Everything about your company is just more information flowing into the daily deluge that the average person has to handle. If that information doesn’t stand out – due to your company having a weak brand – it’ll just sweep on by. Ignored. Unheard. Disappearing into a sea of discarded information while the people to whom you’re trying to sell turn their focus to something a little more interesting.
Social media brand management.
Content Marketing
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Top 1% Global Leader Digital Agency
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
500+ 5-Star Reviews in Google
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
Content Marketing
"Content is king." Listen to any digital marketing expert talk for long enough (and you won't have to wait long) and you'll hear them talk about how a strong content strategy is a key pillar of online marketing. And they're right, as creating content the right way generates some fantastic returns
No matter what industry you look at, you'll see year-on-year growth in the revenue that content generates. Real estate is the clear frontrunner, with quality content netting realtors $1 million in the first year before going up to $4 by year three. But every industry in this chart breaks the $1 million returns mark after three years, showing that committed content marketing efforts get results.
As a digital marketing agency, NEWMEDIA can craft content marketing strategies that deliver returns (and feed into the rest of your digital marketing). Join us as we deep-dive into what content marketing is, what it delivers, and what our content marketing services include.
What is a Content
Marketing Strategy?
Anybody can slap together a few pieces of content, publish them on a blog, and claim that they have a “strategy.” But the reality is that the top content marketing agencies understand that a true strategy takes in multiple channels, each of which generates its own results, but each of which also feeds into the others to create an overarching online presence that helps your business.
To create a true strategy, you have to go beyond publishing what you view as “relevant content” (though that’s a part of it) and come up with a plan that includes the following eight elements:
1. A Clearly-Defined Audience
If you don’t know who your content is supposed to speak to, you may as well be talking to a brick wall. Your audience has a language that it connects with and certain problems that it wants to solve, all of which you need to know as a content marketer.
2. Intelligent Goals
No content marketing strategy is complete without defined goals. Those goals vary depending on the business, with some wanting to use content to create brand awareness among potential customers, while others want to get more leads or even use their content for link-building. Regardless, you need to know what you’re shooting for or your content comes off as aimless.
3. Buyer Personas
Building from knowing your audience, a buyer persona is a tangible representation of what your perfect customer wants, needs, feels and buys. And they’re something that most high-performing companies use to get a better bead on their audience members, as this chart from Delve AI shows:
Almost three-quarters (71%) of high-performing companies use buyer’s personas, with those companies being seven times more likely to update those personas as the tastes of their paying customers evolve. If you want to get more customers, you need to know what those customers look like so you can create content that speaks to them.
4. Targeted Content
Writing whatever comes to the top of your head is like firing a gun into the air. Sure, you’ll make a big bang, but you’re not going to hit a target so you may as well be firing blanks. If you think of every piece of content you create as a bullet, you need to make that bullet count by targeting it toward a specific person, problem, or solution.
5. A Content Marketing Calendar
When you post is as important as what you post. For a super basic example, you’re not going to post about your big summer sale in the middle of Christmas. That content isn’t going to help with lead generation because you’re telling people about an offer that’s six months in the future, meaning they’ll either forget or be annoyed that you’re telling them about something that they can’t use.
Apply that same line of thinking to all of your content to come up with a calendar filled with topics to cover that are relevant to the time of year and what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. Something like the following (courtesy of HubSpot) does the trick:
6. A Wide Range of Content
By the strictest content marketing definition, literally any type of content you create counts towards your efforts to get more customers. The posts you place on social media platforms help with the awareness stage by telling people that you exist, with the landing pages (and the content they contain) that you link to moving people closer to the consideration stage. Every blog post, paid advertising snippet, and email you send is part of the rich tapestry of content that helps you to effectively communicate with potential clients.
What’s our point?
A good content marketing agency will help you string a few blog posts together. The best content marketing agency (like NEWMEDIA) combines different types of content so you can speak to prospects across multiple channels.
7. Content Guidelines
If you’re speaking to a professional audience (as is usually the case for B2B companies), you have to be wary of loading your content with humor and slang. Your audience expects technical language, or at least language that aligns with their type of business, so you have to match the tone they expect. By the same token, speaking to a general consumer audience in complex engineering language is just going to leave people scratching their heads.
