7 Smart Tactics To Use Content Marketing For Business Growth

“Content is king”
– Bill Gates

Bill Gates was certainly a visionary and he had visualized the significance of content marketing even before it was popular enough. In recent years, we have seen the business world undergoing paradigm changes. Parallel to these transformations, the dynamics of marketing are also evolving at a rampant pace. Today, content marketing is at the forefront of marketing strategies aimed at driving business growth.

We often analyze business success in terms of revenue generation and profitability. However, in making a business financially successful, marketing has a key role to play. How will people purchase from a brand unless they are familiar with it and find it appealing enough? This is where marketing plays such a paramount role in creating brand awareness.

Coming back to content marketing, more than 90 percent of marketers are keen on allocating large amounts of money to content marketing as a part of their long-term strategy. In fact, content marketing is only successful as the effectiveness of the strategies you apply. If you get your content marketing right, you can fast-track the advancement of your business incredibly. Otherwise, ineffective content marketing can put your brand at a disadvantage in the digital space.

The important question is, what does it actually take to grow a business with content marketing? Which content marketing strategies and approaches work the best to escalate business growth? In this thoughtful blog, we find conclusive answers to these important questions. This blog sheds light on the most effective ways in which you can add value to your brand’s growth with content marketing. So, let us get started without further ado.

Effective content marketing strategies to embrace in 2022

Create unique and informative content

Irrespective of whether you are creating content in the form of articles, videos, or podcasts, the content needs to be authentic. Your content should vouch for the authenticity and originality of your brand. To be fair, no one appreciates content that is already repetitive or does not present a unique perspective to readers.

Besides, from the content marketing point of view, it is important that brands create informative content. With informative content, you can increase the traffic to your website and hence, generate a higher number of leads. People making search queries to access informative content related to your niche can be effectively converted to leads this way.

For instance, let’s say your company offers project management solutions and software to B2B clients. By creating informative articles on the top features of project management tools, best project management practices, and so on, you can offer great value to your target audience. Similarly, if your organization offers advanced HR solutions, you can create informative content around employee experience, employee engagement, and retention.

In this way, through informative content coupled with SEO techniques, you can find more and more leads. This is where you need to optimize your content with targeted keywords to enhance the outreach of your content among your niche audience. For content marketing to be effective, you need to identify the relevant keywords and structure your content strategies accordingly.

Establish an efficient content marketing funnel

The ultimate purpose of your content marketing is to attract leads and convert them effectively by guiding them through the purchase process. Hence, for content marketing to succeed, it is imperative that you build an efficient content marketing funnel.

To explain, a content marketing funnel mechanism enables effective visualization of potential customers’ journey from their first interaction with the brand to their final purchase. This visualization is necessary to identify effective content marketing tactics that can drive sales. To further elucidate, a content marketing funnel is primarily classified into three stages listed below.

TOFU (Top of the funnel): To attract potential clients
MOFU (Middle of the funnel): To generate leads
BOFU (Bottom of the funnel): To drive purchases and payments

With a content marketing funnel, you can guide your target customers through all stages of their brand interaction and final payment. As long as you frame your content in alignment with an effective funnel, you can drive a continuous enhancement in conversions. Also, you can leverage content marketing tools to effectively execute the different stages in your content funnel. Subsequently, you can take your business to new heights.

Grow through video marketing

As discussed above, there can be different dimensions of content marketing. However, if we look at it in correlation with the latest trends, brands are reaping the benefits of aggressive video marketing. Wyzowl reveals that marketing videos have helped around 87 percent of brands to increase website traffic. Besides, almost 90 percent of marketers report that they have been able to generate a higher number of leads with engaging video content.

To add, in accordance with HubSpot, more than 54 percent of consumers want their favorite brands to create more videos. This clearly explains why video marketing is a thriving trend in the contemporary business world. Brands are connecting with a larger audience via videos and driving incredible business success with higher customer acquisition rates.

If you are not creating appealing and engaging video content yet, you are surely conceding the advantage to your competitors. Video marketing will only get bigger in the near future and you need to start harnessing its prowess starting now.

