In terms of content marketing, the key is to plan and maintain consistency. Look at all the ways to succeed through a long-term strategy.
Content marketing is a popular buzzword in digital marketing for good reason.
An important reason for its popularity is its effectiveness in promoting transportation and its ability to build the industry expertise of individuals or companies through education. It allows publishers to build trust by providing free information, even if your content does not explicitly promote any content, which may cause them to enter the sales channel to buy.
This implicit marketing is important because millennials (and Generation Z), who make up the majority of today’s buyers, have shown that they hate advertising.
If you want to learn more about content marketing and the potential of your site, this guide is what you need.
- What is content marketing?
- Content Marketing Statistics that can not be ignored
- How to use content Marketing in Enterprises
- Budget for content marketing
- Other content marketing skills
- Top content Marketing Challenge
- Common content marketing mistakes
- Content Marketing trend in 2022
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is about creating relevant, interesting, fascinating and valuable content. Content marketing requires consistent distribution and can change customer behavior.
Content marketing does not involve direct selling, but it can help retain and acquire customers. For it to work, the content must be attractive (or stimulate customer reaction), because if not, it really has no marketing value.
Website traffic used to be the indicator of choice when measuring the effectiveness of content marketing, but it doesn’t tell the whole story of performance-it may be more insightful to measure participation that leads to transformation.
A good example can be found in their article on the WordPress page builder on the Kinsta blog. Although this content is not directly related to Kinsta’s hosting service, it is designed to help attract WordPress users (social networking and comments) and attract new customers indirectly, and of course, search engine traffic will not be hurt.
Content marketing example
A brief history of content marketing
Content marketing is thought to have started in the 1700s, when Benjamin Franklin (Benjamin Franklin) published what would become the annual poor Richard Yearbook (Poor Richard’s Almanack) to promote his printing business.
Then, in the 1900s, the Michelin [Restaurant] Guide was developed by the Michelin Company. For a tire company, providing restaurant guides may seem like a disconnect, but the Michelin brothers use this content marketing strategy to encourage people to buy cars for road trips (and then buy Michelin tires).
The term “soap opera” refers to / originates from a Procter & Gamble radio show that began in the 1930s and features soap products such as Duz.
If you want to learn more about how early content marketing became the behemoth we know today, please check out the content Marketing Institute’s guide and infographic on the subject.
The History of content Marketing (Img src: school of content Marketing)
Content Marketing Statistics that can not be ignored
Maybe you want to know, why worry about content marketing? Almost every successful online company has a strategic content marketing plan for a reason. These figures provide a compelling reason to invest in this digital marketing strategy:
- 90% of marketers use content marketing (although 70% of marketers lack consistent or integrated content strategies).
- Content marketing leaders have eight times more website traffic than non-leaders.
- Although the cost of content marketing is 62% lower than that of external marketing, it generates more than three times as many potential customers.
- Compared with small businesses without blogs, small businesses with blogs have 126% higher potential customer growth. This is because 77% of Internet users read blogs.
- The conversion rate of content marketing is 6 times higher than that of other methods.
- Companies that post blog content have 434% more search index pages than those that don’t.
In fact, we can use content marketing and SEO to increase the site’s natural traffic (no advertising or social media) by 517% within 13 months.
Natural flow growth within 13 months
How to use content Marketing in Enterprises
Goals in the top three of content marketing include:
- Generate prospects (59%)
- Build thought leadership (43%)
- Create / increase brand awareness (40%)
The goal of content marketing (data source: B2B Slideshare)
In addition, content marketing can also be used to:
- Get new customers and retain old customers
- Increase traffic for your website
- Increase customer loyalty
- Use content marketing as a way to help educate customers (blog + tutorial skills), which in turn helps reduce support time and tickets.
According to Inc, content marketing usually affects almost all other online strategies. For example:
- The content complements your SEO policy by providing more inbound links, thereby increasing your domain permissions.
