You're missing out if content marketing doesn't already have a place within your marketing strategy.

Content marketing is a powerful tool with one of the best returns on investment (ROI) today.

Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing—like paid ads, for example—and costs over 60% less.

👀 Let's take a look at the numbers:

• Around 82% of marketers are currently investing in content marketing.

• Over 70% of marketers report that content marketing generates more demand and leads than any other type of marketing.

• Consumers engage with at least three to five pieces of content before purchasing.

• Over 45% of consumers take recommendations from blog content while shopping for products or services.

• Companies that blog for marketing purposes see 13 times more ROI than businesses that don't blog.

As you can see, content marketing is effective and trusted by marketers and businesses worldwide to generate leads, drive traffic, and boost sales, among other things.

What Is Content Marketing?

Simply put, Content marketing uses written or visual content to sell a product or service.

The idea is to provide consumers with valuable information and insights through high-quality content that will ultimately convince them to purchase.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, strategic content marketing is all about creating and distributing content that is:

• Valuable and relevant.

• For a clearly defined audience.

• Aimed at achieving profitable customer action.

It’s worth noting there is a big difference between the low-quality, dense information that brands often push out to try to sell stuff—versus content marketing that is high-quality, relevant, informative, and valuable.

Consumers are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages each day, which is why it’s so crucial that your content marketing follows the steps outlined in this guide so that your brand truly stands out from the rest.

The Benefits of Content Marketing

The benefits of this type of marketing are vast. High-quality, well-executed content marketing can help you:

• Create engaged audiences that are loyal and keep coming back for more.
• Develop groups of brand advocates.
• Achieve greater brand awareness and online visibility.
• Gain better traction on social media.
• Generate trust among your customers.
• Generate better quality leads.
• Improve website traffic and online conversions.
• Drive more sales.
• Establish yourself as an authority in your industry.
• Improve your customer journey.
• Build brand identity.

How to get started with content marketing

Typically, you have three options when effectively pulling off content marketing. You can decide to:

• Build an in-house team of content writers, strategists, and managers.
• Outsource your online content marketing to an agency.
• Hire freelancers to execute your content marketing strategy.

You can learn more about these options in our guide to content marketing costs.

The first step to getting your content marketing efforts right is to start with a content strategy.

What is a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy is your action plan for executing your content marketing activities.

This strategy acts as a roadmap, outlining the exact steps you will take to execute your content marketing and identify the target audience you are attempting to reach.

Your strategy should also include the following:

• Your goals and desired outcomes—such as lead generation—and how these goals will be measured.
• Specific personas and a target audience, along with the channels through which you will reach these target audiences. You should also know who you don’t want to target.
• Your brand story and how this story will be presented to your target audience. This can include your unique value proposition.
• The marketing hook that you will use to entice your target audience once they have consumed your content.
• A detailed content plan that helps you keep track of your content operations to ensure you create and distribute content consistently and effectively.

Without a content marketing strategy at the start of your efforts, you won’t have any clear direction for your goal.

You won’t know who you want to speak to and what your content needs to look like.

Instead, you’ll be publishing haphazard content that wastes your resources.

Lastly, it would be best if you documented your content marketing strategies. Drawing a mind map on a whiteboard in a meeting room isn’t enough to get content marketing right.

78% of marketers who felt their content marketing was successfully ensured they documented their strategy from the start.

The Elements of Successful Content Marketing

Other than implementing a strategy, there are several additional aspects you will need to consider if you want this marketing approach to be successful within your business.

Quality over everything

Quickly whipping together a rambling blog post on a general topic without any target keywords isn’t cut.

To get content marketing right, prioritize quality over everything else. Quality is more important than:

• Quantity: How often you publish content.

• Cost: Of course, the price will be a consideration for your company. But remember that quality content is worth the investment, considering its ROI.

• Consistency: While publishing content regularly is essential to some extent, it’s better to get a few good-quality pieces out there than loads of low-quality content.

• Speed: You may be tempted to jump on industry trends as soon as they emerge. However, to compete with those already discussing the topic, you must ensure your content is better quality than the rest.

• Selling: Yes, the ultimate purpose of your content marketing is to increase sales. But this won’t be successful if your output isn’t superior. You also want to offer value before you sell.

Find out what your target audience wants and give it to them

Effective content marketing is about putting your ideal target audience front and center.

You need to conduct in-depth research into what your audience wants to see and consider how you can cater to this.

