Around 86% of B2C marketers think content marketing is a vital strategy and 91% of B2B marketers utilize content marketing, as reported by the Content Marketing Institute. This means content marketing is definitely food for thought if you are starting a new business. Content is one of the most effective ways to promote your business, build brand awareness, and establish yourself as an authority in your field. If you wish to ensure the content you publish results in an optimal ROI, make the following tactics a key priority for you and your marketing team.
Social Media Content Rules
Neil Patel reports that around 83% of B2B businesses focus on social media content to boost follower numbers. A successful content media strategy is one that is well planned, created, and designed in line with your company’s ethos and style, boosted when necessary, and uploaded at strategic times. Use ongoing analytics to track activity over time, and campaign-focused metrics to gauge the success of specific campaigns. Once you have identified the type of content and ideal times for posting, use tools such as HootSuite to plan content in advance over an array of platforms (including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter).
Establish Yourself as an Authority
Whether you deal in luxury lifestyle, fashion, or technical fields, establishing yourself as an authority in your industry will keep audiences coming back to your website, social media pages, and blogs. This is because they feel that they are obtaining insider (or invaluable) knowledge from someone who is an expert in their field. In order to back your points (even if they are experience-based), publish quality reference lists indicating the sources that you have relied upon. These should ideally be obtained from scientific reports, studies, large-scale polls, and authoritative sites. To find this type of source, use advanced search capabilities on Google, limiting your results to pages terminating in .edu, .org, .gov, and the like.
Hone Your Email Marketing Strategy
Research by the Radicati Group shows that over 50% of the world’s population uses email; this percentage rises to 92% of adults in the U.S. Email marketing is a key way to improve your reach and to personalize content to specific target groups, based on customer actions. Email marketing has a $40 per ROI per dollar spent, making it more cost-effective than tactics like banner ads, keyword ads, and even SEO.
To hit your target, use tactics such as segmentation (to personalize content), provide interactive content within the email itself and use automation to improve the timing and relevance of your emails. As far as interactive content is concerned, Martech Advisor reports that “interactive email content increases the click-to-open rate by 73%, and adding videos to your email content can boost click rates up to 300%.” Interactive content is essentially anything users can swipe, click on, and share. It includes polls, interactive images, and emails with GIFs of videos.
Give Something Back
Providing subscribers or clients with online ebooks or white papers is another clever way to keep them loyal. These publications are used by around 65% of B2B marketers since around 80% of users say they would provide their email in exchange for a white paper or ebook. The difference between the two essentially lies in detail. White papers are typically more thorough, scholarly publications, while ebooks are less intellectual in tone but still concept-centric and based on current ideas and trends.
Content marketing is key for all businesses but if you are a startup or a small business, it should take key priority in your marketing strategy, considering your need for greater brand awareness and reach. Tactics such as providing white papers, writing blogs, and posting regular social media content will intrigue and hopefully keep target customers loyal. Establishing yourself as an authority, meanwhile, will add value to your company and attract the attention of competitors as well as customers.
