What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing process that is used for creating, planning, distributing, publishing, and sharing content with the target audience.
It is a consistent flow of content through which relevant and valuable concepts are targeted to a specific group audience.
Ultimately, the core objective is to drive successful customer action and boost brand awareness.
45% of B2B Customers read at least three different content before reaching a sales guy.
77% of companies use content marketing as their marketing strategy, and 94% of marketers use social media for their content distribution.
70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.
In total, 78% of companies have a team of content specialists.
Video content marketing is the most commonly used format, including promotional videos and brand storytelling.
34% of marketers are interested in investing more in 2020-2021.
How Content Marketing helps small businesses
Content creation for small businesses is more beneficial in marketing, and as a strategy, it reduces cost, time, and other promotional resources.
Content marketing is a unique marketing strategy for small businesses.
It is helpful because:
- Content Marketing drives increased brand awareness and high conversion rates.
- It is necessary to make money from the online platform and stand distinctively away from the crowd.
- Content Marketing is 55% Cheaper than other traditional marketing strategies
- Content Marketing helps businesses get 6x more Leads.
- Content Marketing helps a small business to position itself as an authority figure in the industry.
- 70% of people read blogs regularly, and 60% of people turn into customers getting a recommendation from a blog.
Benefits of Content Marketing include
A Definite Content Marketing Guide for Small Businesses
Content Marketing is okay for small businesses. Some Important and simple steps are enough to make the strategy successful. These include:
- Creating helpful and informative content that helps enrich lives from a reader’s perspective.
- Distributing the contents through specific channels
- Sharing the content with social media platforms and encouraging others to do the same.
- The success of content marketing is measured by the web traffic generated by these content marketing strategies.
These key steps will eventually increase the audience’s growth and ensure trust among them.
Define Your Content Marketing ObjectivesThe objectives of Content Marketing for small businesses must be:
- Educating new customers about the range and quality of products or services provided
- Illustrating the story of the company, its formation, and primary objectives toward customers
- Positioning the business among the experts
- Generating impressions across social media platforms
- Minimizing the bounce rate of the website when linking to relevant landing pages
- Expose your business to Target Audience.
Exposing the business to the defined audience is one of the critical aspects of Content Marketing.
It is not possible and required to reach anyone and everyone.
Based on the industry, the content should be crafted with a specific message set to bring value to your business up.
Various social media platforms and other strategies can be used to expose a business properly to the target audience.
Find your first customer.
There is no one-answer-fits-all strategy for finding the first set of customers through content marketing.
Today, there are lots of mediums and methods used for marketing strategies.
Well, all of them lead to a few basic steps, which are:
- Knowing your audience.
- Mapping the content as per the pain point.
- Using relevant content for that particular problem.
- Mapping the content to the buying cycle of the people suffering from the issues.
- Find out the best format.
- Figuring the best content channels.
- Distribute your content in the market.
Create Small Conversion Goals
Things can only be achieved in stages. Therefore, it’s wise to set up small conversion goals to win the race when summed up.
This will help in aiming for a particular destination to create a bigger picture in the future.
Most small businesses skip the small tests and eye for bigger ones. However, it only leads to sailing in a constant circling movement in the industry.
Engage with Customers
Engagement with customers helps in ensuring a healthy relationship with the business.
This can be done by prioritizing their personal preferences and posting content on the media platforms that target any recent activity or occurrence.
Ensure that the incident drags relevancy to your content so that the bridge between your business and potential customers becomes more muscular and neater.
- Create Content for Lead Nurturing (Lead Generation)
Producing qualified leads can be made easier with inbound marketing. It helps the audience when you provide them with the best answers to a problem.
However, things can become complicated regarding winning value in the age of intense competition. Well, this can be achieved by maintaining consistency when publishing the content.
- Create Your Business Brand Identity
It’s pretty simple! Content Marketing helps in portraying the story of your business.
It is the story on which brand awareness is based.
Content Marketing is an incredible and effective marketing tool for small businesses.
All you need is storytelling, but in a different way and with a touch of smartness. Connect the story with people’s lives to create successful branding.
Create Product related content.
Product-related content has particular importance when it comes to content marketing.
If the content is tuned as per the Product’s objective and awareness, there’s no meaning in striking a pose with content marketing strategies.
According to recent statistics, most consumers research the internet to find the best solutions, services, or products that suit their needs.
Therefore, if the content you have created needs more information than the target audience requires, your business is staying away from a potential selling point.
Create Content for Customer Problem Solving
Think not from a seller’s perspective but have a buyer’s eye.
