Content marketing is no longer a “nice to have,” — it’s a must for all ambitious businesses. Expanding your audience and reaching new markets means employing all the channels at your fingertips. While traditional marketing still has its place, content marketing involves strategies that efficiently reach across multiple platforms.
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Ranked by Clutch 2023
Top 1% Digital Agency in United States
Ranked by UpCity 2022
Fastest-Growing Companies in the USA
4 Years in a Row
Top 1% Best Digital Marketing Award
Ranked by Expertise 2023
#2 Global Award Winner
Ranked by MASHABLE
Top 1% Award of Excellence Winner
Years 2020, 2021, 2022
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Ranked by Our Customers
Top 1000 Global Digital Agency
Ranked by Clutch 2022
#1 Global Digital Agency
Ranked by Business Journal
Top Rated SEO Agency
Ranked by SEO Blog 2023
Top Ecommerce Development Company
Ranked by Selected Firms
Top Web Development Agency
Ranked by Design Rush
Your Content Marketing
Specialist Team
Content marketing is no longer a “nice to have,” — it’s a must for all ambitious businesses. Expanding your audience and reaching new markets means employing all the channels at your fingertips. While traditional marketing still has its place, content marketing involves strategies that efficiently reach across multiple platforms.
This graphic from the online resource Blogging Wizard shows that content marketing costs 62% less than conventional marketing methods yet may triple your lead generation. Read on to find out how to achieve these incredible gains and how NEWMEDIA can help.
What Is Content Marketing?
A simple content marketing definition is “any marketing that involves content.” Content can mean anything from videos to social media captions. That’s why it can be hard to fully define content marketing, as it covers such a broad range of assets.
So, what is content in terms of businesses?
Content marketers create text and writing, images, videos, and even games that are specifically designed to engage a particular target audience. These types of content are often called “digital assets,” differentiating them from traditional content such as mailers and brochures. It’s a form of inbound marketing: marketing that encourages the customer to come to you.
How does content marketing work?
- A business defines a target audience.
- Marketing specialists determine the segment of that audience they want to focus on.
- Content creators work with marketers to create assets designed to engage that audience segment.
4. Businesses publish content on appropriate channels.
5. Your marketing team promotes the content across other channels.
6. Marketers or data analysts gather statistics on engagement.
7. Marketing teams use that data to hone future campaigns.
…and the cycle starts again.
Content marketing has such an impressive return on investment (ROI) because many pieces of content can be used for multiple purposes. You can use a popular blog to create infographics, social media snippets, and website content. Likewise, you can transform a series of social media posts into a blog with just a little editing.
Making the most out of your digital assets requires experience and know-how — which you’ll get when you partner with NEWMEDIA.
Why Digital Content Marketing Is Important
Digital content marketing is the creation and distribution of branded content that positions you as a trusted entity within your field. But why do so many businesses spend at least 25% of their marketing budgets on content?
- Online users spend 20% of their time engaging with content.
- Of those wanting to learn about brands, 80% appreciate content from that brand.
- As much as 70% of potential leads would rather learn about a brand through articles than advertising.
Your potential customers are already online. Investing in a content marketing strategy means you’re reaching out to meet them at their preferred engagement points.
Consumer and even B2B buying habits have changed in recent years. Post-pandemic, people are utilizing new channels to find the goods and services they want. Forbes recently reported that as well as search engines, YouTube and Facebook are also in the top five ways people search for products. It’s essential that you make yourself visible via these channels to leverage the shifting ways people engage with brands and suppliers.
Content Marketing
Examples
There are so many different types of content marketing, and each offers different ways to connect with customers and clients. This chart from HubSpot identifies that short-form video content — videos usually under three minutes long — offers one of the highest marketing ROI potentials.
However, this largely depends on your target audience and what types of products or services you’re trying to promote. For example, if you’re a B2B logistics provider, you may find more success with whitepapers and similar resources than taking over TikTok. Let’s take a look at some other examples of content marketing that successful companies use.
Email Marketing
Effective email marketing requires a balance between sending pertinent, targeted information and avoiding spamming potential customers. However, when done correctly, email marketing can offer impressive results.