Create social proof with content

Would you purchase a product or service from a brand you do not trust enough? Of course not and in fact, no one will. In times when online brands are growing at an exponential pace, social proof has become a necessity for customers. They only want to purchase from brands that have earned high in the digital space.

However, the question is, how do people evaluate this trust factor? This is where user-generated content comes into the picture as an effective approach to creating social validation. With online reviews, appreciation posts by customers, and testimonials you can create high trust around your brand.

We must acknowledge the fact that the modern customer is very smart. Having said that, a lot of customers today check online reviews before making a purchase decision. To elucidate, as revealed by Qualtrics, more than 90 percent of customers prefer reading online reviews before proceeding with a purchase.

Thus, for your leads to get converted, social proof in the digital space has a massive role to play. This is where user-generated content has to be at the epicenter of content marketing for greater business growth. In fact, you can also apply the same approach to video marketing and post video testimonials to foster higher authenticity and trust.

You should prioritize delivering exceptional experiences to your customers so that they feel encouraged to share positive content for your brand. The greater the social validation in the digital space the higher will be the prospects of higher customer acquisition.

Publish long-form articles and blogs

Marketers often find themselves in the dilemma between short-form content and long-term content. However, insights reveal that long-form articles are more likely to offer a better content marketing performance. To validate, as per Semrush, long-form content drives higher engagement and better SEO outcomes. In fact, articles in excess of 7000 words can drive four times higher organic traffic to a business website than short-form content.

Moreover, as per Hubspot, articles with an average length of more than 2500 words get the highest number of backlinks. Having said that, you can create detailed guides directly solving the issues your niche audience is likely to face. As mentioned above, you can offer great value to your readers with informative content. You can blend informative content into long-form articles and that could be a brilliant strategy to win more backlinks.

Needless to say, with more traffic on your website, you can generate a higher number of leads and hence higher conversions. Therefore, your business website should definitely have a section for long-form articles and blogs driving multifarious business websites.

Collaborate with influencers

Collaboration is in vogue in contemporary marketing and you should definitely make the most of it. You can collaborate with renowned bloggers and social media influencers to create content for your brand. By doing so, you will be able to engage a wider audience and can substantially grow your leads.

In fact, Influencer marketing has become a vital cog in the wheel of marketing. To substantiate, as per Oberlo, more than 93 percent of marketers are leveraging influencer marketing. Besides, as per HubSpot, influencer marketing offers a high ROI of USD 18 for every dollar spent.

You can easily collaborate with the top influencers in your niche and take your brand among their audience. You need to smartly use their credibility and popularity to build brand authenticity. Also, by featuring the top content creators on your website, you can also win backlinks to their blogs. The higher the number of backlinks the greater will be the content marketing success.

Track the success of campaigns with KPIs

How do you know if your content marketing strategies are adding to your business growth or not? Of course, you will be able to assess that when there are some metrics offering insights. When you track the performance of your strategies consistently, you can precise insights into whether your campaigns are delivering the expected results or not.

This is where key performance indicators come into the picture. Content marketing has its own set of dedicated metrics to gauge the success of campaigns. You need to ensure that you track the performance of your content marketing strategies in an effective way. Doing so will give you a real-time and accurate assessment of how well your content is doing.

These metrics will further help you evaluate if your content marketing efforts are actually adding to business growth or not. However, which metrics are you exactly going to track when it comes to content marketing?

Given below is a quick list of the most relevant content marketing KPIs.

Website traffic
Number of leads
Number of conversions from leads
Transactions
Revenue
Time On Page
Page Per Session
Sentiment Analysis
Number of Backlinks
Open Rate
Click-Through Rate (CTR)

To encapsulate, businesses grow when they are able to establish themselves as credible, trustworthy, and distinguished enterprises. To succeed in this objective, businesses need effective marketing which in today’s era is quite synonymous with digital marketing. The world today revolves around content and hence, your brand needs effective content marketing to grow in a way that inspires a large number of other entrepreneurs. With the strategies above, you can excel in content marketing and steer your business to the zenith of unparalleled success.