Content marketing is one of the best ways to promote your brand online.
A good content marketing strategy boosts engagement rate, converts leads to customers, and retains your customers.
If you are looking to grow a content marketing strategy that produces the above results, this article is for you.
Right now, a huge number of business-to-business marketers use content marketing to grow their business, while almost two third of business to customers marketers use content marketing to reach their customers.
However, it’s not enough to build a content marketing strategy; what’s more important is expanding your content marketing strategy to bring the results you need.
This article will reveal the top five actionable ways to expand your content marketing strategy to grow your business exponentially.
Why expanding your content marketing strategy is important to scaling your business
Investing in growing your content marketing is essential to make more sales and grow your business. Check out the three major ways expanding your content marketing strategy can help you attain your marketing goals below:
- You can promote your business without being salesy
The best form of marketing seeks to bring value first.
Although your customers follow you across several social media platforms, subscribe to your emails, and read your blogs because they want to hear from you, they don’t want your products in their faces all the time.
Rather than run several promotional posts and offers, your customers prefer to know about your services through an informative blog post.
- It give your business a wider reach
High-quality content increases your business’s reach. By providing valuable content to your audience across several platforms, your posts will get more engagements and saves, thereby placing your business in front of many people.
Professional-looking content, well-thought-out storylines, and high-quality videos not only positively affect potential buyers’ decisions but can also become shareable content and raise your brand reach and awareness. This is one of the reasons why some businesses and even startups invest in video marketing and work with experts from the right animated explainer video company that has previously worked on products within the same industry as their business.
- It helps you build trust
Content marketing helps you build credibility online.
When you provide solutions to your customers’ needs through helpful content, you position yourself as an expert in your field.
This builds trust and converts your prospective customers to full-fledged customers in the long run.
Providing valuable content also makes your business a go-to resource for anything relating to your field, which projects you as an authority and gives you an edge over your competitors.
Effective content marketing strategies to hop on
A key factor to expanding your content marketing strategy is introducing new content types to your content marketing strategy.
If you’ve been restricting yourself to a specific content type, you should explore new content marketing types for better results.
Below are the most effective content marketing types you can create for your audience to reach your marketing goals.
- Blog posts
Based on a research, 70% of customers prefer to read a blog post to a promotional post.
Just like you are reading a blog post now, thousands of other people are fixated on a blog trying to learn something new, know more about something, or find solutions to a problem they have.
Investing in creating valuable blog posts for your audience will go a long way in building trust and getting your content across to a wider audience.
- E-books
Though deeply underrated, e-books are a great lead generator tool.
Creating E-books as a lead magnet is an effective marketing strategy digital marketers use to get more subscribers on their email list.
More so, you can use e-books for a wide range of purposes. This could range from creating awareness to educating your audience concerning a particular topic in your industry and much more.
- Templates
Templates are layouts or guidelines created to make things easier for your audience.
They are a highly effective content marketing type because they save your audience the time and stress of getting a specific task done.
Producing this type of content will prove that you put your customers’ needs in mind and put a lot of thought into making your audience’s life easier.
Top 5 ways to boost your content marketing strategy
Expanding your content marketing strategy involves adopting the use of effective content marketing strategies that work. Below is a list of content marketing strategies you can adopt to reach your content marketing goals.
1. Analyze your competitors
If you didn’t analyze your competitors to create your existing content marketing strategy, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Competitor analysis is fundamental to creating an effective content marketing strategy.
You need to handpick the top brands in your industry and know what they are doing to outsmart them effectively. One effective way to find out who your competitors are is to search for your keyword on Google.
For example, let’s assume you want to write a blog post about “customer retention strategies” on your blog. To know who your competitors are, search for your main keyword on Google.
When you do this, Google will bring out the number of blogs competing with that specific keyword, and you can check for the backlinks and other keywords your competitors used to generate traffic.
Another way to do this is to input your main keyword on Semrush. Typing your keyword on the search box will reveal a list of other blogs and web pages competing with you. There are a lot of other similar digital marketing tools which would be of great use.
Then, you can analyze their keywords and backlinks.
The knowledge you’ve garnered from analyzing your strongest competitors will give you a clearer understanding of how content marketing works in your industry and how to strategize effectively to beat your competitors at their own game.
2. Supercharge your SEO
Optimizing your SEO is how your content marketing yields results. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If you keep creating valuable content for your audience and they don’t get to see it, then, your content marketing effort is in vain.
Your audience needs to see the value you bring to the table, they need to know you are constantly creating content to meet their needs, and the only way to ensure this happens is by optimizing your page on Google search results.
Optimizing your SEO increases your website rankings so that when your audience searches for topics revolving around your product or service, you are among the top five results.
The good news about this is that you don’t have to be an SEO ninja to make this happen.
All you need to do is to ensure that you consistently create content around the keywords your audience is looking for and ensure you incorporate these keywords in your blog posts.
By doing this strategically, your website will easily top Google search results when your customers search for keywords relating to your niche.
3. Repurpose content like a pro
Repurposing your content is an effective way to get your content to reach more people.
By repurposing your content, your social media content won’t have to remain just social media content forever, and your podcasts won’t have to be just podcasts.
For instance, you can convert your audio content to blog posts, e-books, and social media posts using the right audio-to-text transcription tools.
You can also turn your videos into audio content and audio content into visual content with the right tools at your disposal.
The point of repurposing your content is to expand your content reach, to get your posts across several platforms so that anyone who doesn’t see your social media post can see it on your blog or read it on your website when you repurpose it.
4. Segment your audience
Many digital marketers and business owners make the common mistake of producing the same content for all their readers.
The truth is: your content can’t suit all your audiences’ needs because they are all at different stages of the buying cycle. While some of your audience are at the awareness stage, some are at the conversion stage, while some are already your customers.
They have different needs and wants, and channeling specific content to all of them won’t meet their specific needs.
This is why segmenting your audience is very important.
Segment your audience based on the different stages they are in the sales funnel and create different content to meet your audience at the specific stage they are in the sales funnel.
That’s how you get the most of your content marketing efforts.
5. Create a content marketing calendar
Consistency helps you reach your content marketing goals. No matter how great your content marketing strategy is, if you don’t implement these strategies consistently, you won’t get the results you need.
Effective content marketing strategy involves consistently dishing out valuable content to your readers, and to do this; you need the help of a content calendar. A content calendar is what you use to plan all your content marketing activities.
You can create a content calendar with tools like Trello for a month or a year to suit your content marketing goals.
A content calendar helps you produce a consistent flow of content by ensuring you always have your content ready in time to publish, which helps you reach your content marketing goals online.
Conclusion
Expanding your content marketing strategy is essential to reaching your sales goals online, but to do this, you must be strategic. This is why we compiled the five clever strategies discussed in this article to help you build your brand’s credibility and convert your readers to customers.
