Hello! You may not know me yet, my name is Gaurav Rajput, I am the CEO of Enjoy Minder and I heard that you want to understand what is Content Marketing.
Lately, there have been a lot of people interested in this topic, with the same doubts as you, and what I can already tell you is that Content Marketing is such a complete strategy that I won’t be able to explain it to you in just three lines!
That’s why I created this content so that you can understand everything in the best possible way. Let’s go!
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is a Marketing strategy that uses content production and sharing to attract and engage potential customers — until, of course, they become customers of your business!
But I must warn you: just because a company creates and shares content on digital channels does not mean it is actually putting this strategy into practice.
When we define what is Content Marketing, we are considering strategic content. In other words, content that is created based on data that profiles consumer preferences and communicates with them in a persuasive way, with the aim of generating concrete results — or, if I may say so, more money in your company’s coffers!
That’s why knowing your customer personas and journey, for example, is essential for any Content Marketing strategy. After all, only by having this knowledge will you be able to create content that truly generates value for your audience!
Why is Content Marketing so strategic?
One of the main reasons that makes Content Marketing so strategic is quite simple: it is the Digital Marketing strategy that best adapts to consumer behavior.
Content Marketing gained strength by relying on the creation of content aimed at meeting the needs and preferences of the public, whether in the subject matter addressed or the format of the content — and so on.
In this way, this strategy can make the company attract and maintain a relationship with potential customers (and clients) much more effectively!
In addition, content can be used in SEO strategies, for example, helping your brand to rank in search engine results, such as Google.
So, the better your content ranks:
- More traffic will be attracted to your website and, consequently, more opportunities to convert visitors into leads and sales;
- Your brand’s visibility will be greater, making it better known and familiar to your audience.
Among other benefits, Content Marketing also helps educate the market, build brand authority and build customer loyalty!
Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing: how do they connect?
It’s quite common for people to think that Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing are the same thing — and much of this confusion occurs because Inbound Marketing uses Content Marketing as one of its main tools!
However, there is a small and subtle difference between these two ways of doing Digital Marketing, which can be seen when analyzing the operationalization and purpose of each of the strategies:
Imagine the case of a company that sells its products through supermarkets — a place over which it has no control. In this case, generating leads will not make this brand sell more, since the sale is not made directly and, therefore, should not be its objective.
The objective of this brand, in fact, should be to influence the consumer’s choice so that, when they are in the supermarket, they opt for its product over any other competitor that is also present at the point of sale.
And this is achieved through Content Marketing, by working on elements that generate the familiarity necessary to stimulate the desire and preference for a specific brand’s product or service!
In Inbound Marketing, this does not happen in the same way: although it also uses content in its actions, the intention is different.
The objective of Inbound Marketing is to generate leads, which will have a relationship with the brand nurtured until the sale is made — and this sale is made through a channel that the brand itself has control over.
In the first case (industry), it is even possible to use Inbound Marketing to discover a potential customer and continue providing content to them through Email Marketing, for example, but this email nurturing will be using Content Marketing to generate need in the consumer, not to sell directly!
Fundamentals of Marketing Content Creation
You’ve seen so far that the answer to what Content Marketing is simple:
- This is another “special” strategy within Digital Marketing;
- Focused on creating and distributing relevant and valuable materials to a specific target audience;
- Aiming to attract, engage and convert curious people into buyers!
To have the minimum control over the results to be extracted from this type of strategy, three fundamentals are essential when it comes to raising awareness among your audience on the Internet regarding the ideas, products or services that your brand offers.
I’ll explain each of the three fundamentals below!
Key elements
Since the entire conquest strategy is based on creating fascinating content to attract and convert curious people into an audience that actually buys, knowing your target audience is the determining factor in selling more for less!
To identify the ideal audience — the one that would embrace your brand, your products or your services — you first need to know what type of company you have and what this investment requires to grow.
Knowing this is essential to prioritize the objectives that bring your company closer to this growth, and that become reality through the execution of your Content Marketing strategy!
By understanding the end result to be achieved, it becomes much easier to figure out what steps will be necessary to get there!
And to get the most out of these efforts, you will also need to identify which buyer profiles your content will be aimed at within your general target audience!
Once you’ve got a clear picture of who your ideal customers are in the internet crowd, the next step is to ensure that your content marketing elements maintain an unbreakable line of quality to ensure that:
- SEO techniques put your posts in front of the right people through search engines;
- The relevance of this content in the lives of potential customers increases;
- Your company avoids wasting resources such as time, productivity or money on channels and platforms with the wrong audience!
