Content marketing is a great way to reach your audience in a way that’s effective, strategic, and highly relevant. Let’s start with an example: this very article! You’ve sought information about content marketing, and we’ve been able to reach you with our insights. In fact, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.1
At Trillion, content marketing has helped grow our business, bringing in opportunities from around the world. We’ve helped our clients to reap those same benefits, developing content to reach their audiences in a way that is engaging and valuable.
What is content marketing?
There are thousands of definitions of “content marketing,” but I define content marketing as generating text, imagery, photos, infographics, video, and more that engages an audience online at the right time, for their benefit and the benefit of the content’s brand.
Content marketing is text, imagery, photos, infographics, video, and more that engages an audience online at the right time, for their benefit and benefit of the content’s brand.
You may have read other articles that list 5, 10, or 20 benefits of content marketing, but many of them can get confusing. Below is our list of easy-to-understand content marketing benefits.
1. Thought Leadership
We like to have our clients publish content that highlights their expert opinions. This type of content marketing keeps your leaders thinking of new, relevant topics that their audiences want to hear about. But not everyone is a writer or content strategist. As an expert, you should be able to talk about specific topics within your genre of business. Take advantage of professional copy editors and writers to help improve the thought leadership commentary by recording a conversation or conducting an interview.
We schedule a 30-minute interview with our clients about a specific topic. A content writer will then prepare a blog post/article based on the conversation and build an engaging, search engine optimization-friendly, and scannable article. To make sure all of the content created is accurate, our client and thought leadership expert must approve everything before the content is published. This process helps save time and yield strategically prepared content.
2. Engagement
Leveraging the contact spheres of the people who follow you or your company can be tremendously beneficial—and the exposure for your content can grow exponentially. All viral content starts this way. As you develop your new content, consider the following ways to engage people and inspire them to comment and share:
- behind-the-scenes images/video
- sneak peek of new things, or things to come
- engaging questions/lists
- funny videos/photos/memes
As you produce and test engaging content, more people will see it and be exposed to your brand. Ask, “what would our clients enjoy and find interesting, funny, or share-worthy?” Approaching from this perspective will help generate more opportunity and exposure for your brand.
3. Press Amplification
It’s always nice when other media outlets see your content and talk about it or share it to their audience. In the case of small businesses, it could translate to many, many more people seeing your brand and learning about your products and/or services. Following and tagging noteworthy media channels, at the right time, can help amplify your message too.
Providing media with new and relevant content can be helpful to them by leveraging what I discussed above. Repurposing or leveraging your existing content for the press can expose your thought leadership and brand to many people. We also find that sending great imagery/photos/artwork along with your content increases the odds of consideration for extended coverage by the media.
4. SEO
When you spend all of the time, effort, and expense of generating new content, it’s important to also pay attention to search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is something that many people talk about but don’t fully understand. In fact, according to HubSpot, 75% of SEO is off-page and 25% is on-page, meaning that optimized content goes beyond what a user sees when visiting your web page. There are books and blogs dedicated solely to this so I will only touch upon a few things we have found valuable when generating new content.
- The title of your content is crucial. To develop several headlines worth considering, utilize tools such as Sharethrough Headline Analyzer or Answer The Public. These free tools help suggest beneficial words, phrases, or improvements that could increase the exposure, or impressions, that your content sees in search. Trillion also performs a Google search of our headlines to identify other web pages and check for potential competitive advantages. We also use this simple test to understand the quantity of results (competition) presented.
- Since users can perform image searches, your images should be original and tagged properly. When you upload your image, you are typically presented with options to add an alt tag and description. The alt tag is like a headline to say what the image subject matter is, and the description is used to explain what is included in the image. It is an often-overlooked way to add extra SEO power to your images. The images found in a search will link back to your website and the page they are featured on.
- Metadata is your friend. Metadata is the text that appears in a Google search. You can control and optimize this text to fit within Google’s requested headline and description character lengths. You have up to 60 characters, including spaces, for the headline; and about 160 characters for the description. When you create a new blog post, utilize a tool like Yoast which can provide suggestions on improving your metadata, as well as your article for SEO.
5. Increase Conversion
Making more money and generating more opportunity is an important part of content marketing. You have to first consider all of the things listed above. They will get new people to your blog, website, or place of conversion. In generating content to increase sales, we like to have specific efforts point to specific landing pages on a website—all while focusing on one key task or conversion. Each of your blog and website pages needs to include a call-to-action. The call-to-action can encourage users to add a product to a shopping cart, use a form to download a PDF, schedule a demo, or call a phone number for the next step. Content marketing can be beneficial in making a sale.
Do you want to learn more about content marketing for your business?
Trillion knows first-hand how content marketing can be beneficial for a business. We have helped our clients—and ourselves—to achieve new goals in our businesses. We can write the content, generate interesting visuals, and publish in the most beneficial way.
Hiring a content marketing company can help get the ball rolling and generate opportunities for your business. Give Trillion a call at 908.219.4703 or fill out our simple contact form and one of our partners will respond promptly and answer questions you may have about content marketing.
1 Hubspot, 2020