- You can reuse articles for social media activities and email marketing.
- It can encourage more email registration, especially if you provide “exclusive” content, such as reports or white papers.
- Cross-promotion of content marketing can open the door for you to build relationships with other brands.
Content marketing can also be used as a separate source of revenue for businesses, such as when creating deep content that customers can buy, such as e-books. This is also known as inbound marketing.
Budget for content marketing
75% of companies are increasing their investment in content marketing.
Content marketers allocate an average of 28% of their marketing budget to content marketing, while more effective B2B marketers allocate 42%. The best content marketers allocate 46% of their total marketing budget to this strategy.
Before deciding on a specific content marketing budget, determine whether you really need it (make sure it is consistent with your marketing and business goals) and whether you will benefit from it.
Although it is a hot topic for a reason, the return on investment of some types of enterprises from content marketing is not as good as that they get through other channels. Knowing the return on investment of your other efforts is necessary to determine whether content marketing is worth continuing investment.
How do you determine the current return on investment in content marketing? An easy way to do this is to check the Google Analytics (assuming you have set a goal). Click convert → Target → Overview. Look at Source/Medium and look at the current ranking of “google / organic”, and then make an informed decision. In the following example, you can see more than 48%!
- If natural traffic is already your first medium of transformation, then you know that content marketing is working, and maybe you should pour more on the fire, as they say. If there’s anything useful to you, let nature take its course.
- If natural traffic accounts for a very low proportion of your conversion, you may need to find out why. Maybe your content is ranking? Maybe your readers are not involved? Or maybe you just didn’t post enough.
Return on investment of natural flow
The cost of content marketing
Although many people know that natural traffic is “free” in terms of promotion, content creation is another matter. Here are some of the most common costs related to content marketing that you need to know and budget:
Your web page
The design of the website is important because it provides a viewing medium for your content. You may have the best content in the world, but your website visitors can’t use your site or read your content because of aesthetic or usability problems, and your content marketing campaign won’t work at all. The technical structure of your site affects SEO, and SEO in turn affects the effectiveness of content marketing campaigns.
According to Ross Hodgins, founder of Siege Media, a good website is expected to cost at least $5000 to $6000. This target can be as high as $20000. You can certainly build your site more cheaply (for example, when customizing a theme rather than delegating a fully custom design), but low prices often indicate poor quality and may even be a technical SEO problem!
Blog article
Blog articles are an important aspect of content marketing. They are the main drivers of traffic, are important contributors to SEO, and can influence your audience by positioning your brand as an industry thought leader.
Like the website, you can buy blog article packages at various prices. Some freelancers (especially those from low-cost third world countries) offer 5-1000 word blog posts for as little as $1 each! But it’s important to realize that in this situation, as in the rest of your life, you get what you give.
Cheap content on iWriter
When working with people who try to write for a first language that is not their own, you will inevitably have to compensate for grammar / spelling problems. In addition, when working with cheap writers, you can’t expect SEO knowledge to be integrated into their processes. It is also important to remember that Google does a readability score analysis of your content to determine relevance to your users. Here’s what Google webmaster trend analyst John Mueller said:
We have done a lot to try to determine the relevance of pages to user queries-complex pages can be useful for the right audience or query, while simpler pages for others. Speak in the language of the audience; show your brilliance in a way that they can understand. -John (@ JohnMu) March 2, 2018
Again, all of this represents the time that you or the person you end up paying will have to consider the cost of creating the content. So don’t skip proofreading it is important and critical. In this detailed blog post, we have collected 19 of our best proofreading tips to make sure you read them.
When it comes to average blog posts, the cost is really different. On average, a 500-word blog post can give you back $150 to $350, but a blog post written by the best writer can get you to give back $2000 worth of 2000-word posts. When working with top writers, you can expect a well-thought-out, well-researched, well-written final product-with the fewest editors, if any.