Your content needs to speak directly to your target audience and should aim to solve their specific challenges.

So, one of the first steps in the content creation process is to identify your target audience and their pain points and determine how to position your brand as the best solution.

You can use content marketing tools like Google Trends to find out what your target audience is searching for online. This will help your content to remain relevant.

You can then identify how to provide more value in your content than your competitors publish.

Position your brand in your content marketing

Before you sit down to create content, you must determine how to position and present your brand within your content.

To get this right, you must plot a brand story, a positioning statement, and a unique value proposition.

Much like you need a mission and vision statement to run a business, you also need your brand story and positioning statement before creating content.

Your brand positioning should include your company’s tone of voice, personality, and how you will communicate your product or service's unique selling points (USPs).

Everyone who creates content for your brand must know how to tell your brand story.

Choose the right content marketing tools

To get content marketing right, you need the right tools to carry out your activities.

You will need content marketing tools that help you:

• Generate rich and relevant topics and ideas.
• Research industry trends.
• Analyze your competitors.
• Determine your target keywords.
• Manage your content calendar.
• Create your content.
• Optimize your content.
• Manage your content.
• Publish your content.
• Measure and analyze your results.

For example, if most of your content marketing revolves around social media, you need a post-scheduling and management tool like Spout Social or Hootsuite.

If you publish content like blog posts and articles, you need to set up Google Analytics to measure your results.

You may even want a tool like Ahrefs to analyze your traffic and competitors.

Lastly, use on-page SEO writing tools like Surfer SEO or PageOptimizer Pro to ensure your content is search engine friendly.

1) Blogging

Starting a blog is an effective way to drive traffic to your website and reach your content marketing objectives.

Blogging in 2023

To give you a better idea of why you should include blogging in your content marketing strategy, let’s look at some results of recent studies on blogging:

• Websites that include a blog have 434% more indexed pages than those that do not.
• Blogs have been rated as the fifth most trustworthy source of gathering information online.
• 77% of Internet users read blogs.
• Businesses that blog experience twice as much email traffic as businesses that don’t.
• Content marketers prioritizing blogging are 13 times more likely to receive a positive ROI on their content marketing efforts.

Pros and cons of blogging

As you can see, we’re all for blogging as a content marketing activity in 2023.

However, it would be best to consider the positives and negatives before embarking on this content creation.

👍 Pros:

1. Blogging is relatively inexpensive - Other than paying someone to write your blog posts—such as an in-house copywriter or a content agency—setting up a blog on your website is mostly free.
2. It's easy - Blogging involves writing content—that ideally includes some images or video content—and then publishing it to your blog page.
3. Improves your SEO results - Having a quality blog post written according to search engine optimization (SEO) best practices, as discussed above, can significantly improve your search rankings.
4. Showcases expertise - Having a blog establishes your brand as an authority on a particular subject or niche.

👎 Cons:

1. Blogging is time-consuming - Although straightforward, crafting quality blog content takes time.
2. You need a steady stream of ideas and topics - Consistently generate fresh ideas that help you stay ahead of your competitors.
3. Results aren’t instant - Although your search-engine-optimized high-quality blog post may be perfect, it can take time to rank well on Google.
4. You need to market your blog - Simply publishing blog posts on your website isn’t enough to get the best possible online visibility. You’ll also need to use various marketing tactics to promote your blog.

2) Social media

With over 4.8 billion social media users worldwide in 2023, there’s a high chance that your ideal customer—or target audience—can be found on social media platforms.

Suppose you’re not using social media as a content marketing strategy. In that case, you’re missing out on an opportunity to reach your audience where they typically already are—glued to their smartphones and scrolling through thousands of social media posts.

The trick is to ensure your content marketing stands out enough to beat your competitors, who leverage social media to their advantage.

Social media in 2023

To give you an indication of how impactful using content marketing on social media can be, we’ve gathered statistics from some of the latest studies:

• Almost 40% of American Internet users between 18 and 34 have bought a product or service from social media.
• Users spend 19.6 hours a month on Facebook alone. Typically, adults consume at least 95 minutes per day on social media.
• Consumers are six times more likely to purchase from a product page with social media images.
• Over 90% of brands have earned new customers by publishing video content on social media.
• Customers who have had positive experiences with brands on social media recommend the company to others at a rate of 71%.

Pros and cons of social media marketing

As always, this online content marketing channel has both upsides and downsides.

