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You may be asking a relevant question to yourself, why at all you need to content marketing?
If you look back to history, you will find that traditional advertising always yielded short term results in businesses. Advertising is targeted to get the attention of your customers and this customer’s attention is shifting gradually with the passing time.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the process in which, you solve the same problems your products or your services solve through the media you create and promote regularly.
You try to drive qualified leads with your content marketing efforts. Your content marketing efforts and the drive of qualified leads must align, so that both should be able to help your customers to solve their problems.
The main reasons of marketing contents are
- Your content is the potential tool that helps you to connect with your every customer. It also helps you to win the trust of your customers. Ultimately, it helps you to build and maintain a long lasting business relation with them.
- You can explain the Unique Selling Points of your product or service, to your customers through your content marketing. Your customers are able to understand the benefits of your product better, with your contents. This helps to eventually increase your sales in the market.
- You can stand apart from your competitors through your contents. You can explain better how your product or service is superior to your competitor’s product or service.
- You can build your brand’s authority in your niche with good content. Your brand also can build a strong reputation and be recognized in the market.
- Your content marketing strategy has to be effective to be able deliver good results in the market, in term of sales.
Organic Search is the only channel that satisfies your every reason you have for having a perfect distribution and promotion of your contents. This is over and above of your online technical operational expertise, your use of print media for publishing your contents, traditional methods of advertising, such as billboards etc, and use of social media platforms, for marketing your contents.
Super Key Performance Indicator of Content Marketing is Organic Search Traffic
You share your information for solving the problems of people, to answer their questions, or satisfy their curiosity. That is why people discover your contents in response to their searches.
You can determine your exact Return on Investment for your content marketing, but it is often non accessible data. Organic Search and Search Engine Optimization can help you define your Key Performance Indicator to measure your success in business and help you to isolate metrics for each of these Key Performance Indicators.
You can do this by deciding your organizational target for your content marketing.
These targets have undergone a change since the year 2012. But, every business organization has different priorities and effectiveness of each objective.
Organic Search is the strongest source of website traffic
You naturally create your best contents to be put on your website first. You have to know which channel, platform or source can bring maximum traffic to your website. You can go to Google analytics
Go to Acquisition>All Traffic>Channels and Look. You will get your site’s traffic by channel.
You will find that organic Search is nearly 75% of the traffic to your website. And you get this your traffic for absolutely free of any cost, whatsoever.
You can ask yourself
- How can you improve SEO to get more traffic from Google?
- What sections of your website the visitors are visiting? What are the contents that appeal to these visitors?
Organic Search helps in building brand awareness among people
The people search queries can be mainly divided into three categories
- Informational
- Navigational
- Transactional
Researchers say that traffic on unbranded items is about ten times greater than on the branded items. But the companies pay for search on these brand items and their websites focus on ranking.
When you create your content to target each type of keyword, you literally guide your customers by holding their hands at every stage of the buyer’s journey, till they make their final decision. You are able to reach to and engage and finally convert your those customers, whom you would have never met.
You build brand awareness for your products, brand recall and ultimately trust for your products, all along the way.
You can ask yourself
- Is your content appealing to your visitor, at different stages of the buyer’s journey?
- How your brand is being highlighted in your content?
Organic Search traffic concretizes your thought leadership
Search Engines are the best vehicles to build thought leadership. The pages of your contents practically start popping up for searches, when you create your contents with a Hub and Spoke approach.
Your contents when are being associated by people with topics more and more, it starts creating awareness and trust for your brand. Content marketing work has led the definition to be the featured snippets on Google. Your contents get much more exposures through Google’s changing SERPs and usage of featured snippets, its answer boxes and the knowledge panels.
You can ask yourself
- How can you create contents that answer your audience’s questions on a particular topic? How can you associate your brand with that topic?
- How can you use the Google’s featured snippets to increase your visibility?
Vistas are opened for engagement by Organic Search traffic-
The utility or relevance of your content is fully up to you as no marketing channel can help you for increasing engagement with your contents, by their own efforts only. But, when Organic Traffic visitors arrive at your page, you can
- Measure all types of engagement with each part of your content.
- Take corrective measures to increase number of engagements and encourage the visitors to visit your other pages too.
A recent SERP feature is a box, highlighting other related searches, when your visitor goes back to Google after visiting your site.
You can ask yourself
- How can you get visitors from Organic Search to bookmark your pages, to subscribe to your newsletter or to share then on social media?
