Content Marketing Channels for Explosive Business Growth
Whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, you need a solid content marketing strategy for your business to grow.
But maybe you’re skeptical about investing time and money creating content. Your business has limited resources, and you want to make sure you only use them on the most effective marketing tactics.
If that’s the case, take a look at these statistics:
- Inbound marketing delivers 54% more leads than outbound marketing into the marketing funnel.
- Adopting an inbound strategy raises average conversion rates from 6% to 12%.
- Brands that rely on inbound marketing save over $14 dollars for every new customer acquired.
As you can see, effective inbound marketing (using content to attract customers) can make your business much more profitable.
Still not quite convinced? Let’s talk more in-depth about how content marketing can help you build your business.
Social media marketing
You need to use social media to market your business if you want to stay competitive and win over new customers. That’s because social media marketing helps you:
Build brand recognition – When you use a strong writing tone and a consistent color scheme, you’ll make it easier for your audience to recognize you online and remember your business.
Humanize your brand – Social media gives you the opportunity to showcase your brand personality and talk directly to your audience in a way that will make them feel more connected to your business.
Drive website traffic – Sharing your blog posts (and your other collateral) on social media is a great way to get traffic back to your website. Just make sure you aren’t too promotional – people want to feel like they’re being educated, not sold to.
Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need to be active on every social media website. Pick the ones that are most popular with your target audience, and build a strong presence there.
Blogging
A good content marketing strategy includes regularly publishing high-quality blog posts. When you blog the right way, you create shareable content that engages your audience and draws them to your website, which can help you build industry authority and get more leads.
Here are a few tips to help you use your blog to build your business:
- Respond to every person who comments on your blog posts.
- Add relevant social sharing buttons to your blog posts. You can easily do this by using SumoMe or a similar plugin.
- Write conversationally and format your posts for easy readability so they’ll be more likely to be read and shared.
- Make sure your blog posts all target your audience. For example, if you’re a marketing agency that specializes in helping technology companies reach their audience, you should blog about marketing strategies for tech companies. That way, you draw in potential customers.
- Include images in your blog posts. Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content that doesn’t include relevant images.
Also, avoid publishing lots of low-quality blog posts just for the sake of producing content, or you’ll end up hurting your brand. It’s better to prioritize quality over quantity and wait until you can publish something useful and relevant to your audience.
Email marketing
If you build an email list full of your ideal customers, you can use it to drive traffic back to your website and sell more. Here’s why:
Brand awareness – When you post on social media, you’ve got to cross your fingers and hope your followers see it. On the other hand, when you send an email, you can feel confident that your subscribers will see it because that email goes straight to their inbox. This helps you build brand awareness and stay on the radar as a business that can help your ideal customers achieve their goals.
Targeting – When you email your subscribers, you can segment your them based on their wants and needs. Doing so allows you to give them content that is specifically tailored to their preferences.
Measurability – After you send an email, you can analyze your results and use what you learn to improve your email marketing strategy in the future.
Keep in mind that you need to entice people to sign up for your email list, and you won’t usually do that by simply telling them to sign up for your company newsletter. What you should do instead is offer free downloadable content in exchange for an email address. As long as the content is enticing and relevant to your audience, you should be able to build your list quickly with this strategy.
Social media marketing, blogging, and email marketing aren’t the only ways you can use content marketing to build your business. You can also use SEO, PR, PPC, and other tactics.
Figure out what method attracts your target audience the most, and focus on that. And don’t get discouraged if you don’t immediately see major results – content marketing takes time, but if you do it right and stay persistent, you’ll see a good return on your investment.
How have you used content marketing to build your business? Share in the comments section below!