Before you think a 500-word blog post will do this every time, understand that long assets (such as basic content) are needed to succeed in order to gain the SEO advantage of content marketing. If you are stingy with words (and budgets), content marketing may not work for you in the end!
Here are some recommended locations for high-quality content:
- Codeless
- WriterAccess
Information chart
Content marketing is not just about written words. A well-designed infographic can cost $2000 to $3000, while animated infographics can cost as much as $6000!
It is expected to spend $1000 to $20000 a month on social media marketing. This does not always include advertising fees, and using social media ads (such as Facebook ads, Pinterest ads, and LinkedIn ads) can cost between $10 and $100 per post (or even higher for higher-level ads).
Hold your social media marketing service provider accountable by asking for analytical reports on indicators such as engagement and mood.
Video
Ultra-high-quality video can cost you at least $3000 per minute, even though it’s really high-end! Indeed, video content marketing is more accessible than ever for companies willing to test. You don’t need expensive production tools or fancy editing software-all you really need is a camera and an application like iMovie!
Interestingly, according to the 2017 SOCE report, marketers often overestimate how much they have to pay for content marketing. For example, according to the report, the cost of a single marketing video is estimated to be $1208, while the cost of producing them (on average) is only half ($631).
Content promotion
Siege Media recommends 16 hours of content promotion per month, and recommends that you pay a content marketing expert a fee of $75 to $85 per hour. This results in a writing cost of about $1250 to $1500 per month to ensure that your hard-working content reaches the right audience.
We recently released a very large PHP benchmark article and set up a full Trello card just for outreach (after the article was released). Promoting your content may be as important or even more important as creating it. It won’t help you if no one sees it!
Outreaching and promotion
Note that there are also hidden costs associated with content marketing, such as the time you have to spend on competitor research, content review, project management, and design.
Bottom line?
These figures are only used as a guide for you to invest in content marketing.
There are no industry standards.
Different business types (and sizes) have very different budgets-especially when comparing small businesses with Fortune 500 companies.
Other content marketing skills
Are you ready for the good news? Not all content has to be unique / fresh to achieve business goals!
As a general rule, content is created by 65% (involving internal employees or outsourced to organizations or freelancers / contributors), 25% planning, and 10% federation. More than 50% of marketers who plan content say this increases their brand awareness, ideological leadership, search engine optimization, web traffic and buyer participation.
The top five departments responsible for creating content are enterprise marketing (53%), product marketing (39%), subject matter experts (36%), public relations / communication (32%), or content creation outsourced to external agencies or consultants (30%). Marketers outsource 18% of the content, but the best marketers outsource 24% of the content to meet demand in a timely manner. The rest of the content is created, planned or associated internally.
The top five skills that content marketing teams lack today include content creation, content leadership / strategy, content promotion, performance management / metrics, and subject matter expertise.
The two most outsourced content marketing activities are writing (44%) and design (41%).
Length and frequency of publication
How long will it take for the content to be valid? On average, 18% of corporate blog posts are 750 words or more.
Long format content is generally considered to be the most efficient because it is 40.54% higher than short format content. On that note:
- The number of bloggers with more than 2000 words is six times that of 2014.
- Compared with 2015, the number of bloggers who wrote 500 words or less decreased by 12%.
CoSchedule deleted their best-performing blog posts, which is what they found related to the length of the content. As you can see, there is no short content to find.
Best performing blog posts (photo source: CoSchedule)
The effective length depends on your goal. If it is:
- Get blog comments: 275 words.
- Get social sharing: 6-1500 words is your goal.
- Google ranking: the goal is 2500 words.
Tip: we find that the above content is correct on our own website, longer articles will only rank higher and increase the customer’s on-site time (an important indicator of participation! ).
For frequency, continue testing and look at your own data to see what your visitors like. Companies that publish more than 16 articles a month have four times more traffic than those that publish 0 to 4 times. While this may seem like an impossible feat for your existing team, consider the above facts about how top content marketers outsource more content creation.
