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Content marketing is basically creating material to put online in any format or platform to market your brand, product or service to your target audience. That’s it, blog finished, well not quite.
It’s a marketing methodology focused on creating and distributing appealing, relevant and consistent material to attract and retain a defined audience, with the ultimate goal of converting that audience into customers. This involves producing informative or entertaining content that resonates with your audience. It can take many forms: blog posts, social media updates, videos, podcasts, infographics, webinars, emails and more.
In an era defined by AI, spam protection and international fraud awareness, the cornerstone of effective content marketing is creating content which is both strategic and of good quality. There is often confusion around the concept of content marketing and what exactly it means. This article aims, like our other blogs, to shed light on what this area of digital marketing means.
Table of Content
What is Content Marketing
The Difference Between Content Marketing and Website Content
While both content marketing and website content are crucial, they serve different purposes.
Website content is the core information found on a company's website. It includes product descriptions, about us pages, contact information, company history and other static information that tells visitors what the company does and offers. The information it contains rarely changes over time. It is typically more sales-focused and directed towards overtly promoting the company and its services or products. After all, the visitor has already chosen to navigate there so why hold back or undersell yourself at that point.
Content marketing aims to entertain, educate or inform and thereby create a relationship with potential customers. Content marketing material, like blog posts or videos, have a longer lifespan, usually progressing and developing and so can attract traffic over time. The material often addresses broader topics, pain points or general information related to your industry in order to attract a wide audience.
Both content marketing and website content are integral components of a successful online presence. They serve complementary roles in attracting potential customers to your brand.
A balanced blend of both engaging content marketing to draw in and nurture your audience, with compelling website content to clearly communicate your individual offerings will help convert visitors into customers.
The ABC of Content Marketing:
Audience Relevance: By providing valuable relevant content that resonates with your target audience, you can build a community of loyal followers and customers, fostering long-term relationships that lead to repeat business and best of all, referrals.
Build Trust: Through your sharing of expert advice and useful information, content marketing helps to establish your brand as a trusted authority within your field.
Create Brand Awareness: By consistently producing fresh and unique content, you can boost your visibility on search engines, expanding your reach and creating more awareness about your brand.
Our Comprehensive Guide to Planning and Achieving the ABC in Your Content Strategy
A well-designed content strategy will help your material connect with your target audience, boost online visibility and drive business growth. Here’s our step-by-step strategy guide to help you create quality content. Yes it’s always nice to have 8 or 10 steps, but we’re sticking with these 9 as our best advice to SME’s like us.
1: Project Management
From the outset, you will either be creating content in-house or outsourcing to freelancers or an agency. Who will be responsible for ensuring content is produced on schedule, edited, published and promoted? Assign clear roles and responsibilities.
2: Allocate Resources
Determine the resources required to execute your content marketing campaign. This includes budget, tools (software for content creation, distribution and analytics) and people (content creators, editors, social media managers).
3: Purpose
With the roles assigned, start by determining what you want to accomplish with your marketing material. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, boost sales, increase website traffic, improve search engine rankings or engage with your audience? Having clear goals will guide your content strategy and help you measure its effectiveness.
4: Know Your Audience
Understanding your audience is crucial in developing successful content. You need to know who you're creating the content for. Create buyer personas to represent your ideal customers. This should include demographic details, interests, challenges and how your product or service can meet their need.
5: Review Current Content
Review the content you already have. This includes everything from marketing emails and blog posts to infographics and videos. Analyse the success of that material or more importantly its lack of success. This process will help you identify content gaps and determine what type of content resonates with your audience.
6: Decide on Type of Content
Based on your business aims and your audience's preferences, decide on the types of content you’ll produce. Again this could be blog posts, social media updates, videos, ebooks, podcasts or webinars. If this is your first foray into content marketing, you might need to experiment with different forms of content to see what your audience responds to best.
7: Schedule Your Content
A content calendar is a schedule that details when and where you'll publish upcoming content. It helps organise your content strategy and ensures regular posting. Remember to include key dates or events that are important to your business or industry. Public Holidays, Festivals, Functions etc.
8: Create, Distribute and Promote Your Content
Now comes the fun part, creating your content! Make sure each piece aligns with your identified goals and speaks to your researched audience. Once the content is ready be sure to test it. Ask for external opinion on its impact and brand cohesion, try it out yourself, does it achieve its purpose? Use your pre-determined channels to distribute and promote your content.
9: Measure and Analyse
Use analytics to measure the success of your content against your goals. Look at metrics like page views, social shares, time spent on page, conversion rates, etc. to understand how your content is performing and how you might need to adjust your strategy. Don’t be rigid or unwilling to adapt to what the analytics are telling you, getting it wrong only helps you get it right.
Creating your own marketing content might seem overwhelming, but with careful planning and a clear understanding of your audience and goals, you can create a successful content strategy that directs your efforts. Remember, effective content is created based on the performance of current content and market analysis, so continue to test, analyse, learn and adapt as necessary.
