Content Marketing For Beginners

Sep 22, 2021 11 min read

Content marketing is the gasoline that can set the fire in generating thousands of free visitors to your website each month.

Before engaging with a sales representative of a business, 47% of buyers view three to five content pieces. 71% in the B2B industry claimed that they review blogs throughout their buyer's journey. In 2021, 82% of marketers are actively using content marketing.

But in contrast to different marketing methods like paid advertising, content marketing can take months to show any tangible results based on the effort put into it.

To grow your business & drive leads through content marketing, it's essential to get an apprehension of the fundamentals.

Yet to decide if content marketing is a worthy investment for your business?

To help you with your decision, in this blog post we will demystify content marketing and go through the basics. Read on to know more about different types of content marketing, how it can be distributed, and how you can monetize content marketing for your business.

Dive deep, gather knowledge & imply it to develop a cogent content marketing strategy to steer results.

What Is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing Statistics 2021
Types Of Content Marketing
Content Marketing Distribution
Benefits Of Content Marketing

What Is Content Marketing?

“Content marketing is a commitment, not a campaign.” - Jon Buscall

Content marketing is a marketing approach in which a business provides high-quality content to attract visitors and turn them into customers. It is one of the oldest forms of marketing, and businesses have used it since the late 1800s.

The concept of content marketing refers to creating & distributing highly relevant, valuable & informative content for the brand's target market. Content adds value to your target market by troubleshooting their issues & take care of your target audiences' needs & requirements.

Although content marketing has seen many iterations, one fundamental has remained: creating helpful content for readers. By consistently providing quality content to a certain niche of customers, businesses can build strong brands and acquire customers for free.

When you deliver quality content during the time of making a purchase decision, they rely on your brand. It helps companies build rapport, strengthen customer relationships & develop industry authority.

Content Marketing Statistics 2021

Are you wondering if content marketing really works to build a brand? Well, let's roll down to statistics to get brevity on the matter.

Content is one of the most significant ways to reach that target market as people often search for information & content to fulfill their needs.

Content Marketing Institute's statistics have displayed that 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers contemplate content marketing as a fundamental strategy.
72% of marketers claimed that content marketing is an effective tool for lead generation & it boosts engagement.
61% of consumers have purchased a product recommended by blogs that they read. (Great!! Ain't it?)
95% of the B2B service & product buyers observe content as a trustworthy parameter during a business evaluation.
78% of corporations consist of a team of 1-3 content specialists.
30% of bloggers following a formal editing process & 50% who adhere to the editing process get impactful results.
86% of marketers claimed they leverage content marketing for building brand awareness & 79% use it to educating audience(s).
63% of B2B marketers claimed content marketing helped them build loyalty with existing clients/customers & 53% said it helped them generate revenue.

Types Of Content Marketing

Are you struggling with which type of content to use that can make a statement? There are diverse types of content marketing that can aid you in promoting your business effectively. Let's check out the types of content marketing & make a splash:

Blog

A blog is the most popular form of content marketing for most businesses. Most businesses typically have a blog on their website, and you can find occasional posts covering different products and services a company offers. Stats says spending six-plus hours on a post drives 31% higher results. Blogs allow businesses to get started with content marketing easily, and they can attract visitors from Google looking for particular topics that a blog covers.

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Video

Video content is a relatively newer form of content marketing for businesses. Videos are great standalone or complementary pieces to a business's content marketing strategy. Many studies have shown videos to help increase conversion rates, attract social shares, and establish credibility.

Whitepapers

Whitepapers are informational documents that businesses use to highlight their products and services in detail. These documents are generally very in-depth and detail different problems that a company can solve for its customers. Whitepapers are often used as complementary documents when a business is pitching a prospect or working with a new client.

Podcasts

Podcasts are some of the newest forms of media and content marketing for businesses. With the growth of several mainstream podcasts, many companies have begun their podcasts to talk about their products more informally. Podcasts are some of the best forms of media to establish thought leadership. Since most podcasts target a specific audience, it can be a great way to get new customers or find people with similar interests.

Email

Email is a great way to distribute your content to an audience that has opted into your business' email marketing. With email, companies can create newsletters, send product updates, business updates, and more. As businesses grow their email list, their email marketing efforts will pay dividends.