One of the keys to content marketing strategy is understanding the language in which your customers speak. And we’re not talking about the difference between writing articles in English or French here, as your content language is all about speaking how your clients speak. Content guidelines (often called editorial guidelines) serve as checklists of rules to follow to make sure you’re writing in the right language.
8. Tracking and Key Performance Indicators
NEWMEDIA is a performance marketing company, which means we measure how well your digital marketing campaigns perform. That’s crucial in today’s business world, as content can often feel like a nebulous thing, making it difficult to figure out how it plays into your sales process.
The struggle to figure out what content marketing actually does for a company’s bottom line is one that many companies contend with, as shown by figures from Smart Insights. It surveyed B2B business owners to discover that 91% of them invest in content marketing.
Great!
What’s not so great is that only a third of those businesses (35%) measure the ROI of their content marketing, meaning 65% aren’t tracking their performance. And of that 65% that aren’t looking at the metrics, 27% say they don’t track performance because “they don’t know how.”
NEWMEDIA solves these problems by incorporating tracking results, be that checking your results in search engines, measuring the engagement of social media posts, or giving you a dollar figure to show how much money your content generates.
The Benefits Content Marketing Agencies Bring to Your Business
"Okay, we get what goes into a content marketing strategy and why we need a full-service agency to create different types of content," we hear you say. "But why bother? We want to know what the best content marketing agencies deliver in terms of tangible results." We get it and we have the answers, as your content marketing helps you make a splash in the digital world in several ways.
Connect with Your Target Audience
Imagine that your friend sets you up on a blind date. That means you’ve never met the potential object of your affection before, so first impressions are going to be everything. You turn up for the date, and your other half is dressed to the nines and looks the part. You grab a drink and start chatting, only to find yourself engrossed in the stories they tell. Better yet, they seem to care about your stories, leading to the pair of you talking through the night.
You’ve just experienced an instant connection.
And it’s that exact type of connection you want to create with your customers via your content marketing. The first piece of content that somebody reads about your business is just like a blind date, with the prospect knowing nothing about you beyond what they’re reading or watching. If you can use that content to create a connection, no matter how small that connection may be, you have a route to the prospect’s heart (and, eventually, their wallet).
That connection has real-world implications for your bottom line, too, as this collection of starts from KoMarketing demonstrates:
Over three-quarters of people (76%) say that they’re more likely to buy from you if they feel a connection with your brand. Better yet, 57% of customers spend more with brands when they feel a connection, with 68% saying they’re more likely to recommend the brands they connect with to a friend.
Content marketing (when done well) helps to create and strengthen the connections that result in more leads, loyalty, and referrals.
Craft Compelling Content That Creates Trust
Coming back to our blind date analogy, we’ll assume the date went well and you have a connection. Next up – trust. You’re going to go on a second date (and more) to see if that initial spark of connection can manifest into the trust that needs to be there for a relationship to work.
Again, content marketers can take your customers on the same type of journey using high-quality content.
Let’s assume that your prospect comes across your brand on social media. They read a post, click the link, and enjoy the content on your landing page, resulting in them feeling that all-important connection. But most customers aren’t going to give you a big sloppy kiss (i.e., buy your product) on the first date. They’ll want to read and watch more to confirm that the connection they feel is real and that they can trust your company to deliver on the promises it makes.
And make no mistake about it – trust is crucial to the modern consumer. Check out this stat from Exploding Topics:
A little over four out of every five potential customers say that they need to trust the brands that they buy from. Content agencies develop that trust by distributing content that speaks the right language and emphasizes your status as the customer’s knight in shining armor who’s come to solve their problem. Combine that with proper scheduling (ensuring the prospect reads the right content at the right time) and you have a recipe for the trust that becomes the foundation of your relationship.
Get a Competitive Advantage Over Your Rivals
There are all sorts of ways you can develop a competitive advantage over other companies, from treating customers better than they do to offering unique products that people can’t get anywhere else. But in the digital realm, the best way to create a competitive advantage is to use content marketing to drive traffic to your website (with the added bonus of content helping you out in search engines).