Here are two WordPress plug-ins that can help solve all the content marketing confusion and make your life easier:
1. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is really the dream of content marketers.
When you draft your content, you are often inspired by social media articles that you only know will spread like a virus. With CoSchedule, you can record these social marketing brainwaves without interrupting your blog post writing process. The plug-in conveniently places a box below the article editor that you can use to write and schedule social media articles for that particular blog post on site.
WordPress plug-in-CoSchedule
Scheduling social media articles is nothing new (especially using popular tools like Buffer and HootSuite), but what’s cool about CoSchedule is that you can schedule articles according to when they are posted.
For example, you can send a specific tweet or Facebook article 48 hours after posting. If you delay posting an article, the scheduled social media article will automatically adjust accordingly, allowing you to do one less thing to follow.
By synchronizing the additional capabilities of all social media profiles on all major platforms in one place, you will eventually save yourself a lot of time.
If you are looking for more control, you can use a visual drag-and-drop calendar, which combines your scheduled blog posts and social media articles-you can see all the content you schedule in a convenient calendar.
Finally, CoSchedule has an excellent user interface that supports team communication and collaboration. You can assign tasks, send reminders, and even have conversations directly in the native UI.
With such a wide range of features in one place, it’s not surprising to learn that CoSchedule is a paid plug-in. However, any serious content marketer can test the water through a free trial. There is no doubt that CoSchedule is one of the best content marketing plug-ins, and it’s worth it.
2. Editorial Calendar
Not every content marketer has a CoSchedule budget. So you might also want to take a look at this free alternative, the Editorial Calendar plug-in.
WordPress plug-in-Editorial Calendar
Understandably, this plug-in lacks much of the gaudy CoSchedule plug-in, but if you’re just looking for an easy way to organize your content, editing the calendar is still perfect.
Like previous plug-ins, there is a drag-and-drop calendar that makes it easy to visualize and edit the date and time your post is scheduled to be posted. This time, however, there is no social media release schedule.
If you want to change the scheduled time of the article, simply drag the article to a different date and enter a custom time. There is no doubt that this plug-in will save you a lot of time if you do large-scale scheduling / rescheduling yourself. By contrast, it is time-consuming to manually make changes each time you enter the post-editor.
The editing calendar also groups all unscheduled articles together, so you can quickly and easily put an article in the blanks of the content schedule. That’s what it’s really good at-calendars can remind you to post unplanned posts and prevent them from slipping away from my network and into unreleased purgatory.
This plug-in is absolutely necessary for any content marketer looking for a free solution to help them keep track of their release plans.
Popular content formats
Content marketing has been developing, but it is by no means unnecessary. There are many different forms of content-not just text.
Some of the most popular forms of content marketing include case studies, press releases, e-books, white papers, blogs, videos, online articles, webinars, e-newsletters, social content, and infographics.
Which format you choose depends on your intention or purpose. If marketers have to choose a format, they will choose vision over blogs (41%, up from 37% in 2016, the first time images have surpassed blogs).
The top three content marketing strategies include social media (93%), case studies (82%) and blogs (81%), but the most effective are case studies (78% visited case studies in 2017 and more than 72% in 2016), white papers and e-books. It is estimated that by 2021, other media such as podcasts and videos will account for 80% of Internet content.
Top content marketing strategy (data source: content Marketing Institute)
Buyers are also more likely to exchange contact information for webinars (79%), white papers (76%) and e-books (63%). They are less likely to share contact information about videos and podcasts (19% each). In addition, B2B marketers (75%) are more likely to use blogs than B2C marketers (61%). Compared with B2B marketers (24%), B2C marketers are more likely to use real-time video (30%).
Content distribution channels and promotion
Common distribution channels include websites, blogs, and social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. For video, content marketers can rely on Facebook (they have enhanced video capabilities as a content format of choice), Instagram, YouTube, and / or Vimeo.
- LinkedIn is the preferred social media channel for sharing business content (84%), but overall, email is the preferred channel for sharing a variety of content (94%).
