Content Marketing 101: Make Your Website Work For You

If you’re reading this, it means content marketing works! Ok, now that we’ve proven our case, we can move on to another topic.

But in seriousness, if you are involved with marketing a brand or website, you’ve probably heard the term “content marketing.” It can seem like too broad a term to accurately define, so it’s often more confusing to people than it needs to be.

However, when done well, good content marketing is arguably the most effective form of digital marketing available to individuals or organizations looking to expand their digital presence.

Want to learn how? Great, let’s dive in!

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing refers to the creation and distribution of pieces of content that you create and host on communications channels for your brand or company. Holistically, it’s a marketing strategy intended to build trust on a topic that educates or entertains your potential customers and ultimately converts them to users of your product or service.

There isn’t one single definition of everything that content marketing encompasses, but that’s a pretty reasonable start to understand how the term is used, and how businesses use it as a strategy.

One of the largest benefits of a content marketing strategy is that all of the content is “owned.” This means that you aren’t paying for it past the point of its creation, and it can work for you indefinitely on your website, in emails, on social channels or elsewhere.

This is opposed to paid content, such as a paid search ad. Yes, this is content that your company created, and it may convert people into leads and revenue. But the moment you stop paying for it, it’s gone.

Types of Content

We probably don’t have the time to list every type of content that can be included in a content marketing strategy. But here are a few of the primary ones you’ll encounter:

Blog Articles

The bedrock of most content strategies, blogs can drive people to your website and be used in other media channels.

Videos

These could be long-form educational videos, or more short-form content designed to surprise or entertain. Either way, it helps to promote a brand or product, even if it’s merely by having the brand provide useful or entertaining information to viewers.

Podcasts

The barrier to entry for starting a podcast is lower than ever, and if you have a strong industry voice and can turn that into a successful podcast, it will help to drive sales.

EBooks

EBooks can be offered on your website as a downloadable asset, usually in exchange for some basic contact information. This can give you leads on potentially interested customers, and can also build an email or phone list for other marketing efforts.

Why Good Content Converts

Who do you turn to when you need information on a subject? The answer won’t be the same depending on the subject.

For content marketing, I might see what Hubspot has to say about a subject. Or read through one of Backlinko’s excellent articles. Or read some case studies from Neil Patel.

These are trusted names in content marketing because they’ve proven to be successful with the strategy and produce some of the most informative content anywhere on the internet for marketers.

And guess what? Millions of others are doing the same. That trust creates business for them.

If you’re an HVAC company and you have the most comprehensive cost guide to air conditioners on the internet, people who find that page will be more willing to do business with you.

I know this because that air conditioner cost article is from a company that works with us here at Leadflask, and that exact article is responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales for the company.

Trust sells, and trust is developed when you create authoritative, valuable content for your audience.

Content and the Buyer’s Journey

The buyer’s journey is a simple framework for describing the main stages customers go through when determining a purchase. They are:

Awareness - the potential buyer sees a need or becomes aware of a problem that a product or service could fix.
Consideration - They gather information about potential solutions to the problem, including companies or specific products that can solve it. Some sources will break the consideration phase into sub-phases related to researching the problem and seeking out options for solutions.
Decision - At this stage, the customer is ready to make a purchase and chooses between options previously researched.

Many purchasing decisions will go through these phases. It might only take a few minutes (e.g. picking out a new t-shirt) or it might take months (e.g. purchasing a new car or home).

How does content play a role in this journey? Glad you asked.

Not every piece of content can be all possible things to all possible customers at these different stages of the buyer’s journey. Many content marketers will instead create content specifically targeted at people who are at one of these stages.

This targeting can get even more specific, because you might then advertise that content or ad using keywords that are likely to indicate a buyer is at the awareness stage, for example.

Additionally, content on your website should ideally facilitate this journey. An introductory article or video on a problem, for example, should lead into considerations of solutions to the problem.

