The Power of Content Marketing: Focus on Content to Grow Your Business
Content marketing is no longer the trendy buzzword it was in the 2000s and 2010s. This marketing tactic isn’t going anywhere and it’s time to learn what it is, and how you can use it to grow your business.
What is content?
The word content is overused, and often incorrectly, which makes it a little confusing to folks outside of marketing. It’s a generic word that can mean a lot of things depending on context. It can be everything and nothing. But our official Pastimes Marketing definition is this: Content is any creative work intended to inform, educate, and provide a benefit to a particular audience. This can be written, visual, or audio formats.
You want something even simpler than that? Content is the message, a thoughtful, customer-centric one. That message can come in many forms, and it can be shared in many places. But that leads us to the next point.
What is content marketing?
In a way, content marketing is an approach. Instead of thinking about what products and services you have to sell and what channels you might use to market them, content marketing flips that and thinks about your customer first. What keeps them up at night, where do they hang out, how can your products and services solve a problem for them? This selfless thinking can help you build long-term relationships with your customers and turn them into loyal advocates.
All content marketing must start with strategy. Content strategy is understanding who your targets are, what challenges they face, what language they use, and where they consume information, then building a plan to connect with them using educational, entertaining, or inspiring content, and using metrics to optimize.
How is content marketing different from social media and other marketing?
As with most things in marketing and advertising and public relations and communications and social media, it’s all related. We view content as the base that everything else stems from. You have nothing to post on Instagram if you haven’t yet figured out what message you need to share, or even if Instagram is the right channel for that message. You won’t get much media coverage without an interesting hook to pitch to the reporter.
We view content as the idea bank, the connector for all of your marketing efforts. Your marketing folks should be BFFs with whoever is talking to customers and managing inventory. Understanding what your customers are thinking and talking about and what they are or aren’t purchasing helps you decide what to talk about publicly. For example, if you have a new product release and you’ve sold out of all the initial inventory, your content marketing folks should tweak their messaging from “buy this cool, new thing” to “get on the waitlist for this hot, sold out thing!” Simple tweaks like that can foster a much better customer experience and make them want to purchase from you over and over again.
While good ideas can come from anywhere, let your customer service and operations teams focus on their work, and your marketing team can develop an editorial calendar with a parking lot of ideas or ways to connect with your customers in each of the channels you use, be that social, ads, email, or something else.
Why should my business focus on content marketing?
There’s only so much you can say in an ad, or on Yelp, or in your meta description on Google search engine results pages. So much of your brand is told about you, not necessarily by you. The content you share on your own platforms be them your website, blog, email, social profiles, or other owned media, can help your customers get to know the real you. Through content marketing, you have an opportunity to share your company’s history, your goals, your values, and so much more. This authenticity helps foster stronger relationships and will convert a one-time customer into a forever customer, and forever customers into raving fans who tell everyone they know about you.
Your content can support customers as they discover your business, decide what to purchase, and even as they use what they bought and decide to buy it again.
By sharing your expertise and demonstrating how you are different from your competitors, you can also dramatically increase your SEO, and in turn drive more traffic to your site, and become more findable for new customers. It all works together!
What companies do content marketing well?
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- Nike’s blog is incredible. It shows the heart and soul of the organization and builds brand equity through each story shared, be they professional female athletes, Muslim fashion influencers, or children on the playground.
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- GoPro has focused less on selling, and more on outcomes. They share some of the coolest videos ever captured by regular people on their Instagram. Those videos make following them so much fun, and encourage users to share more videos and tag them, increasing visibility for the brand.
- Airlines like JetBlue have tapped into the data they have on current customers to use that to send more personalized emails. Their analytics team worked with their content marketing team to develop custom content like destination recommendations, flight reminders, and deals related to each individual’s preferences, all with unique imagery and language.
How much will content marketing cost?
Content marketing can be free if you’ve got lots of time on your hands. You’ll need to do some planning and research to get started, then production (actually writing and designing the content), activation (publishing it on each channel), and measurement.
Much of this can be done with simple tools you already have. But there are thousands of really cool tools that you can buy to help with efficiency, scalability, analytics, project management, and more.
You could also spend money boosting your content on a few channels too. Think social media ads.
So the short answer is anywhere between free and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most experts say you should be spending between 5 and 10 percent of your annual revenue on marketing, and even more if you’re in your first few years in business. So if your business is earning a million dollars a year, you should be spending $100,000 to keep growing.
Additionally, according to Statista, 37 percent of organizations spent at least $10,000 on content marketing specifically.
That $100k could be spent in a variety of different ways. You could pay a full-time employee to do some of this work for you, or you could pay a super cool agency like Pastimes! *wink wink*
How much time will content marketing take?
If you have sticker shock from that 10 percent number, you may want to tackle this on your own. While more is almost always better, you could think about that 10 percent number as a portion of your time instead. Can you spare 4 hours a week to focus on content marketing efforts?
Your progress may be slow as you get started, but once you get some initial infrastructure like keyword research, email automation, and other efficiencies built in, you should be able to scale your efforts quickly.
What results can I expect from content marketing?
Content is a long play. You may not see new folks come into your store tomorrow, or sell out of a product line this month. Which is why it’s important to measure every tactic and assign appropriate attributions for how content might have aided in that purchase.
Eighty-two percent of marketers said that in 2022, their content marketing efforts have been successful and they plan to continue or expand their efforts.
Just like customer retention marketing, content marketing isn’t just something that you think about once a month; it should be at the core of all of your marketing and business growth efforts.
And few things get us more hyped than content. Maybe cheese, but still. That may sound super dorky to some of you, but we love this stuff. And we’d love to develop a content marketing strategy for your business. You know where to find us if you’d like to chat.