That’s in part because 60% of consumers prefer email marketing over other channels. They can open emails when they like and stay in control of which brands can contact them. After all, it only takes a single click to unsubscribe from a company you no longer want to email you.
Types of email marketing include press releases that show company achievements, sales and promotion emails, and follow-up messages. For example, if someone leaves a product in their shopping cart, a brief, friendly email might remind them to come and finish their purchase.
At least 4 billion people use email and that number is rising all the time. Carefully targeted email marketing can help you break into that huge potential audience.
Blogging
A blog is a company’s (or individual’s) online repository of written content. Blogs are a way for companies to highlight success, partnerships, or even work they’ve done in the community. Other popular topics for business blogs include:
- Leadership advice
- Industry insights
- Explainers
- Product or service demos
- Reviews
- Employee stories
- Lists of resources, tips, or ideas
You’ll notice that all these blogs have something in common. They provide value to the reader. People visit blogs to do research, learn something new, or for entertainment. Companies that manage to create blogs that fulfill at least one of these characteristics can generate consistent readerships.
SEO Marketing
SEO or search engine optimization is an absolutely critical part of content marketing — so much so that at least 40% of companies outsource some aspect of SEO to experts. But what is SEO marketing?
Utilizing SEO for content marketing means ensuring the content adds value and has high visibility in online searches. There are multiple ways to achieve this visibility. Possibly the most well-known technique is keyword placement. When your content includes keywords and phrases that your target audience searches for, you’re more likely to ping on their radar.
Another useful method is backlinking. When another website links to yours, this prompts Google’s algorithms (and other search engines) to position your site higher in the search rankings. It’s a way of showing that your site is trusted by others. Creating a link-building strategy is a great way to hit that all-important first page of Google search results.
Social Media Marketing
As social media use continues to increase, brands can’t ignore the opportunities to market themselves on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Even B2B vendors need to explore the benefits of social media. Statistics from PersuasionNation show that 95% of B2B businesses are already using social media to expand their existing audiences.
However, to get the most out of social media marketing, you need someone who understands how people engage with these platforms. For example, it would be easy for businesses to assume that Gen Z would mostly use TikTok, Snapchat, and other newer apps.
However, as HubSpot’s data shows, 81% of Gen Z prioritize YouTube for their online interactions. That’s useful data for any business marketing to the younger generations. Working with social media strategy experts like NEWMEDIA gives you these types of insights. Invest money into the right social media platforms to maximize ROI.
Benefits of Content Marketing
Content marketing allows you to reach more people and bring more value to existing followers. However, most businesses need tangible benefits or motivation to invest in new ways of working. Thankfully, there are plenty of compelling reasons to include content as part of your overall marketing strategy.
Generate Demand and Leads
When you have a carefully defined target audience, you can create content that resonates with them. Connecting with customers or clients on an emotional level is vital to ensure your brand sticks in their minds. That’s why so many businesses share feel-good stories, contests, and positive reviews. These carefully chosen sentiments become associated with the brand and generate more demand for similar content.
When your brand is in demand, you’re more likely to get leads. People who come for the content may stick around for the sales.
Your content marketing efforts can help encourage people to click through to product pages or sign up for mailing lists. Research shows that 76% of marketers believe that content marketing is vital for both lead and demand generation.
Position Yourself as an Expert
Content marketing gives you the opportunity to show off your expertise and deep industry knowledge. Think about the blogs or articles you like to read. Many of them will come from businesses just like yours. The only difference is that the blog you’re reading is from a content creator who’s established themselves as an expert in their field.
Your content creation process should include considering the topics you can speak about with authority. From here, you can create videos, webinars, or insightful blogs that provide genuine value for anyone who engages with them.
High-quality content like this gives you the chance to be invited onto industry podcasts or the YouTube channels of your peers. You may also find yourself cited in other businesses’ content as a provider of reliable and authoritative resources.
Expand Your Audience
While it’s great to have a clearly defined audience, it’s also good to have ambitions to expand that audience. Scaling your business up is something NEWMEDIA excels at, and we can help you utilize content marketing to achieve your goals.