Sometimes this journey will happen within the same piece of content. Other times, it’s broken up between different pieces of content. But the goal is the same: help customers move from one stage to the next, utilizing your brand’s resources to learn throughout the journey.

The end result of this is that a lot of people will use your solution to a problem instead of a competitor’s.

Integrating Content Marketing With Other Channels

Web content is great because it will continue to work for you months or even years after you’ve created it. As people find it, it will help to convert new customers.

However, it’s incorrect to think of this content as existing on its own. It can be, and should be, used across different platforms and in different formats.

Social Media

Chances are, your business has a presence on at least one social media platform. It’s rarely advisable to have too many such accounts, but it can be a valuable way to reach your core audience.

Any content you create is an opportunity to share it with followers on social platforms. This could be sharing video content, other resources, or pulling information and quotes from content into short-form educational posts.

Email Marketing

For your emails to be effective, you need to have something in them that subscribers will want to engage with. Creating interesting, effective content is an excellent way to do this.

This also avoids the problem that some email marketing has, wherein every email sent is an ask for a purchase. If subscribers think you just constantly want their money, they’ll tune out. But if you’re providing value to them even when they don’t need anything from your company, they’ll remain subscribed and will be more likely to use your products and services the next time they do need a solution that you can provide.

The Sales Cycle

Content that you create to perform passive lead generation work for you can also be used proactively as part of the sales process.

If you have a dedicated sales team, they should be using your brand’s content to support the sales process. And if content doesn’t exist that directly supports the sales process, your marketing or communications team should be creating it!

This can reinforce the value of both, and strengthen both your marketing and sales efforts.

Repurposing Content

We sort of mentioned it above when talking about adapting longer content into bite-sized chunks for social media. But who says a piece of content should only be one thing?

A long-form blog article can become a shareable infographic, and from there it can become a sales-focused video that targets a specific person in the buyer’s journey. From there, you might collect a few articles and form them into a comprehensive eBook on a larger, broader topic. And then your head of marketing might appear on an industry podcast.

You won’t want to do all of these, but chances are every business should be doing one or more of them. If a piece of content is only used once and then forgotten, it probably wasn’t valuable enough to create in the first place.

If you’re creating content that is powerful and valuable for your intended audience, using it across media channels and in different forms can be a great way to make the most of your efforts.

Technical SEO for Website Content

Technical SEO refers to the optimization of content for search engines.

This article isn’t intended to get too deep into the technical weeds of content marketing. But you should know that additional depths exist for your company to explore and optimize. Below are a handful of basic best practices that your content should adhere to:

Your content should be focused on relevant and focused keywords that accurately summarize what the piece of content is about.
Any website content should have proper semantic HTML, which includes things like proper code tags for your page title, meta description, sub-headers and other relevant tags.
Your website should be mobile-friendly and indexed on Google, ideally with a sitemap submitted directly to Google for easy categorization and indexing.

From there, you can go even deeper into analytical tools that will allow you to troubleshoot technical details of your website, and others that will help you plan content topics and keywords.

How to Get Started With Content Marketing

The biggest issue we see with companies that want to start content marketing is that they spend too much time planning, and too little time creating content.

This isn’t to say having a plan isn’t important. It’s extremely important. So is quality. But the core of content marketing is content creation.

That means starting with a high-value piece of content. Then making another piece. Then another. And so on indefinitely. So how do you get started? Make an initial plan of action, then start creating. Articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, social posts, whatever your business has the resources to consistently put out.

As you do this, you’ll get better at content creation, update your long-term plans, and improve at finding the ideal audiences for your content. But you’ll be creating content throughout in order to speed up that improvement process.

You may have heard the phrase “content is King” and wondered what it means. It means that those who understand content marketing strategies and execute them efficiently can become dominant brands in their industry. This was true as content marketing was just starting on the web, and it’s true today.

The tools used to create and optimize content have changed (currently AI tools are the hyped new technology), but the underlying strategies stay the same and can benefit those who use them to their fullest.