This article has been written by Subhasish Acharya pursuing a Diploma in Video & Visual Communication for Business Growth & Problem-Solving from Skill Arbitrage.
This article has been published by Shashwat Kaushik.
Table of Contents
Introduction
There are a few professionals and students who know how content marketing works and how it yields business success, especially in the technology industries. This is the case since most people have perceived several technology enterprises and learning institutions; however, the strategic use of content marketing to achieve organisation goals has not been solved yet. This paper discusses how technology businesses use content marketing to increase their visibility, credibility, and reach with their target market, hence fuelling their business growth and profitability.
What is content marketing
Content marketing involves the conception and distribution of content that would attract potential customers toward the business, and various forms of types include articles, blog posts, infographics, and even video and audio files, but what the different types have in common is that it all contributes toward the attraction and retention of a clearly defined audience so that they take action toward profits.
How does content marketing work
Content marketing works by doing both inbound and outbound marketing in attracting, engaging, and retaining a target audience.
Inbound marketing
This end of content marketing attracts customers through helpful and relevant content. Businesses through quality content creation and distribution in whatever forms, such as blog posts, infographics, podcasts, videos, etc., can attract potential customers who are actively looking for answers. These contents help in answering the questions, provide insight and give relevance in order to draw them into the sales funnel unobtrusively.
Outbound marketing
Implementing content marketing is aligned with outbound practices because it essentially promotes the content to a wider audience on various platforms. It employs the usage of social media, email marketing, and paid advertisements by directing the content to people who would not probably look out for a business’s product or service. Strategic positioning of such content at hotspots where the target audience is most likely to visit increase the business’s visibility and create an engagement ability.
Together, these two principles develop a beautiful movement where inbound marketing only brings aboard interested people, and through this, the brand expands further outward with outbound marketing and grabs more attention to drive profitable customer actions.
Why is content marketing important?
Marketing is the best way to connect with your audience through words and influence targeted audience in buying your products profitably. So, let’s analyse in-depth at what content marketing is one of the essentials:
Establishes authority, brand and trust:
- Compelling content adds to credibility and establishing expertise. When you provide fresh insights, solutions, and opinions about things over and over — your audience sees you as a source of information or ideas they can trust.
- Brand differentiation: In a noisy marketplace, great content helps you stand out from the flock. It’s a chance for you to create your unique brand voice, values, and character and build a connection with your audience.
- Building relationships: Content marketing is not just about selling; it’s about developing a rapport. Providing the content that your audience appreciates creates trust and loyalty which will ultimately lead to long-term customers.
Boosts SEO
- Keyword optimisation: Using relevant targeted keywords in your content tells search engines how relevant your content is to what users are searching for. This improves your search results visibility and generates traffic to your site for free.
- Content quality: Vanilla is like a vanilla-people, cause quality matters to Search Engines, because good content giving helpful information, and more value for the search engine users. When you aim for developing high-quality content, you are likely to receive an impressive ranking and a significant amount of inbound traffic.
- Link building: Quality content gets linked to by other websites naturally, an aspect of your search engine ranking improvement search factor.
Drives leads
- Lead magnets: Use of high-quality content, such as ebooks, whitepapers, or webinars as lead magnets to attract potential customers. By offering people something for their contact details cultivates leads, and anchors them through the sales funnel.
- Calls to action: Great content marketing also features strong calls to action that clarify exactly what you want your audience to do next (i.e. buy something, subscribe to a newsletter, book a demo, etc.).
- Lead nurturing: A content marketing guide helps in the nurturing of leads by providing the relevant and informative pieces of content to them at all stages of the buyer journey. Such assurances help build trust which eventually translates into higher conversion rates.
More benefits:
- Higher social media shares: Good content is shared more often on social media, which can increase your brand visibility and reach.
- Customer retention: By regularly delivering substantive content, you keep your existing customers engaged, in the loop, and more loyal to your brand, which in turn raises retention rates.
- Builds brand awareness: Branded Content will increase the awareness of the brand and will make more visible and recognised.
Search engine optimisation in content marketing: the last important step
Content marketing is highly significant because of SEO: you’ll be able to reach the maximum audience possible. Overall, SEO is a set of tactics and strategies that make your website rank better on SERPs. Here’s how content can be optimized for search engines in an effective manner.
Keyword research
Keyword research is the backbone of SEO. It unmasks the terms and phrases that your customers employ for the search of products or services offered within your company. To make things easier for you, you may use Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to get relevant keywords with high search volume but low competition. Then, they must be strategically positioned in your content.
Creation of quality contents
Content is the king of the world in SEO. Good, valuable, and informative content that caters to your target audience’s questions or solutions for their problems does the trick. It has been noticed that a search engine favours informative, profound, and interesting content. Long-tail content, which is more than 1,000 words, usually does better in SERPs since this kind of content is more likely to answer the search query for your audience in its entirety.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO ensures that each page is optimised to rank better and more appropriately to bring relevant traffic to the website. Some of the points included are as follows:
- Title tags: This title tag should have a primary keyword and be something catchy enough to get someone to click on it.
- Meta descriptions: A decent meta description makes all the difference between actual click-through rate increases, especially when short and contains the primary keyword as well as informs the reader what the page is about.
- Headings: Headings break up the content. H1 contains the main keyword; secondary keywords in H2 and H3.
- URLs: Should be short and descriptive, including at least a major keyword.
