The problem is, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 21% of B2B marketers don’t have a content strategy in place. All they do is push out articles willy-nilly without any focus or direction.
Three main limitations cause this scatter-gun approach:
- Lack of budget
- Not knowing whether the content produced is engaging their audience
- Lack of resources and skill to translate ideas into high-quality articles
What does your digital strategy look like?
Everything you publish must have a purpose – to drive engagement and attract leads. The stumbling block for many business owners is not being sure what their objectives are. Well, you can easily solve that by answering a few questions:
- What audience are we writing for?
- What action or reaction do we want to achieve?
- How will the content be promoted once published?
- What type of content are we going to create?
- How do we maintain our brand’s style?
- What are the issues keeping our customers awake at night?
So, that’s the what; now we’ll get on to the why.
Why you should invest in a content strategy
When you’re looking at effectiveness, content marketing outstrips traditional marketing, plus it’s a lot easier.
More and more people are turning to the internet for research and shopping, which is why a strong presence is so important. Here are a few more reasons.
1. Stronger SEO
Investing in a content strategy will give your SEO a huge boost. A constant stream of high-quality content will keep Google happy and drive traffic to your website. When directly targeting your content to your audience, this greater online visibility and virtual footfall will increase leads and conversions into paying customers.
2. Boost brand awareness
Your content strategy amplifies your brand. By getting more information into the search results, you’re placing your company in front of more people. In turn, this leads to higher engagement with your readers, helping your brand cement itself in their minds.
3. Greater social engagement
Earlier, we mentioned working out how and where your content was to be published. The obvious place is your blog, but after that, it’s essential to push it out to all your social channels. As your social following increases, so will your brand awareness and your website traffic (yes, they’re all linked). By building this digital marketing footprint, you will also gain traction against your competitors – but only if your strategy is directly related to the audience, you’re looking to attract.
4. Drive sales
When the first three in our list come together, they deliver targeted traffic to your website. That’s a whole raft of people who are looking for what you’re offering. Provided you’ve done an incredible job on your website content; they will see that they have come to the right place and they will buy.
Where do you go from here?
Now you know what a content strategy is and why it works. Your next decision is how to go about it – do you do it in-house or, like 49% of companies (Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 report), do you outsource?
Whichever option you go for one thing is for sure; a robust content marketing strategy will boost your digital presence.
Thirty Six Digital will take the strain and handle your content strategy for you. For an informal chat to see what that looks like, call the team on 0203 291 1021.
