Content marketing is the strategy of using content to attract prospective customers and then move them onto the next stage of the buying process. Businesses invest heavily in content marketing strategies as they have been proven to work effectively during their short time as an internet marketing technique.
Is content marketing effective?
Content marketing can include informative and entertaining facts, statistics and figures on a business or service. The act of providing a more rounded view of a business and enlightening the reader to extra information delivers extra value which could then lead to an increased chance of a conversion.
While content marketing is clearly an effective marketing strategy, it can only succeed if it’s aimed at the right audience. There’s no use publishing well-written, informative and engaging content if no-one’s going to be reading it. For this, you need to identify who your audience is, and then create a strategy to reach that audience.
Finding your audience
Finding your audience is perhaps the most important step to lead generation because you won’t generate leads if you’re targeting the wrong people. By having a database of a specific audience who are most likely to purchase your product or services, you increase your chances of making conversions and prevent yourself from wasting time and resources.
Getting your hands on high-quality business data is the best way to guarantee that you’ll be targeting the right audience. You want to make sure that you won’t be pushing your content to email addresses that are no longer in use or to businesses that are no longer occupied by the intended recipient.
Whether your content marketing strategy requires email data, direct mail data or integrated data, you need to be certain that your B2B data lists are up to date. Data cleansing services can make sure that your data won’t be incomplete, have any errors or be incorrectly formatted. By cleaning your data, you can also remove any illegal data that has gone undetected and ensure that you remain GDPR compliant.
Make it high quality
While it may sound obvious, the importance of high-quality content cannot be understated. This is because it’s beneficial for more than one reason. Firstly, if the content is good, it will encourage viewers to read it and absorb the information relating to your product.
By making it easy to read, adding visually appealing aesthetics and a few fun facts and interesting bits of information, you make your piece of content more likely to engage with the reader. This, in turn, leads to your audience remembering your content, your name and your business and service. When the time comes for them to make a purchase, they’ll already know where to go.
The second reason why good content is worth the effort is that it’s good for Google. As well as engaging with the audience you’ve specifically targeted, it will also attract new audiences online who are searching for a company that provides your services.
Google recognises high-quality content and will improve your rankings if you consistently produce informative blogs and articles that help its users. However, it’s important to remember that Google doesn’t like duplicate or very similar content, so make sure every piece of content you create has a unique angle.
Grow your network
So by now, you’ve got your high-quality content that you’re sending out to a specific audience as well as posting on your website to attract new customers. You might feel like you’re doing a good job, but don’t stop there!
There are always new ways to promote and share your content so it has an even wider reach. With 61 million senior-level influencers and 40 million decision-makers using the website, LinkedIn is one of the best platforms when it comes to B2B marketing. There are plenty of professionals on the website who use it primarily for business as opposed to other platforms which have a more casual element to them.
While LinkedIn is the kingpin in this scenario, posting on other social media platforms can also be beneficial. Twitter is a great hub for digital marketers to learn from industry-leading experts who share their ideas and content. Google itself has a highly active Twitter account where it shares information on many of its upcoming updates and minor algorithm changes.
Using hashtags on Twitter is also a great way to make your content easy to locate by people searching for specific search terms. And by posting your content and tagging high-profile individuals in your post, there’s always a chance that they see your content and give you a like or share which could massively boost the visibility of your content.
Sometimes, using a more direct method can be effective. Approaching like-minded websites in your industry (not competitors) and letting them know that you’ve created some content that their audience might be interested in is a great way to build relationships and share your work.
Keep up momentum
If you find that your content is successfully reaching your target audience and leading to an increase in conversions, then that’s amazing. But it’s important to keep up momentum by maintaining your contact with your audience. Even if you take a two-week break in between posting content, that time gap may be long enough for a competitor to swoop in and capture your audience’s attention.
By keeping up a steady and consistent stream of high-quality content, you can make sure your audience will be unlikely to forget your business name and service. Keep on producing unique content and targeting different streams of audiences through high-quality lists of targeted data and consumers searching on search engines. Then be sure to share that content on every platform you can.
Marketscan
Marketscan is a leading B2B data supplier based in the UK. As an established and accredited data supplier, Marketscan has over three decades of experience providing clean and accurate data to businesses across the country, as well as a wide range of other services.
If you’re looking for high-quality and GDPR compliant data lists, Marketscan will provide you with a comprehensive service and the assurance that your data complies with all the relevant regulations. As well as supplying the data, Marketscan can also provide an expert consultancy service to provide you with all the advice and support you require.
