A Beginner’s Guide to content marketing

Whether you’re part of a team or running a small business, utilising content marketing is a non-negotiable if you want to stand out. Here’s your guide on how content can be used to drive conversions, build trust in your brand and hit your business goals.

Content marketing involves creating, curating, and sharing valuable and relevant content with your target audience. It’s about offering real value and benefits to your consumers rather than bombarding them with traditional marketing and advertising messages. The goal is to build relationships and foster loyalty by providing content that connects with your audience, offers them genuine value, and encourages engagement.

Content marketing doesn’t push products onto consumers but instead offers something meaningful and engaging. Your content can be educational, entertaining, inspiring, or a mix of many things, but it must always provide value and resonate with your audience.

Content can take many forms, including blog posts, social media posts, newsletters, podcasts, and more. Effective content marketing attracts and engages consumers by consistently delivering high-quality, relevant, and valuable content. It’s not about promotion; it’s about building lasting relationships with your customers.

Additionally, it’s crucial to share your content on the platforms and channels that your audience uses. Meeting your customers where they are ensures that your content reaches and resonates with them, strengthening your connection and driving engagement.

Creating content is an essential part of content marketing, but it’s equally important to ensure your content drives action and conversions.

Here are some tips to effectively use content marketing to drive action and generate leads:

1) Know your audience

Start by understanding your audience’s specific needs and pain points. Speak their language and create content that resonates with them, engages them, and offers them value. If your audience doesn’t see your content, if they don’t understand your content, if your content isn’t relevant to them, and if your content doesn’t offer them value in some way, they’re very unlikely to convert or take any desired action. In fact, this could have a negative impact; they could unfollow you or stop engaging with your brand altogether.

2) Customer journey alignment and targeted content

In content marketing, it’s helpful to align your content with each stage of the customer journey. Customers at different stages have unique questions, interests, emotions, and motivators, so you should tailor your content to address these varying needs.

As customers move through the different stages, their needs and interests change. You must ensure that your content remains engaging, relevant, and valuable at every stage of the journey.

3) Calls to action (CTAs)

Effective CTAs are crucial. They should be clear, relevant, well-placed, and persuasive. They should also align with where the consumer is in their customer journey. For example, you don’t want to push “sign up” on a consumer who has already signed up. CTAs should guide your customers by showing them the next step to take. They help move customers through the funnel by clearly indicating the desired action, whether it’s signing up, downloading an app, or making a purchase. By making your CTAs clear, relevant, and persuasive, you can enhance engagement and effectively drive conversions.

4) Long-term relationships

Content marketing is a long-term strategy, not a quick fix. It’s a powerful tool for fostering lasting relationships and brand loyalty, but this takes time.

Unlike traditional push advertising that bombards consumers with marketing messages, content marketing prioritises building meaningful connections. You should create content that resonates with your audience and builds trust over time. Loyal customers are more likely to repeatedly convert and become brand advocates.

5) Quality and consistency

Your content must always be high quality, consistent, relevant, and valuable. Poor-quality, irrelevant, or inconsistent content can drive potential leads away and even damage your brand’s reputation.

Your content should be easy to digest, correctly formatted, free of spelling or grammar mistakes, readable, scannable, and logically organised. You must not have blurry images, poor-quality videos, or badly structured text. If your content is hard to read or follow, people are unlikely to engage with it or convert.

6) Engagement, value, and sharing

Your content must be engaging and offer real value to your audience, whether it’s educational, entertaining, or inspiring. You should create content that is not only valuable but also shareable. Encourage your audience to share your content. When consumers share your content, it can help build credibility and extend your reach.

7) Leverage testimonials and user-generated content

Consumers are more likely to trust their peers than a brand. Including testimonials from customers or encouraging users to create and share content related to your brand can enhance engagement and conversions. When consumers share their experiences, it can help build trust and create a sense of community around your brand. Showcasing real customer experiences can make your brand more relatable and trustworthy. It also allows your consumers to be a part of your brand narrative, enhancing brand loyalty and increasing conversions.

8) Track and measure analytics

You should regularly analyse your content’s performance to understand what’s working and what isn’t. You can track conversion rates, engagement rates, likes, follows, shares, traffic sources, drop-off rates, and many more. This data will help you see which content resonates most with your audience and drives the desired actions.

9) Optimise content based on insights

Use the insights from your analytics to optimise your content. If certain types of content are performing well, create more of that. If something isn’t working, tweak or scrap it. Analytics tools like Google Analytics and the built-in analytics on social media platforms provide valuable data that can inform your content strategy.

By focusing on these strategies, you can create content that not only attracts and engages your audience but also drives them to take meaningful actions, leading to increased conversions and stronger customer relationships.

Whether you are a copywriter wanting to learn the ins and outs of digital content, an online community manager, a traditional marketer, or an entrepreneur who wants to make a new product stand out and shine, compelling content is one of the most critical pillars of any marketing strategy.

Red & Yellow’s National Certificate in Advertising, specialising in Digital Content & Copywriting, provides you with the strategies to turn content into conversions. It will teach you how to:

• Apply deep strategic thinking, in-depth research, insight development, and conceptual ideation to communicate with your target audiences
• Create a strategic content plan that reinforces the brand positioning and promise
• Execute targeted content campaigns that delight consumers
• Write compelling, persuasive copy that influences customer behaviour
• Create strong customer relationships to improve customer lifetime value
• Build a brand reputation as a thought leader in its industry