And the stats show that content works for those who need an edge:
WordStream’s stats tell us that companies that create blog posts regularly get 55% more traffic to their websites than companies that don’t have blogs. That means 55% more people coming through your virtual doors who’ll grow to like and trust you while they devour your content.
If we come back to our blind date analogy, let’s imagine you went on two blind dates. Both made great first impressions, putting you in the difficult position of choosing between them. One of the dates calls up the next day, arranges more dates, and works on building a deeper connection with you. The other person ghosts you. No call. No second date. No nothing.
That’s what’s happening to your customers if you don’t have great content on your website, be that in the form of a blog, articles, or simply well-crafted content. As impressive as the social media posts or paid ads that you used to make your first impression may be, your lack of substance after the fact means customers aren’t going to go on that crucial second date with you.
Simply put, businesses that blog more get more traffic, and more traffic results in more leads (and more potential sales).
Build Brand Awareness
Ask most marketers what they want to achieve with their content strategy (and even their digital marketing as a whole), and you’ll find that brand awareness is high on the list. That’s not speculation on our part either, as these stats from Smart Insights show:
In this survey, over a third of marketers (37%) say that they want to use digital marketing to create more awareness around their brands. That’s 11% more than the 26% who say they focus their digital efforts on getting leads.
That makes sense if you remember that any potential customer needs to find out about you before they can buy from you. Without awareness, a prospect can’t take the first step on the path to buying from your company because they don’t even know where that path is, never mind where it might lead them.
While content marketing is traditionally seen as a way to develop trust while moving a customer along the buyer’s journey, it’s also key to creating awareness. Every ad you’ve ever seen, be it paid ads in search engines or billboards looming over the highway, uses some form of content to make you aware that a brand exists. Your content marketing encompasses these initial attention-grabbers, in addition to the attention-keeping stuff, to push people toward your company.
The Different Ways NEWMEDIA Can Create Content to Get Results
We've covered some important information so far, including the ingredients that go into a content marketing strategy recipe and what benefits content marketing agencies deliver. Now, let's dig deeper by exploring the specific services that go into a good content strategy.
Website Content
Let’s return to the dating analogy. We know that first impressions are everything. And for many of your clients, the first impression your website makes (both with design and content) plays a key role in their buying decisions:
Kinesis’s stats reveal two important facts about how consumers research brands in the 21st century. First, 85% of B2B customers (and we’d hazard a guess that it’s a similar percentage for B2C customers) turn to the web to find out more about a company before they buy from it. Most of those people will land on your website, with 75% of them saying they’ll make an instant judgment about your company’s credibility based on what the website presents to them.
Design is obviously a key component here, as how your site looks and feels needs to meet modern expectations. But content plays a role, too, as a site that looks that part isn’t going to get conversions if the content shared on that site fails to engage. So, the first part of any content marketing strategy is usually starting at home (your website) to ensure the content you present gets people interested.
Blog Content Marketing
We’ve already touched on how powerful website blogs can be (remember – 55% more traffic to sites that have them), so you already know that a good blog is a traffic-driving moneymaker.
Instead of digging deeper into those numbers, we’ll pose a question:
What is a blog?
By the strictest definition, a blog is a collection of articles (often categorized) where you share your thoughts, wisdom, and anything else you think a customer needs to know about your business. But that’s the obvious answer, and it’s not the one NEWMEDIA uses. Rather, we see blogs as opportunities for businesses to create connections and build the trust that customers need to feel before they’ll buy from you.
To demonstrate how impactful blogs are when it comes to creating trust, we can check this chart from Marketing Charts:
There are some interesting numbers here, with the chart showing that over nine in ten people trust brands more if they get positive feedback from friends, family, or reviews. But cast your eyes a little further down the chart and you’ll see that nearly two-thirds of people (65%) say that the presence of a blog on a website positively influences how much they trust the business behind the site.
Therein lies the opportunity of which we spoke.
Your blog is a place where you can share your expertise, derived from knowledge of your industry that only you have, with your customers. Furthermore, a regularly-updated blog shows a potential customer that you care enough about your website (and, by extension, your business) to keep it updated and filled with valuable information.
The NEWMEDIA content agency helps you to create blogs filled with a mixture of your own content and carefully-crafted pieces designed to target your audience.
