Our comprehensive guide is designed to help you find answers to all the burning questions about a successful online marketing strategy. In the coming months, we will be adding a new article every other week, which you should not miss!
This time we will show you how to use content marketing to massively increase the number of hits on your website.
Content marketing is on everyone’s lips. But what exactly does a good content marketing strategy involve? Find out with our blog article!
How to win and retain new customers with content marketing
The importance of comprehensive content marketing has been emphasized again and again by almost every marketer – and rightly so!
Because numerous processes of change over the last decades have made it necessary for you to convince with your professional competence even beyond pure advertising messages. With high-quality content marketing you create the necessary conditions for this. But especially for many small and medium-sized companies, the regular production of high-quality content marketing proves to be a difficult hurdle to overcome, the costs of which are unclear in relation to the actual benefits. So what distinguishes qualitative content marketing that also proves to be promising for SMEs?
Why content marketing has become so important
For a long time, a large part of marketing efforts on the Internet consisted of creating appealing advertising campaigns and messages via ad formats such as Google AdWords, commercials or related methods. However, for obvious reasons, the general, critical and enlightened user does not want to see advertising: It is perceived as intrusive, annoying and devoid of content; it contains false advertising promises and exists in excess thanks to countless competing companies, all of which claim to offer the best deal. But what the customer wants is information. They are looking for solutions to their problems, answers to their questions and ways to fulfil their wishes. This is exactly where content marketing comes in.
What is content marketing and what is not?
With content marketing, you provide informative, instructive, consultative or simply entertaining content that interests your respective target group. By conveying new and valuable knowledge and information, you appear as an expert and opinion leader in your field and ensure that your readers place their trust in you as long-term and valuable leads. In this sense, you do not come to potential customers and solicit their sympathy, but the customer comes to you and gives it to you as a gift, if he could be convinced by the content you provided. Your company and specific offers are not the focus of interest and are only mentioned in passing, if at all. Otherwise, a large part of the readers will legitimately identify your provided content as camouflaged advertising and will react negatively accordingly.
Content marketing therefore does not have the primary function of winning new customers for your offer. Classic advertising methods such as display advertising are still better suited for this purpose. However, what content marketing can do in terms of generating new leads is to draw the attention of new potential customers to your content and thus indirectly promote the sales potential, in so far as the users of your content automatically correspond to your target group and should be well-disposed towards you thanks to the content provided. At the same time, you can steer their behaviour and views in a certain direction that is beneficial to you and ideally increase the overall market. Lastly, content marketing helps to ensure high visibility on search engines like Google. In this way, you fill your web presence with valuable content relevant to Google and at the same time achieve a significantly longer dwell time on your website, which is also positively evaluated by Google.
What do you need to consider for good content marketing?
But not every content is equally suitable as a component of your content marketing. To initiate a promising campaign, you should rather consider the following aspects:
- Work clean: sloppily researched and inferior articles are not conducive to any party’s goals. Therefore, concentrate on well-founded and carefully prepared content that is informative and well written.
- Plan: Again, a carefully planned, comprehensive strategy proves to be a decisive factor for the success of your campaign. Your content should therefore always be created with a specific objective and embedded within the defined strategy.
- Do not work past the reader: The best content is of no use if no one is interested. The times when reader interest acted as a black box that could not be seen through are long gone. What people are interested in where and when is easiest to identify with simple tools like Google Analytics.
- Offer added value: Unique and useful articles are the heart of good content marketing. So offer your users real added value.
- Concentrate on relevant topics: Always concentrate on a topic on which you provide multiple content. Only in this way can you really distinguish yourself as true experts and maintain the interest of your users in the long term.
- Do not underestimate the effort required: In the whirlwind of the importance of content marketing, the misconception has quickly spread that it can be successfully implemented within a small amount of time, personnel and financial resources. In reality, unfortunately, this is not quite so simple. Because the production of good content usually proves to be extremely time-consuming and therefore financially expensive.
- The work does not stop with the publication: Simply publishing new content may prove to be sufficient for established big players. All others, on the other hand, have to make a considerable extra effort to ensure that the content created is noticed by the desired target group. So you should share your produced content on as many relevant social media channels as possible, make classic PR efforts or rely on paid media like content discovery.
- Try to retain your users in the long term: In order not to lose interested parties after using the content they are looking for, it is advisable to use methods such as newsletter subscriptions to draw their attention to the content you have produced in the long term.
- Do not give up: Most efforts are stopped after a short time: The discrepancy between the actual benefit and the necessary costs proves to be too great. But, as they say, no master has fallen from the sky yet. Even if you do everything right, noticeable successes will only be achieved after some time. Until then you will have to be patient, for better or worse. Especially small and medium-sized companies will have a hard time in the beginning to assert themselves against the established competition and the usual channels. In these cases, a competitive measurement proves to be useful. In addition, you should occupy niches if possible and concentrate on specific content that will make you stand out from the crowd.
- Measure your success: In order to be able to find out whether the efforts you have made add real value, you must also check the success you have achieved. Depending on what works and what doesn’t, you can then adjust your strategy based on the visible results.
Exactly which content you should focus on depends on your company and the particular industry in which you are active. The closest thing is certainly to run your own blog. For all companies in the B2B sector, educational marketing, a sub-form of content marketing, is proving to be particularly promising: In the B2B sector, rational arguments and less emotional messages continue to be more important. Content that does not have to hide from recognized professional articles offers the ideal opportunity to distinguish oneself as experienced experts. For rather younger target groups in the B2C sector, on the other hand, such textually demanding and extensive content is rather unsuitable. The groups concerned prefer modern content methods such as entertaining explanatory videos, audio podcasts or infographics.
If the above-mentioned requirements are taken into account, content marketing, as an ideal supplement to classic advertising methods, can optimally complement your marketing strategy: While classical advertising makes your company known and attracts new customers, content marketing binds them to your company in the long term, provides the necessary confidence in your qualities and ideally makes a large number of potential customers aware of your expertise.
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