In this case, your content should be tuned so that they become helpful for the audience.
People look for web platforms whenever they are still looking for a suitable answer.
If your content serves this problem and gives them peace of mind, you become the winner through content marketing strategies.
Therefore, lay the path to your business through problem-solving content rather than directly coming to the point of selling.
- Improve Organic Search and Visibility
Organic traffic provides a competitive edge on the digital orb of Google.
- Properly optimized content can improve organic search and, eventually, visibility.
- Good quality content is required for this purpose, especially regarding more clicks and site authority.
- Even if the contents are appropriate, you must improve the organic search to lead your information to the proper set of customers.
Therefore, quality contents are equally important with organic searches to increase brand awareness of your business.
- Create Sharable Content -Improve Social Visibility
Shareable content is a crucial strategy for a practical content marketing approach.
It helps in impacting crucial off-site signals that lead to the improvement of organic search rankings.
This includes customer engagements, backlinks, and brand awareness.
Shareable contents encourage customers to get more engaged with the brand and emboss the name in their hearts and minds.
It automatically prompts them to inform and include other people. If you want to create such content, make sure to have:
- Emotional attachment
- Trending matters
- Tied to identity
- Valuable information
- Measure your content marketing.
Measuring the effectiveness of content marketing can be either simple or complicated, based on your personal choice.
They are not mere numbers that stand presentable to the management.
For example, the effectiveness of content marketing can be based on:
- Figuring out the source of subscribers
- Figuring out the topics that lead to your business
- Figuring out the percentages of opt-out sources
Measure your Conversion Rate
Measuring your conversion rate will give you the performance of your content marketing strategy, its tool of measurement of success for your content.
It can be an excellent tool for discerning the overall performance to increase marketing strategies’ effectiveness and boost website traffic.
It is essential to track them if you want to calculate the conversion rate.
There are various analytics and advertising platforms through which conversion rates can be tracked and measured.
If you can understand the conversion rates, the future content marketing strategy will be apparent to you, and in due course, choosing the topics and sources of content can be precise.
- Update your content to the latest.
It is essential to use content that matches the latest topic for most of the audience.
An improved freshness can be achieved by just updating the old content. When Google goes through your newly created content, your business can experience a spike in traffic.
Hence, the trim work is always worth it!
Frequently updating the content forces the search engine to stop by your site, and frequent screening gives an opportunity of achieving higher rankings from content marketing.
Update customers with new releases.
Similar to the importance of updating your content, updating the customers about new releases is pivotal.
Having a company blog is the best tool for effective communication with customers. It will help let your customers know the work you put in and the improvement introduced through the products.
Updating your customers at specific intervals helps in building a healthy relationship. The significant advantages are:
- Faster and precise feedback
- More automation
- Monitoring real-world metrics
- Appropriate handling of intermittent bugs
- Smaller batches
The feedback provided by the customers can be an excellent source for fixing minor to significant issues with the continued usage of the products.
Update your customer with the Latest Features.
It is undoubtedly an exciting time for your business to promote and launch new features to customers.
It is more than a basic necessity for the business. Updating your customers is a professional and ethical way of performing a successful business.
This can be done through:
- Emails
- In-app messages
- Writing blog posts
- Creating training courses
- Initiating a webinar
Updating the customers with the latest features will provide them with many options.
These are particularly great for choosing a range of variety and quality. Coming up with the latest features helps a business to build on customer loyalty and trust.
Keep Your Website Fresh.
Google algorithms use various types of freshness metrics to determine the ranking of your website.
The freshness score can degrade if the site hasn’t been updated longer. Also, the amount of changes done is tracked on which the freshness score is determined.
To simplify it, keeping up with fresh content increases visitors’ engagement, which is a crucial factor in Search Engine Optimization strategies.
It is like getting a new pair of dresses for your site to change the look.
How to start as a content writer?
In this fast-paced digital era, where there are numerous content websites online, there is always a need for good content writers. But before we go any further, let us understand the meaning of content writing and the qualities one can imbibe to flourish as a good content writer.
Content writing is the way or procedure of researching, writing, and editing web content for digital marketing and spreading awareness.
It can include writing articles, creating content for blog posts, writing scripts for videos and podcasts, and creating content for specific platforms.
In totality, content writing is everything to do with writing. But is content writing only about writing what is on your mind?
The answer is No.
The unique and immaculate content amalgamates your exceptional talent with the right way of researching, processing, and presenting.