The Complexities and Pitfalls of Content Marketing
A robust content strategy is the backbone of effective digital marketing. Hopefully our guide above will put you on the correct track. A poorly conceived or executed content strategy can lead to a host of challenges. In this next part of our blog we explore the potential pitfalls of content marketing. We've highlighted a more typical number of items for this section, here are 5 issues we see most often. Invariably a result of not following our notorious nine listed earlier.
1. Wasted Resources:
The number one consideration for us SME’s is that without a strategy you risk wasting valuable resources, namely your time, money and effort, on creating and promoting content that doesn’t deliver results.
2. Lack of Clear Goals:
One of the primary reasons for poor marketing content is a lack of clearly defined goals. Without a clear understanding of what you're trying to achieve, you risk producing content that is pointless and fails to engage your audience or drive desired actions. It’s just material for the sake of material. OK you have a presence but who cares? Who is connecting with you?
3. Misunderstanding Your Audience:
Another reason for missing the mark is through content that doesn't centre around your target audience. Failing to understand your audience’s interests, needs and pain points can lead to content that falls flat, failing to resonate or drive engagement. Why would they waste their time browsing your material if it means nothing to the reader. They haven’t time for reading pointless material. This blog is nearly 6 pages long, who is bothering to read all of this if it isn’t of benefit to them?
4. Inconsistent Branding:
A poor content strategy often results in inconsistent branding in your content, leading to mixed messages that can confuse your audience or worse, harm your brand by questioning the trustworthiness of it.
5. Forgetting SEO:
Content created without considering SEO (search engine optimisation) can hinder your visibility on search engines, making it harder for potential customers to find you and in effect making you obsolete in your industry or market. Why create all this content if it’s not organically visible to your potential audience.
Navigating the complexities of content creation and marketing can be challenging, but understanding the pitfalls is the first step in avoiding them. By setting clear goals, understanding your audience, maintaining a consistent brand voice, integrating SEO practices and efficiently using your resources, you can turn your content marketing efforts around for the better. How? With a content strategy of course, the notorious nine!
Now the Biggy, Cost of Content Marketing
Content marketing is basically digital marketing, it is the foundation of it all, but what does it truly cost? We’ll break down the various factors that contribute to the cost of content marketing, but remember these are all influenced by geography, industry, complexity and duration.
Content Strategy
A well-planned strategy is crucial to ensure your content marketing efforts are effective. This can involve market research, buyer persona development, SEO planning and creation of a content calendar. Again, these tasks can be handled in-house or outsourced to a specialist.
An in-house content strategist could command a salary from £25,000 to £50,000 per year.
When outsourcing, the latest .gov.uk information puts content strategy consultancy costs at £850-950 per day.
Content Creation
This is likely to be the most significant cost. Depending on your strategy, this could include on the lower end writing social media posts, to articles, ebooks, videos, infographics or creating podcasts. The cost will depend on whether you hire in-house creators, freelance professionals or work with an agency.
Hiring a freelance writer can cost anywhere from £20 to £100 per hour.
Infographic design could range from £100 to £2000 depending on complexity.
Video production costs can vary greatly, starting from around £300 for a simple video up to £10,000+ for more complex projects.
Podcast production could cost around £35-£100 per hour for recording and editing.
Content Distribution
Whether you push your content through social media, email marketing, paid advertising or other channels, each comes with its own set of costs. For instance, social media posting might not cost anything but paid advertising campaigns will have a budget.
Social media posting can be free, but the cost of your time or an employee's time should be considered.
Email marketing software can range from £10 to £300 per month depending on the platform used.
Complete digital marketing platforms can be anything from £200 to £1500 per month.
Content Promotion
Promotion is key to getting your content in front of your audience. This may involve influencer partnerships, paid social media promotion or sponsored content on other platforms.
Influencer partnerships can vary greatly, from around £50 per post for micro-influencers, up to £1000's for high profile individuals.
Sponsored content can range from around £200 for a sponsored blog post, to several thousand for more prominent placements.
Analytics and Performance Tracking
As mentioned in our notorious nine, it’s essential to monitor the performance of your content over time to assess its effectiveness and adjust your strategy and your content accordingly. This will likely require the use of paid analytics tools or services.
Analytics tools can range from free (like Google Analytics) to up to £1000 per month for more advanced, comprehensive tools.
Hiring a professional to handle reporting and analysis could add to this cost, either as a salary or a consultancy fee.
As mentioned in previous blogs, these are only estimates based on our own research. The cost of content marketing can vary quite significantly based on the specific services you require, the professionals you hire, the scope/complexity of your campaign and geography. It's important to get several quotations and choose the suppliers who offer the best balance of quality and cost to meet your specific needs.
Marketing is not a new notion and never was cheap in the traditional formats, but the return of investment we now get on digital marketing is far above that from traditional methods, that’s not just our opinion, Forbes and The Economic Times from India have made this conclusion repeatedly, both entities having their fingers on the pulse of serious economies.
While content marketing does represent a significant investment, it's important to balance this with the potential benefits - increased brand visibility, audience engagement, lead generation and customer conversions. Remember, content marketing is an investment in your brand's future growth and should be viewed as such, rather than as a drain on your budget.
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