Content Marketing

Content marketing, commonly referred to as copywriting, is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience - and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Any business in virtually any industry can leverage content marketing to their advantage. From major consumer brands and retail stores to tech companies and service-oriented businesses, content marketing can help you reach out to your target audience.

Both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies have developed successful content marketing strategies. The techniques and goals vary between B2B and B2C companies, but that doesn’t make content marketing any less effective.

The beauty of content marketing is that it serves multiple purposes. Depending on your goals and the type of content you create, it could boost your brand in several different ways.

First, content marketing can increase awareness and authority of your brand, especially if the material you produce has an educational angle. As customers get to know your brand and the value that it provides through high-quality content, you can also increase customer loyalty. As you grow your brand’s base, you can also generate website traffic and drive sales.

With the right strategy in place, you can use content marketing to generate a steady stream of new leads to your business. While most brands offer content like blog posts, social media posts and videos free of charge, they also create high-level content, such as white papers, case studies, and eBooks to serve as lead magnets. They then require readers to opt in to a mailing list before gaining access to those high-level content.

Once you’ve gained permission to email interested customers, you can introduce your leads to your sales funnel. As your leads discover and engage with your other content marketing efforts, they may convert from potential to current customers.

For most businesses, the biggest content marketing mistake is jumping in without a coherent strategy. Like any type of marketing, you need a plan to get the results you want from content marketing. Launching a blog and producing posts regularly may never help you achieve your objectives if you don’t know what you want to accomplish or how to get there.

To develop an effective content marketing strategy, you’ll need to understand who your target audience is, what kinds of content they want, and how your brand can offer the greatest value to your audience. Many businesses opt to create buyer personas so they can get to know their target audience and design content that’s sure to resonate.

These two branches of marketing aren’t the same, but many businesses integrate their content marketing and social media marketing strategies. This synthesis helps brands ensure that they’re optimizing their marketing efforts.

While content marketing encompasses written, graphic, and video material that can live on your company’s website or any number of other places online, social media marketing takes place strictly on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Many social media marketers build their editorial calendars around sharing links to content that their brands have created, as this practice can drive traffic and value.

When you invest in a content marketing strategy, it’s essential to track the results and determine your return on investment (ROI). As a general rule, your goals determine the metrics you’ll need to track.

For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, you might track website traffic, bounce rate, or social shares. If you want to generate leads, you’ll track the number of leads, conversion rates, and average time to close.

Content marketing is a long-term strategy. While you’re likely to see more social shares and new leads within the first few months of implementing your campaign, your ultimate goals should be long-term. Since your content can provide value for many years to come, consider it an asset that you’ll be able to use to build loyalty, generate leads, and drive sales far into the future.

Ready to get started with content marketing? Contact our world-class team of content marketers for expert guidance today!

When creating content, it’s important to focus more on quality than quantity. We understand not all businesses have the time to create new content everyday, so if you’re a small business getting started, one or two high-quality content pieces a month is a good starting point. If your business has the resources to produce more, start thinking about adding more images or videos, or strategize additional content that can reach your target audience in different ways.

At Inbound Hype, we recommend posting content containing at least 1,000 words. Google doesn’t always index content with less than 300 words. And while that’s the bare minimum, the longer your blog, the better. If you go through our site, you’ll see blog articles pushing way beyond 1,000 words, with a few even hitting 5,000 words.

Some of our favorite content marketing resources are HubSpot, Backlinko, Newscred, Search Engine Journal and Neil Patel.

There are several content marketing tools that help us put together content. First, we conduct keyword and topic research to determine the information people are searching to find. We usually turn to Moz, BuzzSumo, SEMRush and Google Keyword Planner to find the keywords people are searching and the questions they are asking online. Once we’ve determined what to write about, a headline is created and run through CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. We then use Grammarly as a grammar check and peer review the content to evaluate from a different perspective. When it comes to an infographic or image, our designers use the full Adobe CC suite for quality content creation.

There’s no simple answer. Content marketing is one of those “you pay for what you get” services. The more money you spend, you’ll likely generate higher quality content and more of it. If you’re writing your blogs in-house, consider how much time you can take away from your other tasks in order to create quality content. Otherwise just hire an agency like us to do it for you.

You should include at least one image, as articles with one image get 94% more total views than articles without an image. Hubspot suggests using one image every 350 words. We suggest you use them throughout your article to break up the copy where it makes sense.

Yes! For both search engines and users, it’s helpful to give blogs publish dates and to update the date when the article is revised.

This depends on your brand. At Inbound Hype, we like to put a face to the content and use authors, but we work with multiple clients who prefer their brand be the author.

That's up to you. While we commonly see “blog” and “article” tossed around as the industry standard, it’s also common to use “news” when you’re posting a variety of information (such as press releases and blogs together). A press release, on the other hand, is a specific type of post and should be classified individually, as such. Many of our clients use multiple or all of these terms as categories within their blog section to distinguish content.