Content Writing Process
Writing content is a dream work for many people who aspire to write impressive stuff. But, have you ever noticed how some writers are better than others, though the dedication and zeal to become the best is the same in every one of them? So where does the difference lie?
One thing that helps shape a writer’s content is the process and way of writing.
As defined, Content writing is a process of different steps
We will discuss the process with some excellent points, which can be pondered over to understand the nuances of content writing.
- Deciding a concept
Writing starts with an idea. An idea, or a concept, is the first step towards creating unique content. It’s generally unformed initially, but it is the foundation of the write-up.
Once you are clear about the topic or concept, you know how to pursue it and which direction to take.
Identify the keywords for your content; keywords play an essential role in your content.
Keywords are not just so search engines; keywords pull and tighten the content to its limits. For example, if you are an avid cook, and your food is loved by many people, who are always praising your culinary expertise, and voila, you have an idea to publish your cooking ideas with others. You decide to create a blog on this topic.
Often, the keywords for the project will be in the idea, and once you are ready with a vague idea of the length and format, you can work on it.
- A suitable title
It’s optional to have a title at the very beginning, but if you do think of a title for your writing,
it helps you connect more deeply with the concept. You can change the title later if you feel like it, but having thought of a title at the beginning always helps.
When the project is done, you can decide for yourself whether the title you thought of at the beginning is suitable enough or whether there can be a much better title. You can brainstorm for more suitable ones.
A tile must be catchy and the essence of your article’s storyline.
Here are some tips for writing a compelling title.
Examples of effective title tags
Answer the Questions:
What technique
What is SEO Content
Why SEO Content
How to build
Answer the Question
Tips,
A Complete Guide for the Topic
Case study for choosing a content title
If you see for the keyword “SEO content” searched in Google, most of the titles are Questions.
Here are a few examples of top-ranking content titles.
If you look at the search results
As said, most of the titles are Question-Related Titles
- Find Your Distinctive Style
It’s easy to copy other writers and start your journey wearing someone else’s shoes. But remember, that is not how you should start your voyage toward becoming a recognized and favored content creator.
During your scrolling through the content of other writers, you will come across many writers who may have a unique working style.
Taking inspiration is not wrong, but copying the exact style is not correct. You must remember that everyone is blessed with a different personality and different perspectives.
What may be right for them might not be the same for you. So rather than blindly following others’ writing styles, creating and working upon your own uniqueness is better.
That said, the writing style is the identity of a writer, and the distinctiveness defines the very core.
- Drafting an outline
The next step would be creating a blueprint for the project. This will help you with a flood of ideas for developing the content.
Try to pen down every idea that crosses your mind so that you may further use it.
The ideas can be indistinct or hazy, but you never know how they will help you with your writing. You can rearrange them to create a concrete progression toward your goal.
Any headers coming to your mind, any titles that erupted in your thoughts, or any slight inclusions should be jotted down.
You can distill the concept and work on it with a rough outline.
Once your subheads and bullet points are in order, you can start filling them up with details. This way, you won’t have to struggle with the ideas for any particular section.
How the outline is formulated depends on the project as well.
If you are writing a small article, you might not need a thorough or deep outline, but if you are writing a big project such as a book or a series of blogs, you might need a more detailed summary comprising three main steps. Introduction, main content, and closure of the write-up.
- Doing the Research
Research is often the transition between outlining and writing. This transition period is critical, as it helps refine your knowledge and understanding of the concept.
It would be best if you remembered that you can’t write only with what you know. Your knowledge of things can be limited and sometimes flawed.
So rather than going on with half-baked knowledge, it’s better to research your chosen topic.
It will not only increase the horizon of your apprehension but will also give a better shape to your writing without any place for mistakes or unsolicited descriptions.
- Actual writing work
Now comes the most crucial part of content creation: writing. After creating the outline and researching the topic, you need to fill up the blueprint of your Product with words enhancing it.
The writing should be crisp, to the point, without unnecessary dragging of any moment, and with easily understandable vocabulary.
- Evaluation
Once the writing is done, you can thoroughly assess the report. This will be done before the final editing is done.
How do you evaluate your content?
Read it like a reader, and try to analyze it; if you feel something is missing, something can be added or deleted if the content created is doing full justice to your topic.
By doing so, you will be able to improve the quality of your writing.
Sometimes, you might encounter glaring mistakes in the write-up, which you might have overlooked.
If some portions can be rewritten or enhanced by adding more details or removing some nonimportant information to create a better flow, you must go ahead.
- Editing
This is necessary as mistakes should be rectified before publishing your writings.