With the key elements aligned, the next step is to decide which metrics to guide you when collecting data based on your Marketing actions, to ensure that your company gets where it wants to go!
Measurement and analysis of results
To recap, the only way to know whether a Content Marketing strategy can work or not is:
- Creating goals to achieve your objectives;
- Breaking these goals down into singular actions;
- And compare the results of these actions with the expected result of each goal.
KPIs or “Key Performance Indicators” , as the name suggests, are key performance indicators that indicate how close or far a goal is from being achieved!
The analysis of these KPIs is done within a Digital Marketing tool capable of:
- Collect;
- Categorize;
- And present accurate numbers with invaluable information about audience behavior and the performance of your content!
Measurement is essential in Content Marketing because it feeds the production of materials:
- More irresistible, which leads to a considerable increase in the number of new leads;
- With increasingly better quality, due to easy identification of what the public likes to consume;
- And fascinating, converting leads into paying customers and, consequently, into recurring buyers of your brand!
Some metrics to be observed within the most popular Content Marketing strategies — and Digital Marketing planning in general — involve:
- The conversion rate, which shows how many people took an action guided by your company’s communication, including the transition from curious to buyer;
- Engagement rates, which include likes, tags, shares, comment activity, and many other signs that the audience is engaging with the brand’s posts;
- And the time users spend consuming content, or staying on each page on your business website.
With so much good information like this, strategies to sell more online through Digital Marketing can be adjusted in a granular, immediate way, and best of all: without guesswork!
Challenges and opportunities
The most common challenges businesses face when trying to increase their sales with Content Marketing often involve a lack of experience with sales approaches that are centered around Customer Success rather than just the product, and an impatience for immediate results rather than sustainable long-term results.
For this reason, the third foundation that makes up Content Marketing involves discovering what challenges your company may face during the implementation of a strategy and planning active ways to overcome them.
This is where working with an experienced content agency, like Enjoy Minder, can help your business see and fix the flaws that you and your partners no longer see, and ensure that opportunities for success are seized without having to bet your resources on fatal games of trial and error!
Looking at problems so closely also brings new perspectives on what can be explored as opportunities from overcoming challenges and paves the road that leads to the genesis of originality, the nurturing of authority, and the innovation that generates sales!
How to plan Content Marketing?
See how you can’t talk about Content Marketing without talking about planning?
Luckily for you, there are very well-defined levels of planning to follow when creating strategies focused on increasing attraction, engagement and conversion of leads, through the publication of valuable content.
Listed in order of importance, they are:
- The decision of which single, measurable and achievable objective to take off paper and transform into reality through efforts aimed at achieving targets (KPIs) through the creation of content for the Internet;
- Defining personas (detailed portraits of your perfect customers within your target audience) which, as you saw earlier, ensures that all content is based on the possibility of impacting the right people — starting a customer journey that is completely personalized for each of them;
- Competitor analysis, to find out what mistakes your competitors are making that you should avoid, what market demands they are ignoring and that your company could dominate, and what elements your content cannot fail to include to become competitive and express the differentiation of your business to guarantee a click in the results of searches made by search engines;
- The definition of your editorial lines, which are basically the best themes, chosen from among the most popular and interesting subjects for the personas to be affected by your business, and which will be used to direct all content creation in the most diverse formats and for the different platforms where your perfect audience spends the most time;
- And the editorial calendar, which serves to organize and set a deadline for approved themes to be produced by your team, in addition to those already created and waiting for the publication date.
Each of the steps listed above should be broken down into even more specific steps within themselves to ensure that the full scope of planning is covered.
One example is when defining your editorial lines: in addition to deciding which topics to cover, you will also need to spend time considering the best keywords for SEO (something normally defined in the agenda of each content).
Another example would be when defining personas: what would be the tone of voice and the strongest terms to use within content and trigger action in the public?
To dive even deeper into this process, check out the guide I’ve put together for you below:
What is Content Marketing for Organic?
The top of Google
At Enjoy Minder, content production is an essential pillar of our Digital Marketing strategy: more than 80% of our sales come from SEO actions, made possible through Content Marketing!
And we achieve this because we are present in the micro-moments of our potential clients’ professional lives — stimuli that occur in their routine and that lead them to turn to Google to find an answer to the need they are feeling:
Every time they repeat this behavior and find Enjoy Minder, they gain more knowledge and awareness about who we are, and they begin to realize that we can help them find a solution.