Social Media Marketing
Log on to your social media platform of choice and you’ll find content as far as the eye can see. Facebook is awash with posts, images, and videos. Every condensed thought shared on Twitter is content that you can consume, as is every photo on Instagram or short-form video on TikTok.
Far from being a place to connect with friends, social media is the modern-day content-sharing phenomenon. And you’ll see this in action whenever leading brands use their social media platforms to share stories or when influencers regale you with tales from their lives, with the requisite links to product pages where you can buy something, of course. And it’s through stories that your content marketing will shine on social media, as this pie chart from TrueList shows:
According to these stats, 63.4% of marketers believe that the stories they share on social media are at least “somewhat effective” in helping them to connect with their audiences. Only 1.9% are confident to say that their social media content is “very ineffective,” but we’d wager that those people aren’t sharing compelling stories.
The point is that a good content marketing agency (like NEWMEDIA) transforms your social media pages from digital business cards into effective online content marketing machines.
Infographic Content
When most people think of the word “content,” their minds naturally gravitate to the written word. What you read is the content you consume, but writing is only one piece of the content marketing puzzle. Visual elements are just as important, especially when you consider the fact that people process visual stimuli 60,000 times faster than words, and that 37% of your audience members classify themselves as visual learners.
That’s where infographics come into the picture.
An infographic combines text with imagery to give your audience the best of both worlds. Take the following picture, courtesy of HubSpot, as an example:
This fun little infographic combines interesting stats (apparently someone can type the alphabet blindfolded in less than five seconds) with attractive imagery that aligns with the text.
This potent combination makes information more likely to stick in the reader’s mind, which is why infographics are a great addition to any content strategy. NEWMEDIA combines the content created by our writers with attractive visuals from our design team to create stunning infographics.
Email Marketing
It’s amazing to think that technology as relatively new as email (at least when compared to print) is now seen as outdated by some marketers. It’s not hard to find evidence of this, either, as any research into email marketing will eventually lead you to articles proclaiming email to be a dead medium.
Those articles are wrong.
Emails can be one of the most effective content marketing tools in your digital strategy, as this chart from Maven Marketing Lab shows:
If you asked us to trade $1 for $40, we’d bite your hand off. So, if we tell you that a good email campaign can generate $40,000 for every $1,000 you spend, what excuse do you have not to use email?
Now, we recognize that many brands use email (or have used it in the past) without results. But that’s where planning comes into play, as a random email shot off every month or so does not an email strategy make. Proper email marketing combines compelling content with knowledge of where each recipient is in their buying journey, ensuring you only send emails that the recipient is likely to open and read.
NEWMEDIA doesn’t just write those emails for you. We help you to create campaigns designed to get you the highest ROI possible out of one of digital marketing’s oldest (and most reliable) tools.
Podcast Content
We’ve already dispelled the myth that content marketing is limited to the written word, as infographics show us that visuals come into play, too. So, it should come as no surprise that your actual words, at least when delivered in the structured format of a podcast, can complement and supplement your written content.
Podcasts are great for content marketing for two reasons.
First, a ton of people listen to them, as demonstrated by this chart from Riverside.fm:
Here, we see constant growth in podcast listening. In 2006, only 11% of Americans aged 12 or over listened to podcasts. Fast-forward to 2022, and that percentage rockets up to 62%, meaning approximately 177 million people settle in to listen to their favorite podcasters wax lyrical about whatever subjects interest them.
Second, the same organization shows us that 90% of people who listen to podcasts think that the ads in podcasts are “effective,” with over half (55%) saying they’ve bought something as a result of listening to a podcast ad.
Both podcasts and ads placed in them are examples of content marketing. NEWMEDIA can help you to develop both.
Video Content Marketing
With platforms like YouTube and Vimeo combined with your social media pages and website, video marketing can become a crucial part of your content marketing strategy. The downside of video, at least when compared to writing content, is that it costs a lot more to produce a video than it does to tap away at a keyboard. Animated videos require animators, with live-action videos needing lighting, cameras, and possibly even actors.
All of that may make you shy away from using video in your online content marketing strategy. But it shouldn’t, as videos are extremely profitable:
The Social Shephard shares this Oberloo stat, which comes from a survey of marketers that use video content. An enormous 88% of those quizzed say that they get “satisfactory” ROI from video content, at least when they post it to social media.
