Digital Marketing
Content marketing helps your business stand out from your competitors. If you are running a profitable business, chances are it’s because you know your product and your customers well. You understand the questions they frequently ask and the problems they need to solve. You have a wealth of industry information and client stories available to you.
Content Marketing uses this deep product and customer knowledge to create and publish high-quality content for your website. Practical and valuable content spreads through word of mouth, search engines, social media, newsletters and videos. As a result, customers and prospective customers can come across your content and your business in many places.
This article demonstrates how to use your existing knowledge to build your business through content marketing. Create business assets you can feel proud of, and your salespeople will love. Interested? Let’s dig deeper to see what it’s all about.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. This material is designed to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, ultimately driving profitable customer engagement with your business.
Content marketing can build brand awareness, trust, and loyalty among consumers. Traditional advertising interrupts consumers to get its message across. Content marketing offers useful, timely information at the time customers are seeking. It can establish your business as a credible and authoritative voice in your industry. This approach enhances customer engagement and supports other digital marketing strategies, like search engine optimisation (SEO) and social media marketing.
The core concept of content marketing is creating and sharing online material such as blog posts, videos, and social media posts. The content does not explicitly promote your brand, however it does stimulate interest in your products or services. This educational and value-driven approach aims to engage customers by offering relevant information or solutions to their problems.
In contrast, traditional marketing typically involves direct promotion of products and services. It focuses more on sales pitches and direct advertising, using advertorial, print ads, TV commercials, and radio spots. Traditional marketing often seeks immediate conversions, whereas content marketing aims to build a long-term relationship with an audience by providing ongoing value. This difference in approach reflects a shift from transactional marketing to customer engagement and brand loyalty.
Content marketing is effective because it aligns with how consumers seek and consume information. Customers increasingly use digital platforms for research, entertainment, and social interaction. Content marketing meets them in these spaces with relevant, engaging content that offers value beyond traditional sales pitches. This approach enhances brand visibility and credibility and fosters stronger customer relationships.
Providing consistent, high-quality content that appeals to your audience increases your business’s visibility. Making content that is easy to share across digital platforms can boost customer engagement. Search engines favour relevant and valuable content, leading to higher rankings and improved positioning in search results. Combining heightened engagement and search engine visibility enhances a business’s online presence.
Content marketing demonstrates a brand’s expertise and reliability and builds brand trust by offering valuable and informative content to solve consumer problems or answer their questions. This consistent delivery of helpful information establishes the brand as an authority and fosters consumer confidence and loyalty.
Architect Neil Cownie is addressing owners and developers of major building projects. Client interviews give details of the scale of his previous projects as well as his design and management skills. For high value engagements it is common to hear the phrase, “I’ve read every word on your website”.
Source: https://www.neilcowniearchitect.com.au/interview/john-percudani/
Content marketing boosts consumer engagement by providing interactive and compelling content. By tailoring content to address the specific interests and needs of the target audience, it invites active participation, discussion, and feedback, deepening the connection between the consumer and the brand.
Identifying and understanding a target market involves analysing demographic, psychographic, and behavioural data to create detailed customer personas. Google Analytics is a popular tool used by agencies for this purpose. It can provide website audience insights and social media analytics like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics and details user demographics and engagement patterns. Once your target audience is clearly defined, you can create materials and collections to appeal to them.
Internationally recognised winery Moss Wood, make their tasting notes available for wine lovers anywhere in the world.
Source: https://www.mosswood.com.au/wines/moss-wood/cabernet-sauvignon/2008-vintage/
At Tectalic, we frequently make use of interview-driven content. It is an efficient method to gather relevant content. The flow of language is conversational and works well online. It has a ring of truthfulness that is difficult to achieve using formal content structures. You need to cover a set of basics to produce content likely to help your business.
Understanding the Audience: Tailor the content to meet your target audience’s interests, needs, and challenges.
Storytelling: Use storytelling to make content relatable and engaging. If you are using interviews, be sure to see out material where people are describing positive experiences and emotions, as this makes for engaging content.
Value-Driven Content: Ensure the content provides real value, whether educational, informative, or entertaining—the more useful and original, the better the cut-through.
Strong Headlines: Craft attention-grabbing headlines that encourage readers to engage with the content. There is no point in writing a great article if the headline has little appeal and no one reads it.
Visual Elements: Incorporate visual elements like images and videos to enhance appeal and readability. For example, an infographic or map can communicate complex ideas quickly.
Call-to-Action (CTA): Include a clear CTA to guide the audience on the next steps. Your customer is ready to do business with you if the article is valuable and inspiring. It is your job to make that easy.
A multi-channel approach to content strategy can reach a wider audience. Creating and distributing content across platforms and mediums, such as social media, blogs, email newsletters, and videos, maximises exposure and meets potential customers on their preferred platforms. It allows for tailored messaging that resonates with a diverse audience while enhancing engagement and reach. People often need to see your brand several times before they take action.
Content marketing creates high-quality, keyword-rich content to broaden and improve business search engine rankings. Engaging content encourages shares and backlinks, contributing to a stronger SEO position and boosting website visibility and credibility in search engine results.
