Content marketing is a form of marketing in which businesses use blog posts, ebooks, checklists, webinars, and more as a form of lead generation. Essentially, it's using any form of content to market your business.
It's been a powerful method of enticing people to become more interested in your business because offering informational content like this is incredibly valuable. Potential customers become even more intrigued by your business offerings if they feel like you're handing something out to them for free.
This way, it's not just your customer giving you their money. There's some back and forth between your business and your customer that helps to create a more trusting customer relationship.
Just as every form of digital marketing is constantly changing, adapting, and evolving, so is content marketing.
It's important to always stay up-to-date and on the curve of what the future of each major digital marketing strategy holds. After all, you don't want to be investing time into a dying strategy. So let's dive into content marketing, the state it's in today, and what experts expect from its future.
Content Marketing Today
Content marketing as a strategy has long been a popular method of generating website traffic and business leads. Now that there are over 570 million blogs in the world, it's becoming more and more difficult to be heard through all the noise.
With so much competition out there, it's difficult to rank for commonly searched keywords and bring in as much website traffic as you once did.
If you want to build a successful blog, it is suggested to write long-form content (around 2,000 words) that strategically includes your focus keyword, as well as high-quality, valuable information, and you have to write a lot of it.
Not only that, you have to write unique content that people can't find elsewhere. This is hard to do when pretty much every topic has been covered on hundreds of other blogs.
When you're focusing on building your business, or you don't have the budget to hire a dedicated content marketer, that can seem overwhelming or impossible. This is why content marketing strategies need to be adjusted for the future.
The Future of Content Marketing
So what can we expect from content marketing in the future? How can we adapt so that we can ever hope to stand out among the crowd? Content marketing is not dead, and you shouldn't discount it as a strategy. It can still work for you - if you do it right.
That being said, what does it take to do content marketing right? Let's take a look at a few tactics your content marketing strategy will have to adopt if you hope to see results.
1. Quality over quantity.
Publishing tons of poorly researched and written short articles is not the way to do content marketing. There is way too much mediocre content out there taking up space in Google's double-digit results pages. You want to be ranking on page one.
This means you may need to post less content and focus on posting better content.
Longer blog articles that are well researched, that do deep dives into your main topic, and that include lots of visuals to illustrate your point are the way to go.
2. Revamp past posts.
It's been said that the only constant in life is change, and that also goes for your business and industry. No business or industry that wants to survive can stay the same forever. So it's inevitable that some of your blog content will eventually become outdated. (If you're in a fast-paced industry like we are with digital marketing, it'll happen faster than you might think.)
So you'll want to revisit your past posts and update them with current information so that they stay relevant sources for your audience no matter how much time passes.
3. Focus on content distribution.
Because it's harder and harder for people to find your content naturally, a big part of your content marketing strategy needs to focus on content distribution. This means you need to be sharing your content in many different places to help audiences learn about your business.
This includes social media marketing, reaching out to blogs in your industry for backlinks, sharing links on forums, and more.
4. Utilize other forms of content.
Blogging isn't the only form of content marketing. There are so many other types of content marketing to try out. Create ebooks, checklists, or cheat sheets as your lead magnets. Use videos to attract new audience members. Put on a webinar presentation to increase your lead generation. Create email courses and series. Record a podcast.
By increasing the amounts and the types of content you put out, you're improving the chances that you find new audience members and new customers. Plus, people like consuming content in different ways, so catering to your audience and what they want from their favorite businesses is always a good idea.
Content marketing is far from dead, but it is changing. It's important that your business keeps up. By paying attention to the new tactics and strategies, your business will be able to create content that generates leads, creates customer loyalty, and helps to position you as an industry expert.
To learn more about content marketing strategies and how we can help your business grow, contact us today.
Written By: David Carpenter