Infographics

Infographics are visual representations of data or information. With infographics, you can communicate content visually, and it has the opportunity to bring you more traffic. In addition to making your content more visually appealing, infographics are very sharable. Many people who use your infographics in their work will cite you and bring additional backlinks to your website.

You can place your business' logo and name at the bottom of each infographic. This will help build your brand and give you additional recognition as a business that creates high-quality content.

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Content Marketing Distribution

The different types of content marketing can be distributed to audiences via different channels. Although there are hundreds of different platforms, they all fall into one of four distribution channels: owned, earned, paid, and organic media. Each distribution channel has its benefits, so it's important to use the right content marketing with the right distribution channel for maximum traffic.

Owned

Owned is any media that a business or brand controls. This can come in the form of a website, blog, social media channels, etc. With owned media, a business has the autonomy to distribute their content however they please. Owned media can be the most vital distribution channel for a business because there are few restrictions on the type of content you can promote.

Did you ever feel anxious about thinking how long it might take for you to create a social media report?

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— Statusbrew - Social Media Management Tool (@Statusbrew) September 16, 2021

Although owned media can be compelling, it's one of the most challenging forms of media to build. It can take businesses many months before seeing any meaningful traffic on websites, blogs, and similar owned media. In the long run, all businesses need to have dynamic owned media. This can reduce ad expenditure and help build a loyal audience of customers.

Paid

Paid media includes any marketing that you pay for. The goal of paid media is to drive traffic from sources to your owned media to convert the visitors into customers. Paid media is the quickest way to distribute media because you can start getting visitors to your site and products immediately. Although this can be great, you need to keep a close eye on the ROI of your paid media campaigns. You should have a positive ROI after all sales and conversions are calculated.

Examples of paid media include promoting on social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. Additional popular platforms to advertise on include Amazon and Google. With paid media, you spend on a cost per click (CPC) basis. The more lucrative a keyword is, the more you will have to pay per click to get a visitor to your site.

However, to drive traffic & to establish an impactful content market strategy if crucial to assess the insights to understand the needs & requirements of the target audience.

Scale content marketing efforts with Statusbrew. Whether your organic or paid media campaign, Statusbrew reports provide an all-encompassing view of your social marketing effort & translate your engagements translate into business success.

Statusbrew's newly launched Reports Lab offers 180+ metrics which is the highest in the entire SMM industry. You can get insights into all platforms in a unified dashboard. The unmatched metrics, customization & sharing features are a plus; it offers tailored templates for instant post, paid, cross-network, profile, & team reporting. Using highly customizable widgets, you can create, export & share data among your team to measure KPIs. Users can resize, reorder & reposition the widgets by dragging & dropping.

The live reporting dashboards allow sharing real-time report links to the non-Statusbrew users. Statusbrew reports offer Engagement Metrics, Social Profile Metrics, Post Metrics, Facebook Page Metrics, Facebook Post Metric, Instagram Metrics, LinkedIn Metrics, YouTube Metrics & Google My Business Metrics.

You also can leverage the Shopify analytics & Google Analytics integration with the Reports Lab.

Get Free Access To Reports Lab

Earned

Earned media is publicity or exposure gained from other methods besides paid advertising. In simple terms, earned media is online word of mouth. This is the best form of distribution because it doesn't cost your business any money, and it has the opportunity to make your business viral. Although this is such an excellent distribution method, it's the hardest to create.

Earned media works when your audience willingly decides to share your products or services with their network. This can have a network effect that can make you go viral without spending a dime on advertising. Examples of earned media include product reviews, media coverage, customer reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations, and more.

Organic

An organic channel is a free channel to create content that targets keywords that searchers are looking for. The primary organic way to bring traffic to your site is SEO (search engine optimization). With SEO, you can write content that targets a particular keyword and rank on Google's results.

The less competitive a keyword is, the higher the chance that your website can rank for it. With SEO, it can take months to reach the top results for a given keyword. Once your site gets ranking for a lucrative keyword, you can gain thousands of visitors per month to your site. With the right SEO strategies, you can maintain a top-ranking position for years.