- Links: internal linking helps a search engine understand the architecture of a site and keeps a user engaged for a longer time
Optimisation of images and other multimedia
Images and multimedia add richness to a user experience, but they can equally make your site crawl if not optimised correctly. Provide alt text and keyword-rich file names for images so the search engine can understand what your image is of. Image compression is done in order to be able to decrease load times. Videos should be hosted on YouTube or Vimeo rather than on your site.
Mobile optimisation
Most of the searches are done through mobiles so it is necessary to have a mobile version. Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning that it mainly refers to the content served for indexing and ranking purposes on the mobile version. Ensure your website is responsive and a great experience on all devices.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO as a concept deals with everything about the non-content elements on your website and how it impacts the performance in the SERPs. Some of the main elements include:
- Site Speed: A fast-speeding site gives users a better experience. Google has incorporated site speed as one of the ranking factors. Use the tools, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, to point out and fix issues.
- XML Sitemap: This sitemap in the XML version will make search engines have an easier time understanding your website as well as figuring out new content sooner.
- Robots.txt: This is a file where you tell the robots which files to crawl or index and which to leave alone. You have to be sure it is formatted just so you avoid blocking the wrong types of pages.
- Secure Website (HTTPS): Having a secure site (HTTPS) helps protect user data and is also a ranking factor for Google.
Backlink building
Backlinks or inbound links from other websites still rank among the highest-ranking factors. Quality links from good sites give suggestions to the search engines that your content is valuable and worth being trusted. Tactics to build backlinks include:
- Guest blogging: You write posts for other relevant sites in your niche in order to receive backlinks and get more noticed.
- Influencer outreach: That means you will perhaps be able to reach out to influencers who will bring you to a larger audience and grant you high-quality backlinks.
- Content promotion: The more you are publishing content, so it circulates about more and reaches people through their social media and channels, the more likely they are to be creating backlinks.
User experience (UX)
Search engines love websites that have good experience. Some of the things that make up UX are as follows:
- Easy and logical navigation: A well-structured logical menu is the most important for the user to find what they want
- Readability: The content should be broken into smaller paragraphs using bullet points and images to enhance reading.
- Elements of engagement: Quiz, surveys, and infographics with interactive elements keep users engaged so that they spend more time on your website.
Analytics and monitoring
Track the SEO performance through all those tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, which would provide traffic along with user behaviour about your site and keyword performance. Implement such data to improve your content and alter the improvement of the SEO plan accordingly to you.
What are some of your best practices for IT companies?
IT companies sell products and provide services across industries through blogs, webinars and other modes of communication. The IT industry is a highly competitive one and you need to study your industry well to implement the best strategies of creative content marketing. Try embracing some of these best practices:
Empathise with your audience:
- Know your ideal customer profile: Who are you marketing to with just contact information?
- Buyer personas: Create detailed breakdowns of different types of your target audience. This will give you a clearer idea of how to change or modify your content to suit their needs and interests.
- Market research: Find out what old news your audience is facing and what new news, trends, technologies, and challenges they have. This will enable you to create timely and topical content.
Define your content marketing objectives
- Set clear objectives: What do you hope to achieve with your content marketing efforts? Examples of such worldwide goals include lead generation, brand awareness, thought leadership, consumer interaction, and site visits.
- Establish measures for success: Also, You need to identify KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for success in your consumer targeting campaigns. They can be website hits, leads, social media impressions, email signup.
Develop a content strategy:
- Create a content calendar: Yes, you read it correctly! Please schedule your content in advance and average good an individual channels.
- Choose appropriate content formats: Once the defining ideas are identified, present them in a mix of formats (i.e., blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, infographics, videos, webinars and podcasts) to fit varied audience preferences.
- Think about quality and relevance: Share information or insight that helps your visitors fulfill their needs and address their issues.
What is search engine optimization (SEO) and how to do it:
- Keyword research: Identify the key phrases and words your audience is searching for.
- On-page SEO Use appropriate keywords, meta tags, headings, head tags, image alt text, etcext.
- Backlinks: Acquire Qualified backlinks to your site in order to increase your site authority as well as your search ranking.
Promote your content:
- Utilize social media: Your content are simply using at this moment. Use social media networks to share it.
- Implement email marketing: Use targeted email marketing to interact with prospects and share content to followers.
- Use the paid promotion : The tool of a third party promotion, such as the Google Ads and social media ads — to get more account visibility.
Measure and analye results:
- Track your key metrics: To check how well your content marketing campaigns are doing, monitor your metrics.
- Analytics tools —Use tools like Google Analytics: They help you understand user behaviour, content engagement and conversion rates.
- Optimise your Strategy: Analyse the data and make data-driven decisions to optimise your content marketing strategy.
Stay consistent and adapt:
- Develop a publishing schedule: Publish regularly to build an audience and keep up with their lives.
- Knowing what is happening into technology and following trends will keep your content strategy aligned.
- Innovate and experiment: Avoid sitting on your first idea; even if it is a good one; try out new types of content, courses; even new distribution even new promo/repurposing tactics to jump ahead of your competition.
References
- https://ninepeaks.io/content-marketing-for-technology-companies-ultimate-guide
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-marketing
- https://www.capterra.com
- https://neilpatel.com/blog
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo
- https://backlinko.com/seo-strategy
- https://searchengineland.com/complete-guide-optimizing-content-seo-checklist-269884