- The top five most effective social media platforms that provide content and attract audiences are LinkedIn (82 per cent), Twitter (66 per cent), YouTube (64 per cent), Facebook (41 per cent) and SlideShare (38 per cent).
- The top three channels that B2B marketers use to promote / distribute content are search engine marketing (66%), print or other offline promotions (57%), and traditional online banner advertising (55%).
- Frequently used paid social media marketing methods include Facebook advertising (84 per cent), Google advertising (41 per cent), LinkedIn advertising (18 per cent), Twitter advertising (17 per cent), YouTube advertising (12 per cent) and promoting blog posts (7 per cent).
- 23% of companies spend 6-10 hours a week promoting content on social media, while 20% spend more than 21 hours a week.
- 91% of marketers found that spending just six hours a week on social media promotion increased business exposure, while 81% said it increased traffic.
Content marketing index
The top five content marketing indicators tracked by marketers are:
- Network traffic / visits (63%)
- View / download (59%)
- Number of potential customers (42%)
- Prospect quality (39%)
- Social media sharing (36%)
But only 30% of marketers think they can effectively measure the impact of content marketing.
Top content Marketing Challenge
The content Marketing Institute has identified some of the major challenges faced by B2B marketers in terms of content marketing:
- Create compelling content (60%)
- Measure content effectiveness (57%)
- Maintain consistency of production content (57%)
- Measure the return on investment of content marketing programs (52%)
- Lack of budget (35%)
In addition, marketers have identified their primary needs from the perspective of content marketing:
- Audience identification and positioning (67%)
- Analysis (67%)
- Create (60%)
- Distribution (53%)
- Curating and aggregating (43%)
Common content marketing mistakes
There are many ways in which content marketing can go wrong-these examples represent the most common mistakes:
1. Failed to plan or develop content marketing strategy.
As the saying goes, “if you don’t plan, you will fail.” If you do not have a plan or strategy, you will create content at will, which may cause you to fail.
You might think companies already know this, but 44% of marketers say their companies don’t have a written strategy for managing content as business assets. Only 42% of organizations have executives in charge of content marketing strategies.
two。 Do not split the content.
Not dividing the content is like casting a big net and getting nothing. Personalized content is important, and to some extent, segmentation helps to achieve this goal.
Here are some ways to split the content:
- Product / service category (53%)
- Buyer role (40%)
- Specific vertical (35%)
- Sales cycle phase (32%)
- Pain points (28%)
3. Not diversified.
Content marketing is like an investment: to get the best return, you need to diversify.
Not all viewers can be captured on a single media. By diversifying, you can reach as many audiences as possible and capture new prospects.
4. No promotional content.
There are a lot of companies that spend time making content and want to know why they don’t get any traffic-this is usually a feature that fails to promote content.
If they don’t know that a new article is available, who will read your content?
You should devote at least as much energy to promoting your content as you put into preparing the content. Yes, it’s not an easy thing!
Send customized emails to influencers and ask them to share them with their followers. You will be amazed at how many people are happy to share quality content! Share it on social media and other high-traffic sites. This will vary from niche to niche, but Reddit and HackerNews are great, and if you click on the top of the page, your traffic can soar overnight.
5. Do not measure or use your data.
If you do not have your CMS, install analysis software, such as Google Analytics. This is very helpful in determining which aspects of content marketing work need to be adjusted and improved. You can go a step further and use tools such as Accuranker to track the organic keyword rankings of your content. SEO is an important part of content marketing.
Accuranker SEO tool
6. Impatient.
Because content marketing is a long-term strategy, it may take a while for companies to get any return from it. Content marketing operates like a bank’s compound interest. Content marketing may take about 6-12 months to show significant results and begin to build a reputation for your company in the industry. As long as you focus on publishing great content, the returns will continue to increase.