Benefits Of Content Marketing

1. Increased Organic Traffic

The first and most important benefit is bringing organic traffic to your website. Content marketing is one of the few types of marketing where you can bring thousands of visitors to your site at little to no cost besides creating content. Businesses that use content marketing strategies can bring in thousands if not tens of thousands of visitors to their site each month with the right SEO strategies.

2. Brand Building

Content marketing is one of the best ways to build a brand for your business. The content you create today will stay on your site for the foreseeable future. As you create more content, your business will start creating an audience. By capturing the visitors that land on your content pages, you can create email lists and continue marketing to your audience.

3. Domain Authority

Content marketing also helps build your domain authority. Domain authority is a key metric that search engines use to gauge how reputable a site is. The higher the domain authority for a website, the higher that search engines will rank their content in comparison to competitors. This makes it easier to rank faster for new content when you have already established your domain authority.

4. Compounding

Content marketing has one of the longest ROI cycles in marketing. As your business creates more content, you will gain more links, build more domain authority and get more organic traffic. The older your site is, the more you'll have all of the SEO ranking factors in order. This can lead to ranking for content much faster and seeing higher ROI on your content marketing efforts.

5. Decreased Marketing Spend

When you start seeing the results from content marketing, you'll have an audience along with thousands of visitors to your site. Instead of using paid media to capture new audiences, you can continue to market to your existing audience for free. This can save businesses thousands of dollars per month just in ad expenditure.

6. Monetization

Now that you've got a good understanding of what content marketing is along with the benefits, you can explore the different options your business has regarding monetizing content. Each of these methods has its pros and cons; explore each to choose what works best for your business. Some of the best monetization methods for content marketing include:

Products/Services

Selling your products and services should be the first way you look to monetize your blog. When you create content, you're generally helping answer a question that someone searched for. At the end of your blog post or content, you can include a call to action to book a call, demo, etc. This will help generate more leads for your business and increase your revenue.

Affiliate marketing

If you are not selling any products of your own, you can monetize the traffic on the page with affiliate marketing. You can refer your audience to another provider and get a commission when they buy a product or service with affiliate marketing. Getting one commission may seem small, but it will quickly add up if your audience is sizable. This can be a great new revenue stream for your online business.

Affiliate marketing can be used in virtually all types of content. You can add an affiliate link to a blog post, video, description box, and more. You can start negotiating with different affiliate providers on commission rates and net a larger profit as you gain more traffic.

Sponsorships

Sponsorships can be a very lucrative monetization avenue for businesses. To get high-quality sponsors, you will need to build an audience and brand that markets to a particular niche. Sponsors pay for blog posts, shout-outs, and similar promotions. The more value and revenue you can generate for your sponsors, the more lucrative your sponsorships.

For example, if you write content about IT providers, IT companies may reach out to sponsor your content. As the media owner and the distribution to your audience, you can set rates and choose which sponsors you want to work with.

Ads are another way you can monetize the traffic from your content marketing. Depending on the type of content marketing you produce, you can apply to different ad programs. To start generating money from ads, your content should be generating over 50,000 views per month. Although this may seem large, it's doable if you have produced enough content.

Most ad programs will pay you based on RPM (revenue per thousand views). Depending on the type of content you produce, this rate can be anywhere from $7-$40 on average. The ads displayed on your site will be static banner ads that show at the bottom of the screen.

You can work with your ad provider to choose where and when ads are displayed to your audience. It's important to consider user experience when adding ads because it can diminish the quality of the reader's experience.

Wrapping Up!!

The success of content marketing relies on understanding what your audience needs & deliver content accordingly. Experiment with your marketing efforts & assess the analytics to translate your audience requirements into the content. Monitor brand performance reports & figure out what types of content communicate best to your target audience.

You can rely on Statusbrew's Content Suggestions feature to avail a personalized content repository to curate content. Content Suggestions allow you to filter content based on the feeds you have added. Depending on the days of the week, you can add particular sources & choose the content that fits your needs.

Simplify your social media scheduling with Statusbrew's permission-based access & equip your team with one of the most powerful publishing tools & reach wider audiences with minimal effort.

Explore Statusbrew to build a content plan & drive results analyzing analytics. Book your demo today!!

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