👍 Pros:

1. Affordability - Content marketing on social media is relatively affordable for companies. You would need to pay to develop the content, but setting up an account and publishing posts costs nothing.
2. A large audience - As mentioned above, content marketing on social media gives you a massive audience to tap into.
3. Speed - If you want to get your content out there quickly, social media is one of the fastest distribution methods.
4. Engagement and feedback - Posting your content to social media allows users to interact and engage with your content.
   Analyze these engagements, and you’ll have a treasure trove of insight and feedback on your content marketing efforts.

👎 Cons:

1. It takes time - Social media marketing is time-consuming and will require at least one dedicated person within your organization to manage this function.
2. ROI is slow - Much like blogging, seeing the full results of your content marketing efforts on social media can take time.
3. Reputational risks - Publish the wrong thing at the wrong time or accidentally post to the wrong account, and you could have a publicity nightmare.
4. A saturated channel - As a result of so many brands on social media, you have a lot of voices to compete with.

3) Influencer marketing

If you’ve developed an effective content marketing strategy but can’t seem to get the results you’re after—despite your quality and relevant content—it might be time to call in the big guns.

Influencer marketing is a marketing tactic that involves working with well-known personalities with online visibility to further your content marketing efforts.

Influencer marketing in 2023

We’ve analyzed one of the latest studies on influencer marketing as a content marketing activity to show you just how successful this tool can be:

• Over 90% of marketing teams use influencer marketing as a content strategy.
• More than 60% of consumers trust influencer recommendations on products and services. Get an influencer to recommend your brand in their content, and you’ve hit marketing gold.
• On average, brands return $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.
• Over 50% of marketers say influencer marketing has helped them generate better leads.

While getting a big name behind your content marketing can give you a big boost, there are also negative aspects you need to consider before entering into a relationship with an influencer.

Pros and cons of influencer marketing

👍 Pros:

• Reaching the right target audience - Working with an influencer relevant to your niche can help you get customers who match your target audience.
• Trust and credibility - Consumers tend to trust brands more when they are associated with an influencer they already trust.
• Increased reach - Your high-quality and valuable social media content reaches a far wider audience when you throw an influencer into the mix.

👎 Cons:

• The wrong influencers can harm your brand - Working with the wrong influencers can cause reputational damage to your brand. Most marketers say that finding the right influencer is their biggest challenge regarding content marketing.
• Mistakes are costly - Good influencer marketing can do wonders for your brand. Getting it wrong can lose your following and undo all the hard work you’ve put into your content marketing.
• Results are difficult to measure - It’s hard to track and manage the performance of an influencer campaign as the person you are working with often has such a vast reach.

4) Email newsletters

Email marketing is an effective and lucrative form of content marketing that you can integrate into your content strategy.

With over four billion email users worldwide, you have a massive opportunity to communicate with current and potential customers and win them over through well-developed content.

Email marketing in 2023

• Let’s take a look at why email is such a powerful type of marketing content:
• Over 80% of marketers say email newsletters are the most used form of content marketing.
• Around 69% of marketing teams prioritize email newsletters in their content strategy.
• Brands that send more than five newsletters a week get higher open and click rates than those that don’t.
• Email content marketing delivers an ROI of $40 for every $1 you spend.
• Adding video content to your email newsletter can increase click rates by 300%.

Pros and cons of email newsletters

Now that we’ve told you just how great email is as a channel for content marketing let’s look at the pros and cons of this tactic.

👍 Pros:

• Cost-effective - Other than paying someone to create content for your email newsletters, email marketing is low-cost—especially if you only pay for a small email marketing plan on platforms like Mailchimp or Sendinblue.
• Content Diversity - Email marketing tools allow you to include various types of content in your newsletters, such as plain text, visuals, graphs or infographics, video content, and even attached files.
• Effective at every stage of the sales cycle - Email marketing allows you to gently nudge your existing customers and prospects through the marketing funnel from the awareness stage to the consideration stage.

👎 Cons:

• Current and potential customers need to opt in - With privacy laws in place worldwide, you can’t just send email marketing to anyone. You need people to permit you to send them email communication.
• It’s hard to stand out - Email inboxes are already crowded, and your message may not even be opened if someone receives a high volume of emails daily.
• Emails can feel ‘salesy’ - As with any format of marketing content, you need to avoid using email marketing to purely sell your product or service. Customers often think emails are only sent to sell them stuff and will quickly unsubscribe if your content confirms this sentiment.