When you use SEO techniques and focus on quality, omnichannel content, you’ve got the chance to reach so many more potential leads. You may discover, using marketing analytics, that a major segment of your audience is active on Instagram. Publishing content here could be a way to reach those people and more.
Every time your engaging content is shared, it reaches people outside the scope of your target audience. You could even find yourself breaking effortlessly into adjacent markets.
Build Trust
Creating content that provides valuable information or guides the buyer’s journey is a way to build trust with your audience. Trust is a vital component of branding. It’s a measure of how reliable you are and how you deliver on your company promises. Trust can also be a reflection of how your web and blog content matches up to your corporate values. Utilizing digital publications to address customer pain points and highlight your business’s ethics can build lasting relationships with your followers.
As the graphic shows, 81% of consumers won’t buy from brands they don’t trust. Your blog posts and visual content can help create that trust, even before you speak to those customers.
Maximize your content marketing efforts to become a reliable resource and have that trust associated with your overall brand.
Increase Brand Awareness and Recognition
When your clients, customers, and online followers trust your brand, they’re more likely to share your content. Shared content is an excellent way to generate leads because it’s essentially a peer-to-peer recommendation.
It’s like if one of your close friends recommended a restaurant. You’re more likely to try it than if you saw paid ads for the same restaurant online. You trust your friend, so you might book a table this weekend.
Brand Story Creation
Similarly, if a consumer sees someone in their circle share your content, they’re likely to go and take a look. That share has just increased the reach of your content and boosted your brand awareness.
As you get more regular readers and viewers, your brand will become associated with high-quality blog posts, videos, and other content. With the right support, content marketing can become a self-propelling machine.
Competitive Content Marketing Strategies
Creating a content marketing strategy requires understanding where you are now and where you want to be. You should consider what existing content you already have. For example, have you got blog posts that never get any hits? Expert marketing professionals may be able to edit those to gain more traction.
Start your strategy by performing a content audit, noting what’s generating leads and what isn’t.
Next, define your marketing goals. These should run side-by-side with your organization’s goals and may include growth, increased profits, or sales of a specific product.
Conduct market research to create a target audience or ideal customer profile (ICP) as this is who you will aim your content at.
You can also use this research to decide what types of content will work best for your particular industry and audience. For instance, you might discover that your direct competitors get more hits on their Facebook page than their blog posts. Use this information to tweak your own content marketing strategy.
Engage marketing professionals and a content creator (or several) to put your strategy into action. Always include ways to monitor the success of your campaigns.
The Importance of Creating a Content Marketing Plan
Having a content marketing plan in place is vital, mostly because most of your competitors do. Statistics show that 82% of surveyed business leaders state that their organization uses content marketing to promote their products or services.
Getting your content marketing plan in order fast is essential to stay ahead of the competition. You should consider what type of content marketers to engage and how they’ll liaise with your marketing teams. It’s also a good idea to consider a content marketing schedule to ensure you’re creating content consistently.
Creating content marketing plans is easier with a trusted partner. NEWMEDIA offers multiple content services, from content creation to SEO services. NEWMEDIA also helps businesses understand what they’re doing wrong and how to fix it.
10 Content Marketing Tips
No matter what shape your content marketing plan takes, these 10 tips will help you reach more potential customers.
1. Be Consistent
Expert content marketers know that consistency is key. If you commit to starting a blog, you should post at least weekly, if not more often. Set your readers’ expectations by letting them know when to expect a new installment.
2. Align Content With Business Goals
Your content marketing specialist should understand how to direct viewers or readers to actions or other content that will help convert leads. Ideally, content marketers and marketing teams should work together to ensure every asset works toward a defined business goal. Refer back to your overall marketing strategy and brand messaging frameworks when developing your content marketing plan. These documents will help guide your content and ensure it has the optimal effect.
3. Embrace User Generated Content
Any great content strategy looks at the media it can get for free: earned media. Testimonials, reviews, and positive comments are all examples of user-generated content (UGC). You can use this freely to boost your brand. Businesses also engage influencers and affiliates to talk about their brand, leveraging the extended reach of these online personalities.
Sometimes earned media will come organically, via great customer experiences. Other times, UGC may be gained in return for free trials, partnerships, or renumeration. Research what types of UGC will resonate with your target audience.