Editing helps you create a specific flow as regards the topic you have covered. On the other hand, proofreading enables you to check grammatical mistakes.
Good editing ensures a good read. Edits should always progress from the general to specific.
The end result should be appealing and capture the essence of the chosen topic.
Now, once you have understood the very steps to be taken to create some good content,
What should the content be like?
- Creativity speaks a lot.
If you are writing a content piece already on the internet, what news are you offering? There is no dearth of good topics which can be written about.
Writing about something exploited beyond limits won’t be a good idea to start content writing online. Start with a novel idea that can generate interest in the readers.
If your writings are a little different from what is already available, they will invoke a unique angle to your content, which will, in return, help you gain a dedicated audience.
- Keep your words simple
.
Lots of people prefer simple words as they might need help understanding the complexity of complex sentence structures and vocabulary.
You have to keep in mind that you are not going to target a specific choice of readers.
Your audience can be a student, a highly educated executive, a housewife, or a retired professional.
Your writing should be able to convey what you are trying to say without any difficulty. Don’t exaggerate facts too.
Exaggeration can sometimes dilute the truth and distort it in the wrong way. You should not give a new definition to the fact by stretching it.
This might tag you as an unreliable writer who can distort facts. This is if you are to write about some facts or news. If you are getting into fiction, then a little liberty won’t harm you.
- Choose your forte
We know many accomplished writers are multitaskers and can write exceptionally well on any topic. But don’t try to emulate them when you are just starting out.
You don’t even know how much time and practice must have been invested in them to establish themselves as multitaskers.
When starting out, pick up a specific area of interest. This will not only help you start out with less pressure but will also result in some engrossing writing.
Once you have understood the nuances of writing and are more comfortable in your shoes, you can also spread your wings toward other topics.
- Delivering Value
Whatever you create should be valuable. It would be best if you continually keep your audience in mind. Your audience should be able to connect with the very crux of your content. It should interest them.
If your content is interesting and informative, apart from being uniquely designed, you can carve a niche for yourself from the beginning.
- A perfect start with an impeccable conclusion
The start evokes interest, so starting your writing with a perfect start can grab the audience’s attention.
The first thing that people notice in a write-up is its title. After that, they ponder over two or three lines.
That’s the very time when they decide whether to read further or skip it for some other content. If the start is impressive, the audience will stick to your content till the end.
Conclude the writing with a powerful note. This will make the end thought to linger in the minds of your audience, and hence, they will wait for your next contribution.
The key is to cover what you have given in your writing and sum it up perfectly.
- Give equal importance to the feedback
- .
Read the feedback as it helps you improve your writing and presentation.
If you want to improve your writing and become a well-accepted writer, then start paying attention to what your users and clients have to say about your work.
Be prepared for negative feedback as well. Give yourself credit, as this is just the start of your journey, and having some issues is not a big deal.
Never take any kind of criticism to heart.
Take note of what went wrong, according to your audience, and work on the loose ends. This will help you with your future writings, as you will understand what works for your audience.
- Keep learning
Always remember that learning never ceases.
Once you start thinking that you know everything, you start stagnating.
So keep in mind that even after becoming a pro, you must always keep your learning gears ready.
This will help you in self-evaluation and bringing changes to your writing style for betterment.
Career opportunity as a content writer
Nowadays, a career as a content writer is very profitable, especially at this point when the use of the internet is at its peak, and more businesses are turning online every day.
It dominates the online space, and as more and more people access the internet, it’s become imperative for most businesses to operate online.
The opportunities depend on the quality of the content churned out by the writers. You can join a company on a payroll or can work as a freelancer. The choice is yours.
Once you feel that you are equipped with all the weapons for a perfect start in the world of content writing, you can create an online writing portfolio to plunge into the arena of writing.
Remember, nothing is difficult and impossible as long as you know your strengths.
17 Awesome Career Opportunities for a Content Writer
- Professional Content Writer
- Copy Writer
- Blogger
- Story Writer
- Script Writer
- Speech Writer
- News Writer
- Editor
- Publication Assistant
- Freelance Content Writer
- Social Media Writing
- Communications Director
- Academic Writer
- Technical Writer
- Novelist
- Poet
- Book Writer
- Content Marketer
How much does a content writer make?
Content Writing professionals require a creative mindset and always keep a learning attitude to stand out for competency and the latest updates.
As mentioned, there are multiple career opportunities for content writers; if you are a freelance writer, you can make $20 to $30 per hour.
Depend on your expert level and the project.
A full-time content writer can make $60,000 – $75,000 as annual perks.