7. Resist change.
Content marketing strategies change all the time, and if you can’t keep up, you’re sure to fall behind. Follow the thought leaders of the industry and let yourself understand the new strategies and tactics.
8. Do not invest in design.
Content always comes first, but design is also important because it reflects the time and effort you spend on your work, which is a good mirror for your readers. People like beautiful things, so once you spend a few days completing your wonderful content, it’s worth paying attention to the design. Since your article is likely to be a long reading, not to make your eyes nervous when reading is a key factor.
Content Marketing trend in 2022
Provide your company with the best chance of successful content marketing in 2022 by familiarizing yourself with the following trends:
Video will continue to dominate.
Video is a big deal in 202021 and will continue to do so in 2022. According to Hubspot, marketers are giving priority to video content, with 48 per cent planning to add Youtube video and 46 per cent planning to add Facebook video to their strategy in 2022.
In addition, Search Engine Journal found that the participation of their live videos was 178 per cent higher than their usual posts, and the coverage of these videos doubled. Whether it’s recording video, long video, short video, live video, 360 video, fleeting video, or animated video, there must be a place for video in 2022.
Marketers will be smarter to understand why they create content.
It is said that content marketing is a long-term strategy, but one of the things we can look forward to in 2022 is to establish content as the cornerstone of all marketing strategies.
Rebecca Lieb, author of content, the Atomic particles of Marketing, “I’ve realized that marketing is impossible without content.” Social media can’t work without content, and neither can paid advertising. Without content, there will be no progress in the whole marketing field.
Because brands recognize the importance of content, they also try to create content without selling intentions. For example, Apple is reported to be investing $1 billion in content creation.
Brand transparency.
Just because content marketing does not explicitly sell the product does not mean that customers will not get tired of your content in some cases.
Millennials especially appreciate brands giving back to the environment or philanthropy, but they are increasingly wary that brands may use these strategies for display. Looking ahead, brands need to be more transparent about their content creation.
At the same time, brands and influencers should work together to disclose more transparently whether posts are sponsored or not. FTC has taken steps to this end by sending letters to 90 bloggers disclosing their relationship with the brand.
The super personalization of the content.
One of the biggest content marketing mistakes and challenges is creating personalized content. In the past, brands would create an article or video for the event, but now they may create a variety of variants to attract different audiences.
YouTube currently offers a feature called Director’s Mix, which allows brands to provide thousands of videos in an event, based on demographics, online behavior, and even the actual location that a person has visited (based on Google Map data).
Some marketers may even turn to machine learning or artificial intelligence to create “intelligent content”, which is created by combining search marketing, artificial intelligence and content marketing.
Kevin Bobowski, senior vice president of marketing at BrightEdge, explained: “one example of smart content is the use of AI to identify what consumers want, what consumers naturally search for, and where consumers search.”
He added: “using this information, content marketers can create content around these keywords and phrases aimed at key audiences. This customer-centric approach makes content easier to find on search engine ranking pages.
Another strategy in line with content personalization is content localization. This applies to situations where content outside some countries does not apply.
Change the content media.
In addition to video, marketers can also expect to distribute content through IoT, virtual reality, and augmented reality.
For example, Swedish brand Ikea has an augmented reality app that allows you to see how their furniture looks in your room. The American Heart Association also has an [Amazon] Alexa integration that tells you the steps of CPR and details warning signs of stroke and heart attack.
However, according to John Haynsworth, a senior content strategist in marketing, using VR and AR is still ideal for many content marketers due to barriers to access to the device (and cost), which makes it difficult to deliver these experiences on a large scale. Agent POP.
Although there are a variety of content marketing media available, you don’t have to use them all; choose those that are right for your brand and audience.
Key points of content Marketing in 2022
Content marketing has changed a lot since it first appeared in Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard Yearbook, and it seems likely to change faster in recent years as digital marketers pay more and more attention to it.
In terms of content marketing, the exact medium you use is not as important as having a strategy and consistency. By understanding costs and trends, you can prepare for success.