4. Be Ready to Pivot
If you’re new to content marketing, don’t be surprised when your first attempts fall flat. Just because your valuable content doesn’t get any engagement doesn’t mean you should give up. Be open to feedback and ready to pivot and try something new. Document everything you try so you don’t accidentally make the same mistake twice. Consider partnering with an external, expert content marketer to guide your early efforts and optimize your budgets.
5. Work With an SEO Specialist
SEO helps you get more hits via organic search traffic. Why is this important? Well, if you take a look at this chart from Ahrefs, you can see that the vast majority of blog views come from organic search traffic.
In other words, if you’re not using techniques to help your blog or website appear high up on search engines, you’re missing out on potentially over 85% of your audience. Ask NEWMEDIA about improving your content strategy with our SEO expertise and other content marketing services.
6. Write What You Know
Every content marketer knows that it’s practically impossible to wing it through a topic you know nothing about. A blog post, for example, should read as if the writer knows the subject inside out. If not, it becomes stilted, boring, and unshareable. For businesses, this should be as simple as writing about topics within your industry that impact you every day.
7. Jump on Trends
Having said that, if there’s a content marketing trend that’s getting your peers a lot of attention, don’t be afraid to jump in. Just make sure it’s on-brand and relevant to the rest of your content strategy. You probably don’t want to be posting a dozen TikTok lip sync challenges if your audience expects insurance insights.
8. Discover When Your Audience Is Online
Automation of content is a great way to save time. You can use digital tools to send emails, schedule a blog post, or even send an automatic reply to a customer query. However, these solutions are only useful if they deliver content at the right time.
For instance, it’s probably best for B2B providers to send content during the standard working day. However, if you’re a recruitment agency writing about night shift work, an early evening content run might reach more leads.
9. Revise, Repurpose, Re-use
Digital assets are rarely only useful once. Their practicality lies in the ability to revise them for use on other platforms. Content marketers can use snippets of blogs for social media posts or valuable content from whitepapers for Instagram-worthy infographics.
As your audience’s interests and favorite platforms change, you can continue to provide them with branded content wherever they are.
10. Partner With a Content Marketing Expert
Going it alone with content marketing is challenging. It can be tempting for businesses to “blog dump” (post high volumes of low-quality blogs) or post the same social media update repeatedly. Usually, these tactics are taken due to time constraints. After all, how do you take the time to write beautifully crafted articles while you’re busy running a business?
Unfortunately, content dumping simply to fill a gap doesn’t work. The tech blog Review 42 came up with this neat infographic that shows the core characteristics of a successful content strategy.
The characteristics are as follows:
- Strategic: Every piece of content should align with organizational goals.
- Consistent: Post regularly and across multiple channels.
- Defined: Use your target audience research or work with a trusted partner like NEWMEDIA to ensure your content is on brand and engaging.
- Profitable: Use CTAs and links to create opportunities for viewers to become leads and customers.
- Educational: Successful content provides value rather than actively selling goods.
When you work with NEWMEDIA, we take all these factors into account. Our team excels at creating compelling content strategies that generate growth and brand awareness.
Content Marketing Services From NEWMEDIA
Here at NEWMEDIA, we pride ourselves on working with businesses just like yours to level up content marketing strategies. Here are just a few of the services we offer that can optimize your reach and expand your potential target audience.
Web Design
Did you know your business website is one of the most essential cornerstones of your content marketing strategy? Your site is like your digital shop front. It displays your products or services, your prices, but also your brand and values. Optimizing it is a way to increase engagement and draw more customers in.
Even businesses with a physical store or office need to consider creating or improving their business website. Statistics show that 91% of customers who visit a store do so because they researched it online. A great website encourages leads to engage with you wherever is convenient for them.
Effective content creation for websites requires considering what devices your target audience uses the most. Responsive websites work on all devices, including smartphones and tablets. The NEWMEDIA web design team works from a “Mobile and Content First” approach. We center on the core of your content and mobile use to ensure your customers enjoy the best online experiences.