- Do you have a good CTA? Do you have a good internal linking strategy, which encourages the organic visitors to visit other pages on your website?
Organic search is the best reason to do content marketing. It helps you to reach to and engage your customers, whom you could have never reached without doing content marketing.
Organic Search traffic proves to be the best source of quality leads
The three kinds of search keywords, as discussed earlier, clarify the intent of the searcher. These are also the most valuable variables in lead generations that ultimately lead to sales, whatever the intent of your searcher may be. Every customer’s journey begins, progresses and ends with some intent.
You can go to your Organic traffic analytics and then match keywords with intents. If you do it correctly, you can get exact idea of how the visitor has come along the buyer’s journey.
You can qualify the organic search visitor as marketing qualified leads or sales qualified leads, based on the search queries and the nature of the queries. You can then target them with appropriate contents.
You cannot ignore what the sales people eventually want, though you can assess through the search effects, the quality of your leads. You must not disappoint the people. Organic traffic and a HubSpot study reveals that SEO beats social media, e mail marketing, PPC and all other marketing channels at increasing fresh leads.
You can ask yourself-
- Does your keyword research help you to understand the intent of your visitors? That too at different stages of buyer’s journey?
- What are the criterions you use to classify organic visitors as leads? How can you nurture and convert them?
Organic Search traffic helps in converting better results in sales
The HubSpot study highlighted two statistics
- Using inbound marketing increased the leads to sales conversions in 42% companies.
- Half of the companies increased their sales within six months time.
Increasing Organic traffic resulted into increase in sales. Content is a big part of an integrated and search focused, inbound marketing strategy. Organic Search proves to be the single digital channel, adding most to the bottom line.
46% contribution of the increasing sales is made by a combination of SEO, blog posts, landing page copy and compelling CTA. Adding lead intelligence to it will emerge an unsurpassable sales machine. Using compelling conversion points with valuable contents in your blog post may also result into the same effect.
You can ask yourself
- Are you integrating your SEO efforts with Conversion Rate Optimization, on your website?
- Does every part of your content on your website, augment your process of sales?
Organic Search helps in improving your customer retention and loyalty
Google Search profiles every user’s search results, based on terms used by them and the URLs they click on. The returns of personalized results, deemed suitable by the algorithms, based on the user’s interests and preferences also matters in it.
The nature of previous searches made also matters in this subject. User’s location and the devices used by them also play a significant role in this. Search engines focuses on first impressions, brands, and match the real world customer’s journey and experiences with the digital. The artificial Intelligence mimics behavior of natural search.
People clicking on Google or Bing will see more of your URLs in their SERP, for search terms for related topics. Organic Search keeps sending your customers and brand advocates, back to your website. It is an opportunity for you to give them more of what they want, every time they come back.
what they want, every time they come back.
You may ask yourself
- Do you have sufficient content, enabling your customers to fully use your products or services?
- Do you create informative or authoritative contents, making people think of your brand, for everything related to your industry?
Organic Search, the most cost effective way of content distribution
You have once an approximate figure for your SEO expenses, you will be able to measure the Return on Investment and its reach, that it gives to your brand. It can also compare the ROI with other digital channels. You can then set up the goal to determine the ROI and the tracking of conversions of your current SEO and content campaigns.
You can now ask yourself
- How much do you spend on SEO and content marketing every month?
- How do you determine which channels deliver ROI for your content?
Your Content marketing flywheel is spun by Organic Search
You can always have the better chance to dominate the search results for branded terms related to your industry, if you have more number of contents in different forms.
You can create blog posts, landing pages, slide decks, social media profiles and updates, graphics, videos, and podcasts, which you will have all of them ranking for a given set of related keywords, with the 10 blue links giving way to search results populated by snippets, leading to content in a variety of formats.
You will have a competitive edge with Organic traffic and it can create a digital flywheel on Google. Optimized and best contents lead to better search visibility. More number of clicks will increase the authority of your website and this will give your contents better chances in ranking.
You can ask yourself
- What is your strategy for redistributing and repurposing your best contents?
- Where are you posting your contents? Consider the platforms, publications and media, other than your website.
Organic Content marketing is a permanent feature
SEO is continuously changing its face. But, the business benefits brought to your business by organic traffic never changes. It benefits your strategy of digital content marketing. Only you can optimize your content to take advantage of Google’s SERP features and improves your sales by improving your conversion rate.
Do you have any additional information to share with us? Contact us and share your experiences.
