Content Marketing Archives - Page 2 of 7

Content Marketing vs Inbound Marketing: Are They the Same?

Content marketing vs inbound marketing, what a great debate between the two!

Even the experts are struggling to differentiate them or point out which one is better than the other.

Well, if you are one of them, who have heard or known about these two marketing strategies, you should probably be wondering the same.

Before we dive into answering the questions, let’s understand what each one of them means and their approaches to help support the answers.

Without further ado, let’s jump right into the details.

People often say that content is king, but is it really?

While we cannot deny the power of content, by itself it doesn’t give you enough power. It is really hard to rank in Google without optimizing that content. There is simply too much information on the web which makes it hard for random pages to get traffic.

On the other hand, if you’re at the top of your game both in terms of content and search engine optimization (SEO), you can get some incredible results. This is why SEO, content writing and internet marketing, in general, are such important skills in the modern world.

74% of the B2B customers conduct half their research online before they complete their purchase offline.

If you look at buyer dynamics, as stated by the research above, you will know how much B2B marketing matters if you want to convert higher. A good start to your marketing efforts helps you reap the profits, either through good customers, leads or increased profits. You need to place your marketing efforts in tandem with your goal if you aim to grow your business.

Why do most companies in the B2B sector fail to achieve growth or, are unable to convert their leads into customers? 60% of B2B marketers have no strategy that they can incorporate into the business strategy. Yes, they have not planned their marketing efforts.

Even among marketers who do have a strategy in place, there are few who don’t know what will work, and which channels to accommodate for the efforts.

The biggest mistake any marketer can make is to not have any strategy. This can be the scariest part of marketing, as you don’t know what to do and how to go about your marketing efforts.

In many cases, you can fail with a strategy, if you fall prey to one of the seven mistakes that we have curated for you. Avoid these mistakes and you should do just well.

Acquiring a new customer costs five times more than keeping an existing one, according to a report by Invesp, and when businesses increase customer retention rates by 5%, they boost profits by 25-95%.

To create successful customer retention campaigns, businesses should consider where customers are in the sales funnel and market with personalized information.

Digital marketing agencies can be a helpful option for companies who have fewer resources to create a campaign on their own.

In this article, we share strategies to help you resell your current customers. You can use the information to build a marketing campaign that focuses on increasing your retention rates.

Content marketing is an entire mood! As profitable and marketable as content marketing is, however, there are lots of people who fail at it.

Tired of failed content marketing campaigns? Perhaps you need to get a better grip on content marketing statistics, as proper usage of statistics is the key to success in the world of content marketing.

In this post, I’ll let you in on some of these crucial statistics which are essential for your brand’s success in content marketing. This way, you are better guided on the steps to take in your next content marketing campaigns. Sounds good?

Let’s get all the juicy statistics!

With the first half of 2019 already over, one thing about content marketing that has become quite sure is it’s going to become more and more important to digital marketers.

While many companies are still contemplating its effectiveness, the content marketing tools, channels, and strategies are continually evolving to create a bigger and better impact in the digital domain.

As you can see from the image, only 37% of B2B marketers invest in a proper digital and content marketing strategy, while others are still lagging in some way or another. Content marketing improves customer engagement and helps in conversion. It is the most efficient form of marketing that works today.

So, before you start marketing your content, you should know what are the latest content marketing ideas and how to implement them in your content marketing strategy. In this post, we will try to find the answers to these questions.

#1. Create Relevant Content

The first suggestion that you’ll ever get from any content marketer is to create original and relevant content. Take inspiration from your competitors, but generate your own ideas. If you cannot produce unique ideas or content, hire a consultant or an agency that can help you with fresh and meaningful content for your marketing efforts.

Remember that your audience is smart, and they would not fall for anything that looks like clickbait. If you want to build and improve trust amongst your customers, you need to be consistent and develop content that they want to read.

A lack of relevance in content can drive away more than 80% of your audience. Being in 2019, you need to figure out ways to make your content more personalized so that your audience can connect to your brand easily.

The Internet revolutionized the world: how we communicate, how we learn, and how we buy things.

Today, a majority of consumers spend hours gathering information and comparing products and services before they make a purchase.

According to Forrester, on average a person consumes 11.4 pieces of content before making a purchase decision. Some of that content is likely an answer to the question, “Should I buy X or Y?” So, how do you market to this research-driven customer base?

Give them the information they’re looking for.

86% of B2B marketers report that their organizations are using content marketing. Custom content is the best way to lead customers through the sales funnel. The trick is to learn what kind of content makes the most impact at which stages of the sales funnel.

Did you know that only 4% of people believe that backlinks can barely influence your rankings?

That means a whopping 96% disagrees with them. These people believe that link building is one of the best ways of making a mark on the top of the SERPs.

But if you think that acquiring just any type of link can get you there, you’ve got another thing coming.

While some links can catapult you to the summit, others go the opposite direction. So, rather than pursue every backlink opportunity that comes your way, you need to distinguish the good from the bad.

In this post, let’s look at this one SEO factor that can make or break your rankings: the quality of your link profile.

Let’s get the ball rolling.

What are the links?

Links can either be internal or external. First, let’s cover internal links. These are links that connect to internal pages of the same domain.

Here’s an example from Mondovo’s blog post on SEO content writing.

Content Writing

When you click the link, you’ll be sent to another page on the same blog.

Simple, right?

Internal links matter because it passes on traffic and PageRank to other pages in your site. Search engine crawlers will also have an easier time discovering them.

If you have a high number of internal links that point to a specific page, you’re sending Google a signal. You’re telling them that your page is important.

As long as you created this link naturally, Google will give that page a nod. Meanwhile, external links are links that point you to a place outside a domain.

If these links point you outside of your site, you can refer to them as outbound links. And if they are pointing to you from another site, you can refer to them as inbound links or backlinks.

It’s time to get controversial: SEO might not be right for you.

This is difficult to imagine, considering how heavily SEO is pushed from all sides. But, it’s not always a practical solution. It may be a great recommendation in many cases, but possibly not for you. Let’s take a look.

You are doing everything right, but still, your content is not having the impact you had envisioned. There is a massive amount of content- articles, videos, photos, etc posted on the Internet and social media every second. That is a lot of noise and you need to be heard above the din to be effective.

Consider this: according to BuzzSumo’s Content Trends Report 2018, a majority of the content gets zero backlinks. Only authoritative research gets more links over time. An analysis of 100 million posts published in 2017 revealed that social sharing has decreased by half since 2015.

What’s more, here are the number of blogs posted at the time of writing this article. The screenshot is taken from Worldometers.info and gives you a fair idea of the huge amount of content that is daily generated on the internet and the competition you are dealing with.

Worldometers.info

While creating quality content still matters, it will not get you the required traction without proper distribution. So, if your content marketing is not delivering on its promise – the reason may be because you are not distributing your content effectively.

Just posting doesn’t make your content effective no matter how well written and informative it may be. What matters is the exposure it gets and this is only possible if you have a good content distribution strategy in place.

In this article, we have discussed some content distribution ideas which can help you to create an effective plan for content distribution for your business.

SEO & Content – The New Power Couple

How to Plan a Full Funnel B2B Content Marketing Strategy?

The One SEO Factor That Can Make or Break Your Rankings

What are the links?