the desired success. The KPIs are recorded using tracking tools. Which KPIs are particularly relevant depends entirely on your objectives. In general, the following indicators play an important role:
- Leads: How many leads are generated in a certain period of time and what is the percentage of qualified leads? What is the conversion rate?
- Reach: How much traffic does your website generate? How much time does a visitor spend on your website?
- Engagement: How many visitors subscribe to your newsletter and/or interact with you in other ways? How often are certain content downloaded?
- Sales volume: How many orders did you win through the content?
By continually analyzing your content and checking for potential weaknesses, you can continually improve your content marketing strategy.
CONCLUSION: THIS IS WHY CONTENT MARKETING IS IMPORTANT
Traditional advertising methods such as placing advertisements on the Internet are becoming increasingly less effective. Content marketing counteracts this by taking a different approach: instead of disturbing potential customers with disruptive advertising, it attracts them with high-quality content. As a result, content marketing has proven to be a very good communication strategy that not only benefits the company, but also provides added value for potential customers.
Helpful content that helps prospective customers solve their problems strengthens trust in your company and ensures that customers stay after a successful purchase. The content and its formats can be individually adapted to the respective target group.
The right strategy is crucial for the successful implementation of content marketing. Do you need support with this or would you like to find out more about content marketing? We look forward to your inquiry!