People often fail at content marketing because they don’t really understand it. There’s more to content marketing than sticking a couple of videos on Facebook or writing an article for LinkedIn.

According to the Content Marketing Institute:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” 

But what does that actually mean? Let’s break it down…

All too often, people dive into content marketing without a strategy. They just create content without thinking about who it is for or why they are creating it.

It’s easy to feel like you are making progress if you get lots of followers, likes and views on a social media post. But if those followers, likes, and views don’t turn into profitable customer action, have you really achieved your objective?

Getting attention is only the first step. Your content should move people through a process from never having heard of you to becoming a customer. You need to attract your ideal clients, nurture them, and then convert them into paying customers.

And to do that, you need content for each stage - some to attract, some to nurture, and some to convert.

Another mistake people make with content marketing is focusing on the creation part but not the distribution.

Sticking a blog post on your website won’t magically generate a hundred new leads overnight – it just doesn’t work like that.

It’s not a case of ‘if you build it, they will come’. You have to actually let people know your content exists.

Social media and email are my favourite channels for distributing content, but you can also use paid ads, influencer marketing, or sponsored links.

Don’t just create any old content and hope for the best. If you want your content to generate leads, you need to make it:

• Valuable – it has to be something your ideal client wants – information, advice, or entertainment
• Relevant – it’s got to be relevant to your audience – you don’t want to attract the wrong people
• Consistent – don’t just turn up when you want to sell something – be consistently visible

The whole point of content marketing is to attract your ideal clients, so you’ve got to know who they are. If you don’t, it will be much harder to create relevant content or achieve your goals.

And now we come to the main goal of any marketing, which is to sell. What’s the point of building an audience, getting subscribers, or driving traffic to your site if you are never going to turn any of those followers, subscribers, or website visitors into customers?

If you create content simply for the sake of creating content, you might get results, but you probably won’t get the results you want.

Content marketing is about building a relationship with potential clients so that when they are in the market for your products or services, they’ll be more likely to buy from you.

I like to think of it as doing customer service backwards. Rather than waiting until somebody becomes a client or customer before showing them how good you are, show them how good you are in advance so that they want to become a client or customer.

Through your content, you can convey your passion, your knowledge, your expertise and your company values. If your content matches your brand, it will attract the type of customers you want.

And as well as attracting new clients, your content will help you nurture relationships with existing clients too.

The main purpose of any type of marketing is to attract new customers, and content marketing is no different. How it works will depend on how you approach it and the type of content you create.

Creating content for your website (for example, articles like this one) is a good way of increasing the number of visitors.

You can share links to your content on any social media platform, other people can share those links on social media, and other company websites can link back to the content.

The more your content is shared, the more people it will reach, and the more clicks you are likely to get. This will increase your website traffic, and some of those visitors will then go on to become customers.

Another great way to use content as a marketing tool is as a ‘lead magnet’. I don’t particularly like the phrase, but I do like the concept.

You create useful content that people can access for free if they sign up. This can be a PDF, an e-book, a training course, email content, a video, a podcast, a webinar or any other type of relevant content.

It doesn’t matter what type of content your lead magnet is, as long as it is of value to your target audience and delivers on what you promise. If people sign up to receive something and it isn’t what they expected, they are going to feel cheated.

The idea is that your lead magnet starts a relationship with potential customers. The free content gives them an insight into what kind of person or company you are and helps you establish credibility. You can then ask them to subscribe to ongoing communications and provide information about your paid services.

Of course, not everyone will become a customer. Many people will sign up for the free content and never buy from you. That’s ok. Even though they never become a customer, you are still giving them a great experience of your company.

Getting found in search engines isn’t always easy, and there are lots of things that will impact your results. However, content marketing can greatly improve your search engine rankings for several reasons, including the following:

Although content (particularly written content) is good for SEO, I always advocate creating content for people first and search engines second. If you are writing content purely designed to satisfy search engines, it is unlikely to be as good as it would be if you created it with your target audience in mind. Nobody wants to read a blog post stuffed full of keyword phrases that don’t seem to fit. What’s more, if you try to manipulate the search results too much, this can have a detrimental effect on your rankings.

Focus on creating quality content. If it’s valuable, interesting, and relevant, then you’ll convert more readers into customers.

Who is going to get noticed more online – the company with a fancy website or the company that is consistently sharing great content on their blog, on YouTube, or across various social media channels?

The answer will almost always be the second one. A website is all well and good, but unless you are marketing it, you won’t get any visitors. You might go down the route of paid advertising or posting lots of links on social media rather than creating valuable content, but that will only get you so far.

Let’s say we are looking for a recruitment company and we visit two similar company websites. They both offer what we need at a similar price, and they both have great reviews. However, one of the companies has a blog full of advice about how to create a good job advert, how to structure interviews, how to choose the right candidate, and so on. The other doesn’t have a blog.

Are you more likely to choose the company that is showing you that they have lots of relevant knowledge and experience? Are you more likely to choose the company that is already giving you lots of tips and advice before you even become a paying client? Probably.

In fact, research shows that not only do websites with a blog attract up to 55% more visitors, but they also generate 67% more leads than those without.

Hopefully, the above points have given you an insight into how content marketing can help your business generate more leads and increase sales. Content marketing is also brilliant for:

With so many benefits to content marketing, I’d say it’s definitely worth the effort, but it’s not a quick fix. It can take time for content marketing to pay off, so if you need customers fast, you might want to do some more direct forms of marketing while you build your content up.

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