Top 5 Content Marketing Strategies + Trends And Challenges For 2022
In this article, we address the five most effective types of content marketing strategies, their best practices and where they stand in user journey.
- Drives traffic to key landing pages:
- 72% of B2B buyers turn to Google during the awareness stage
- Companies with blogs see 97% more links to their websites
- 60% of people are inspired to seek out a product after reading about it
- 68.5% of users claim that a blog enhances website credibility
- 81% of US users find blogs to be a trusted source of information
- 9 out of 10 B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on purchasing decisions
- Over 80% of B2B buyers view at least five pieces of content during the purchase process, and half of them view more than eight pieces
- 62% of B2B companies make a business decision based on digital content alone
5 Top Content Marketing Strategies For 2022
1. Web Content Strategy
From awareness to consideration and conversion, use your web copy across the sales funnel to educate your audience about your services, share your message and influence prospects to make a final purchasing decision.
- Make your audience feel at home: To deliver a great copy, understand your audience and their reasons for browsing your brand’s website. Define their pain points and needs and deliver exactly the type of content they are looking for at each stage.
- Be brief: To create copy packed with value, use short sentences and small paragraphs. Focus on what’s really important to your audience. Don’t forget that most users only skim through your web pages.
- Highlight your unique value proposition: Motivate your readers to keep engaging with your business by showing them what makes your offers better than your competitors’.
- Present your unique brand personality: To e n s ure b rand retention and memorability , use a consistent tone of voice to help your customers identify with your brand’s values and personality.
2. Blog Content Strategy
Other types of content, such as case studies, demo videos, product descriptions, tutorials and client testimonials are also highly effective, especially when combined with blog articles.
Blogs belong at the top – or, at the beginning – of your conversion funnel, where your objective is to educate your potential customers who come into contact with your business for the first time.
Blogging best practices include covering both evergreen techniques and rising trends based on the evolution of search engine algorithms and changes in audience behavior.
3. Email Marketing Strategy
Meanwhile, the B2C segment sees a reverse of this: higher average open rates of 19.7% and lower CTRS of 2.1% – due to usual customer behavior and typical offerings of broadly general products.
4. Digital PR Strategy
Digital PR is about raising awareness using traffic to the campaign or boosting the brand’s visibility by improving your ranking positions, which is why it belongs to the top of the marketing funnel.
5. Video Marketing Strategy
However, it can belong at any stage of the conversion funnel and user journey, depending on the content it contains. Video content can be adjusted to the specific needs of a prospect on different stages of their journey.
Developing a Content Marketing Strategy
In this chapter, we cover the basics of a successful content marketing program, including methods and metrics, the business roles that should own your content marketing, and the lingo you’ll use to talk about it.
For instance, for the software company Freshbooks, this web page represents perfect content marketing for a prospect who needs pricing information to make an informed buying decision.
While blogs are a major component of content marketing, they’re only a part of the bigger picture. In fact, in most cases, a blog is not the most lucrative form of content marketing.
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A cold prospect cannot evaluate your solution until they are first aware of the problem and your solution. And conversion is impossible until the prospect has first evaluated the possible courses of action.
Blogs are fantastic facilitators of awareness, but they do a poor job of facilitating evaluation and conversion. And, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, evaluation and conversion are super critical to your business.
As a result, you need content with a low barrier to entry—because at this stage, they have little to no motivation to put skin in the game (such as giving your contact information or money).
Most businesses will post content to a blog and to social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. Once you’ve mastered these two content types, you’ll want to add more top-of-funnel content to the mix, like a podcast or a print newsletter.
Your lead may be reading your blog and downloading lead magnets (and it will help convert her), but you’ll need content that helps her decide between you and your competitor to move her through to purchase.
But Quickbooks could earn some points by comparing their tools to their competitors’ tools as well. For instance, a Google search suggests that a comparison sheet between Quickbooks and their competitors (such as Xero) is another piece of content that should be on the radar of the Intuit content marketing team.
The key to perfect content marketing is understanding existing intent and anticipating future intent, and then, creating the content “assets” needed to address that intent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The truth is the most lucrative content assets you’ll create (if you have an existing business) are assets that meet intent at the bottom and middle of the funnel. Optimize for this existing bottom and middle of funnel intent before going to work on generating awareness at the top of the funnel with an expensive and time-consuming blog roll out.
That’s not to diminish the power of a business blog. Over the last 24 months, we’ve been adding content assets (articles and podcasts) at the top of the funnel and we’ve increased website traffic (think awareness) by 1053%.
When a prospect visits a piece of content (spends time) they have raised their hand and indicated interest. And, because of the magic of ad retargeting you can follow up with these prospects with a relevant ascension offer without even acquiring their contact information.
Frequently asked questions about content marketing.
What does a content marketer do?
A content marketer is generally responsible for creating and managing campaigns that use content to deliver against set marketing objectives. For example, a content marketing campaign may aim to increase website traffic to key product pages by 10 percent.
The content marketer will collaborate with craft specialists such as SEOs, copywriters, designers and PRs to produce and execute the campaign and then report back on performance.
What are examples of content marketing?
Good examples of content marketing include informational-style articles which answer questions people have asked search engines about topics relevant to the brand’s products and services.
For instance, a bank creating guides around applying for a mortgage. Another example is a whitepaper, created for specific leads to provide thought leadership and an argument for securing buy-in on new products and services.
What is a good content marketing definition?
A good definition of content marketing is that it’s a marketing approach that uses various forms of content to attract potential customers and engage their interests in the brand. The idea is to use content types like blogs, videos and whitepapers to show you understand a customer’s needs and problems.
Resource:
https://www.digitalsilk.com/content-marketing-strategies
https://www.digitalmarketer.com/digital-marketing/content-marketing-strategy/
https://www.marketo.com/content-marketing/