3 Things You Must Know About Content Marketing
Content Marketing is critical to the long-term success of your business.
Businesses need to have a marketing strategy that encompasses both long-term and short-term marketing and lead generation.
But what exactly is content marketing and what’s the difference between organic marketing and paid marketing?
What is content marketing?
First, let’s define content marketing.
Content marketing is a marketing strategy based on creating content that attracts your ideal customers. Content marketing can take many forms, such as blogs, videos, social media, SEO, email and ads, to name a few.
Organic marketing vs. paid marketing
Organic content marketing is a strategy for creating content that isn’t dependent on paid advertising. Organic content marketing is a long-term approach toward marketing your business and driving traffic to your business.
Paid marketing is just that - marketing that you pay for to attract customers. If you’ve been online, you’ve seen paid advertising - whether it’s displayed through sponsored posts on Instagram or Facebook or loaded at the top of your Google search.
While organic marketing and paid advertising work well when used together, not every business may have the need or financial means to rely solely on paid advertising. But every business, including yours, should use organic marketing in its overall marketing strategy if the objective is to create a successful business now and in the future.
Why you need organic content marketing
The primary goal of organic content marketing is to get potential customers to your business and website. Organic content marketing allows you to create content that naturally attracts your ideal customers.
Organic marketing allows your customers to get to know you and increases the odds of them making a purchase. Before buying, a customer goes through three stages - awareness, consideration and decision. Your organic marketing will help walk them through this process.
The buyer’s journey
The awareness stage is the stage in which a potential customer becomes aware that they have a general problem and they begin investigating the problem deeper. Organic content marketing is the means of introducing you to the customer. It is how a potential customer becomes aware of your business and your solution to their problem. This can happen when someone googles something related to their problem and sees your blog or video in the search results.
The consideration stage is when your potential customer does further research and narrows the exact scope of their problem and begins to identify possible solutions to it. This is where organic content marketing can demonstrate your authority on the problem and present your solution.
Lastly, the decision stage is where your potential customer has completed their research and makes a decision to move forward with the purchase of a solution.
Sales is relational and organic content marketing is how you can grow and nurture the relationship. Organic content marketing is vital to the buyer’s journey.
In fact, according to Salesforce, potential customers are 131% more likely to make a purchase after consuming early-stage educational (i.e. awareness and consideration stage) content.
Popular Forms of Organic Content Marketing
Organic content generally serves three purposes - to educate, to entertain or to engage.
Every business should have a primary means of sharing pillar content. Your pillar content is the main organic content channel or format that you use to share your content.
The most popular channels for pillar content are blogs, podcasts and videos.
Regardless of how you share your content, it should also be housed on your website. Blogs are the most natural means of creating content for your website. But if you have a podcast or YouTube channel, you should also be posting these to your website. Not just embedding the audio or video but also sharing the transcript.
Having your pillar content on your website lets Google and other search engines find your website more easily. Using search engine optimization strategies, commonly referred to as SEO, improves the chances of search engines finding and driving traffic to your website. According to Hubspot, SEO drives over 1000% more traffic to your website than organic social media.
Your website is the best way to drive customers to your business and develop a relationship between your customer and your business and brand.
You have full control and ownership of your website. Your pillar content will live there as long as you want it to and you aren’t at the mercy of a third-party platform. As long as you have a website and a means of engaging your customers through your pillar content, you have the ability to continue growing your business even if Instagram/Facebook goes down or the algorithms change.
You can use other forms of organic content marketing to drive potential customers to your pillar content and website, such as email marketing, social media, guest posting, etc.
In fact, most business use more than one channel of organic content marketing. Recent data shows that over 80% of businesses use more than three channels in their marketing strategy.
How to repurpose your pillar content
When you own a business, you know the importance of working smarter and not harder.
You can use your pillar content to create content across other content channels.
By strategically leveraging the content you have already created, you can save yourself time to focus on the other areas of your business.
For example, if you use blogging as your pillar content, you can:
Use a snippet from the blog in the body of an email to your list enticing them to read the full blog on your website
Create multiple Instagram posts, like quote posts and short-form videos highlighting points of the blog. Use various calls to action to drive followers to read the full blog on your website
Use the blog as the script or outline for a podcast or video
Create pins linking to the blog and share them on Pinterest
Upload a shorter version to a third-party platform, like Medium, and then direct the reader to the full post on your website
There are numerous ways to take a pillar content piece and repurpose it across different channels with little additional effort on your part.
Organic content marketing should be an integral part of your marketing strategy.
Although many think creating organic content can be time-consuming, the benefits far outweigh the time and effort. And there are practices you can put in place to systemize your pillar content process to reduce the burden of content creation.
To create a strong foundation in your business, you have to play the long game and organic content marketing should be the driver of that game.
If you’d like to find out how you can create or improve your content creation process, I’d be happy to talk to you about how Aynsli + Company can help.