Japingka Aboriginal Art Gallery addresses a global audience with articles that provide a rich background about individual artists and art centres. This information gives context for the work exhibited at the gallery. The credible nature of the articles helps build on the gallery’s thirty-year reputation for ethical practice and curators of art of an international standard. Each of the articles contain specific keywords that assist in online rankings.
Source: https://japingkaaboriginalart.com/info/articles-info/
Keywords are crucial in content generation. They align the content with the terms and phrases potential customers use in search engines, enhancing its visibility and relevance. Effective use of keywords helps to target the intended audience, ensuring that the content reaches those most likely to be interested. Keywords increase engagement and conversion potential, another reason why interview-driven content is helpful. Interviewees will naturally use a sprinkling of rich keywords throughout the material. The natural use of keywords is essential. Overusing specific keywords can make your content sound like a shouty advertisement rather than a helpful discussion.
PumpEng (pronounced pump-enj) arranged onsite interviews with their mining clients, where they discussed their dewatering pump challenges and the solutions found. The result is website content with a natural, rich flow of keywords in the form of fascinating industry case studies. Even if the interviewee’s identity is kept private, the material is credible and interesting within the industry.
You can measure the success of your content marketing projects in two ways. There are analytical tools to measure traffic to web pages and engagement with social media posts. There is another sort of success that is equally powerful and more challenging to measure.
Here are examples clients have shared with us.
Long Play: An interior designer is flown interstate to consult on a new dental practice fit-out. Halfway through dinner, the client pulls out a blog post the designer wrote two years before. The points in the article form the basis for the discussion between the designer and their client about the project. The client read the article and prepared their ideas to align with the designer’s project approach.
Recruitment: A large plumbing company reports that the quality of their website helps attract new staff who notice professionalism in the content of the website.
Reputation: A specialist allied health worker attends an international conference on his area of specialty and discovers that all the other attendees know him through his blog posts, articles and infographics. One person declares, “I came to this conference to meet you.”
Influence & Thought Leadership: A reputable international art education journal reaches out to an art gallery to consult on an article they are writing. The journal links to the gallery website when the journal article is published. Other educators follow the link to the gallery website because of the originality and quality of their articles.
Tracking the right metrics in content marketing helps you understand the effectiveness of your content strategy and plan for future content. Measuring key indicators like engagement, traffic, conversion rates, and social shares allows insights into what resonates with your audience. This feedback enables continuous improvement in your marketing efforts. Some content strategies work quickly, and others take time to mature. A sensible approach to content marketing is to consider it a long game, a process that develops over time.
There are several tools available for monitoring content progress. Each offers different functionalities:
The first step is to define your target audience and their needs and preferences. Effective content marketing hinges on creating content that resonates with and is relevant to the intended audience. Knowing the audience well helps you develop content strategies that engage and provide value for your customers, build a loyal customer base, and enhance brand visibility.
Setting a budget depends on business factors. One method is to use a percentage of turnover as a guide.
For B2B companies, the suggestion is to spend between 2% and 5% of revenue on marketing. In contrast, B2C companies often allocate a higher proportion, between 5% and 10% of their income towards marketing.
Source: What is the average marketing budget for a small business?
A commonly recommended rule of thumb is to allocate about 25% to 30% of the marketing budget specifically to content marketing.
Source: Forbes: How Much Should Your Company Budget For Content Marketing?
Tailor your budget allocation according to your unique circumstances and objectives. Strategic planning should factor in these recommendations and consider the specific market position, competition, and the business’s unique value proposition.
Content marketing will be in the marketing mix as long as search engines seek to optimise the user experience. The future of content marketing will likely reflect an increasing personalisation and interactivity, driven by advancements in AI and data analytics, allowing for more targeted and engaging content. The growing importance of video and voice search optimisation and the integration of immersive technologies like augmented and virtual reality will offer new and innovative ways to connect with audiences.
The impact of AI on content marketing may offer significant benefits and risks. AI can enhance content marketing with personalised content creation, optimising SEO, and providing insights into consumer behaviour. The advantages are increased efficiency and effectiveness.
The potential risk of over-reliance might lead to a lack of creativity and authenticity in the content. There are also ethical concerns, such as privacy issues and the potential for AI-generated content to be misused or to propagate biases inadvertently. A significant risk is the potential for damage to the reputation of your business. AI is an imperfect tool and may only sometimes provide accurate information.
In summary, use AI with care. Gathering authentic original material is worthwhile as it will make you stand out.
This article highlights the critical role of content marketing in the digital era, particularly for Australian SMEs. We reflect on the strategic importance of creating valuable, engaging content to build strong customer relationships, enhance brand trust, and improve online visibility. There is a discussion of the shift from traditional advertising to a more interactive, value-driven approach, highlighting the integration of content marketing with SEO, the significance of understanding consumer behaviour, and the use of analytics and client feedback to measure success. Future advancements in AI, data analytics, and emerging technologies like AR and VR may lead to further personalising and revolutionising content marketing strategies, making them more impactful and relevant in connecting with and retaining customers.
If you would like to explore content marketing strategies, call or email Tectalic, and we’d be happy to meet to discuss your options.
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