But far from being a social media marketing strategy, video is something that you can use across multiple channels to get people to pay attention to your product. NEWMEDIA can help you to craft attractive (and attention-grabbing) videos.
Paid Ads
Type almost any search term into Google and you’ll see something like this pop up:
Those first three results with the “Sponsored” tag are paid ads, which appear ahead of organic search results in Google. And if you take a second to read the ads, you’ll notice…that you’re reading the ads. In other words, those ads contain content that’s designed to grab your attention and make you click through to the website in the ad.
The couple of lines of content you see in each of these ads slide under the content marketing umbrella, with a key challenge being how to make the most use of the limited space that paid ad formats provide. NEWMEDIA can help your business to rise to that challenge with quality paid ad content, which contributes to helping you get the $8 for every $1 you spend that Google claims its paid advertising delivers.
User-Generated Content
Sometimes, the best content for building brand recognition and convincing people to trust your company is content that you have no hand in creating. Walls.io highlights just how powerful content written by other people can be:
According to these stats, over four in every five people (81%) say that a product supported by positive user-generated content (UGC) is a product they’ll spend more money on (at least compared to similar products with no UGC). That tracks with the other stats in this collection, which show that about nine in 10 people look for recommendations or advice from others before they buy products.
With that in mind, it’s worth exploring UGC.
Any review that somebody leaves about your product, every reply to a post (or individual post) somebody shares on social media, and even comments on your website’s blog fall under the UGB umbrella. Of course, you can’t write this content yourself, as that’s unethical and creates the risk that people will lose trust in your brand.
Instead, you’ll provide platforms for people to leave their comments and reviews, such as the posts you place on social media, in addition to keeping an active presence on review websites. Every bit of encouragement you send to current clients to leave reviews for your product plays into the UGC equation, too, ultimately allowing you to use other people’s content to promote your brand.
Landing Pages
A landing page is a webpage that somebody lands on when they click on one of your paid ads or select your site in organic search results. So, they’re basically web pages, with the key difference being that they need to be relevant to whatever the client clicked on to land on the page.
For example, imagine that you have a car dealership that sells BMWs. You notice through your keyword research that more people are searching for Mercedes than BMW, so you create some paid ads that claim you sell Mercedes vehicles, only to send anybody who clicks to a BMW page.
That isn’t relevant.
You’re going to spend more on every click because your page doesn’t match your ad (ad platforms consider relevancy when charging for clicks) and you’re going to anger customers. After all, you’re pulling the wool over their eyes by promising one thing and giving them another, and we know by now how important trust is to your consumers.
So, relevance is critical with landing page content. But volume also plays a role, as this chart from Uplers shows us:
Interestingly, these stats show us that companies that have between one and five landing pages generate about 100 new leads through those pages, with the number of leads rising to about 175 for those with between 16 and 20 landing pages. Once you get to 40+, B2B companies generate almost 600 leads through landing pages, with B2c companies not far behind on about 575.
More and highly-relevant landing pages generate leads, with NEWMEDIA being perfectly positioned to create the content (and the pages themselves) for you.
Create a Successful Content Marketing Strategy for Your Business
The simple fact is that if you’re not working with a content marketing agency, you’re losing out on potential customers. Quality content (with an appropriate strategy) builds brand awareness, creates connections, and develops trust, all of which feed into customers buying from your company.
The only question to answer is why work with NEWMEDIA?
- No matter the size of your brand, we can develop a content marketing strategy for you. We’ve helped multi-national companies generate $1 million or more in revenue per day with digital marketing, and we’ve helped small businesses achieve massive growth.
- Major brands trust us with their websites and content, from CBS Television and California Almonds to Six Flags and Postnet.
- The industry recognizes our talents. Clutch calls NEWMEDIA one of the top 1000 companies in the country, and Expertise.com says we’re one of the top digital marketing agencies around in 2023.
NEWMEDIA’s content creation team can help you with everything from the words that go on your website’s pages to the videos and imagery you use to engage your audience. Contact us at [email protected] and let’s start your content marketing journey.
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