To do this, being at the top of Google is essential, as it is only the first three results that attract the most clicks!
In fact, it also ends up generating an effect that we call Halo:
The Halo Effect
The Halo effect is a psychological phenomenon in which a single characteristic of something ends up influencing how people perceive the other characteristics of that same thing.
Thus, if a person has a characteristic that is considered very positive, for example, there is a great chance that their other characteristics will also be valued — whether they are positive or negative.
In Digital Marketing, this effect also occurs: when accessing a company’s website, if it doesn’t load quickly, with good usability and a good design, we automatically understand that the company’s products or services may not be that good!
The same goes for blog content: if it is found during a search, but does not answer the question (or even generates even more questions), the experience provided by this waste of time is so negative that it will be forever marked in our minds — and, worst of all, associated with the company that made us go through this. After all, the first impression is the one that lasts! Right?
And it is for reasons like this that those companies that are best positioned on Google, for example, tend to be considered market leaders, the most trustworthy and the best option to buy from. Have you noticed this?
Several companies take advantage of the Halo effect to sell more, but what many still don’t know, as they have never achieved the much-dreamed-of number 1 position, is the incredible sales result provided by being at the top of Google:
More visibility, more customers!
I can say that content, in Enjoy Minder’s current strategy, serves mainly two connected purposes:
- Rank on Google;
- Attract potential customers, generating more commercial opportunities.
In fact, there are three ways for a person to become a customer. They search on Google, find our content among the results and, through this content:
- She was delighted and got in touch, creating an immediate opportunity for our sales team;
- If you are interested in more advanced content — called rich material — and, to access it, you become a lead. We then continue the conversation with you via email, nurturing you with some Inbound Marketing actions, until you decide to buy;
- You read the blog content, find what you wanted and leave, but continue on your purchasing journey and start looking for answers to other questions that arise as you move towards the purchasing decision — and Enjoy Minder also appears with an answer!
Then this person finds us again several times, during these new searches , making our brand increasingly familiar to them — and, in this way, the level of trust they have in our brand also increases!
At the same time, we invest in raising awareness among these people so that they are convinced that they need the services we offer and that we are the best purchasing option.
Count on Orgânica to produce content!
At this point, I think there is no doubt: content production is truly capable of building a lifetime asset of organic traffic and engagement for your company!
This happens by making your brand a trusted source of learning, inspiration and connection with your potential customers, ensuring they get exactly what they expect from your business.
After all, the most literal definition of what Content Marketing is can be summed up as an informed strategy within Digital Marketing, and focused on attracting, winning over and converting a curious person into a buyer!
By taking the focus off the product and focusing all of your business’ attention on ensuring that your customer is understood, analyzed and leaves this relationship satisfied, you make new leads start to chase your offers — instead of continuing to force a sale down their throats!
Since the only way to communicate with the public from a distance is through what your brand has to say through rich and relevant materials published on the Internet, investing in Content Marketing is the right decision for those who need to:
- Sell more to new customers;
- Generate more repeat buyers;
- Gain solid authority in the market!
Just don’t forget that Content Marketing depends on three fundamentals to work, which are:
- The key elements, which involve the target audience, the persona and the platforms they use on the Internet;
- Continuous measurement of data, to ensure that the analysis of results is always well-informed and immune to errors;
- And the identification of challenges and opportunities, which can occur in parallel and which require proactive and impartial preparation on the part of your company!
To set up a Content Marketing strategy itself, you need to ensure that the five stages of your planning go through the domains presented in this guide, such as:
- The decision of which goal to pursue at a time;
- Identifying your most profitable personas;
- Analysis of your competition and your competitors;
- The listing of your editorial line with the themes to be explored (and with SEO);
- And the creation of a content calendar for periodic publication!
By requesting a completely free Digital Marketing diagnosis from Enjoy Minder, you will receive analyses to discover which fundamentals or planning steps are missing in the development of your content to attract the perfect type of customer : the one who buys what your brand sells!
As here at Enjoy Minder we always seek to understand where our clients want to go in order to offer strategies that are most aligned with their objectives, we apply the most innovative technology on the market to create this diagnosis.
Through it, you will count on the expertise of our multidisciplinary team (with expertise in everything from Marketing to technology) to help you achieve the results your company deserves!
Don’t waste time: request a diagnosis and find out what our Digital Marketing agency can do for you!
Here’s a spoiler — for over 16 years, we’ve been making the impossible come true!