Local SEO
NEWMEDIA offers a full range of SEO marketing services. For effective content, applying local SEO techniques can get your blogs and web pages further up the search engine results pages (SERPs). Why? Because 46% of online searches contain what’s known as “local intent.” Examples of local searches could be “Content marketing agencies near me” or “Best Houston, TX marketing company.”
Optimizing your content to appear when your audience makes these types of searches requires local SEO specialists. This specialized form of search engine marketing requires deep keyword research and time-consuming trend exploration. As most businesses don’t have the time to invest in this, outsourcing to an expert is the most common solution.
NEWMEDIA knows exactly how Google decides which local businesses get the most attention and can apply those techniques to your content.
Email Marketing
Your online content marketing strategy isn’t complete without exploring the possibilities of email marketing. Even if you tried and had little success before, the NEWMEDIA team can show you how to achieve growth with emails.
We’ll help you craft ongoing marketing campaigns and grow mailing lister subscriber bases. Our content marketers know how to combine email with other solutions for a complete omnichannel strategy. We look at techniques such as automatic emails triggered by customer actions. And, for ongoing growth, we can provide email templates matched to your own branding.
Social Media Management
You’ve already seen the potential benefits of social media marketing. To make the most of the opportunities available, you need effective social media management.
NEWMEDIA will help you understand which channels you should be exploiting and which could represent a wasted investment. We can advise on where to channel advertising budgets and how to best utilize social media paid posts. If you already have a social presence that’s stagnated, we can remodel your strategy for increased engagement.
Our social media managers focus on consistency, tone of voice, and careful branding to maximize your online visibility.
Carefully Tracked Results
Monitoring and measuring the success of your content marketing campaigns is the only way to understand the impact they have. Yet so many businesses release their content into the wild and simply hope for the best. NEWMEDIA tracks every aspect of your content marketing efforts. You’ll gain insights into how every aspect is performing, from clickthroughs on blogs to engagement via social media.
Why is this important? Without data to show which parts of your marketing campaigns are seeing the most success, you don’t know what to replicate and what to remove. When you gain access to those insights, you can make even higher-quality content to match and beat your competitors.
This chart from Ahrefs shows that 83% of businesses are now focusing on the quality of their content rather than the quantity. Your business needs expert content management and data analysis to keep up with the competition and increasing consumer expectations. Talk to NEWMEDIA about your critical key performance indicators and we can help show how your online content marketing impacts those.
Why Choose NEWMEDIA as Your Content Marketing Agency?
You know why you need a brand agency in your corner, and you understand the specific services that the best agencies combine to build out your strategy.
There’s just one more question to answer:
Why choose NEWMEDIA as your brand strategy partner?
Full-Service Marketing Agency
NEWMEDIA can provide your business with all the content marketing strategy support it needs to thrive. However, you don’t need to take our word for it. Here are just a few of the awards and accolades we’ve received:
- Expertise.com Best Digital Marketing Agencies 2023 Award Winner
- Mashable Global Award Winner
- National Excellence Winner
- Clutch Top Global Digital Agency
- Business Journal #1 Global Digital Agency
- SEOBlog top Rated SEO Agency
- Over 500 five-star ratings on Google from satisfied clients
Our Digital Solutions Win Awards
Our award-winning service is available to help you scale your brand. We only succeed by making you succeed, which is why we see you as a partner rather than merely a customer. The NEWMEDIA team has worked with over 1,000 clients across more than 50 industries, leveraging the latest technology to achieve growth and visibility.
We Work with Global Brands
What do Delta, Six Flags, The YMCA, and California Almonds all have in common?
They’ve worked with NEWMEDIA to build their brands – often through digital products – locally, nationally, and even around the world. And that’s just a small sample – we have a laundry list of successful projects under our belts for some of the most recognizable brands in the world.
Why should that matter to you?
For one, a branding agency needs to know what makes the most successful brands tick so that it can apply powerful strategies for your business. NEWMEDIA’s exposure to such huge companies means we have knowledge and expertise that you can’t find anywhere else.
As for the second reason…
We bring a global branding mindset to companies of all sizes, from massive multinationals to small businesses trying to make waves on the local level.
Interested?
If you want to find out more about how we can elevate your content marketing efforts, drop us a message at [email protected].