Chapter 5 – Content Marketing

Previously, we’ve walked you through the nuts and bolts of conducting keyword research. The next step now is to improve the ranking of keywords and obtain high-quality traffic through content marketing. So what exactly is content marketing? What are the benefits of investing in content? In this chapter, we’ll first take a look at the relationship between content marketing and SEO, and then explore how we go about creating a content marketing strategy. 

 

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing uses any form of content to provide current and potential customers with valuable information to promote the brand, establish good public relations, and drive conversions.

 

What are the Benefits of Content Marketing?

1. Boost Marketing Efficiency

Traditional marketing techniques typically rely on ads to improve brand visibility and sales. Although ads generate immediate results, brand visibility and sales will drop once you stop paying for them. In contrast, high-quality content attracts your audience organically to read and share, generating backlinks. Through this method, you are able to get continuous traffic even without paying for ads, thereby reducing marketing costs.

 

2. Establish Brand Loyalty

Well-designed content can build authority and credibility for your brand. According to a 2014 study by NewsCred, more than 60% of millennials feel that useful content helps drive their brand loyalty. When readers consider your content practical, they will be more likely to depend on you to obtain the information that they need. As a result, we can establish lasting relationships with our readers.

 

3. Improve Conversions

As mentioned, content marketing helps drive quality traffic and build healthy relationships with our readers. When readers trust a brand, they will be more willing to take the next step, such as becoming followers, sharing brand-related content or even converting into a targeted customer. Compared to other marketing methods, studies have shown that the conversion rate brought by content marketing can be nearly six times higher.

 

Content Marketing Done Right

A common misconception about content marketing is that we can maximize its effectiveness as long as there is new content being continuously published. But the fact of the matter is, quality of content outweighs quantity. Take content farms as an example. They generate large numbers of articles to increase click-through rates. However, their content is often irrelevant to the brand, lacks originality, and not tailored for a specific group of targeted customers; hence, it doesn’t bring value to the brand. Content marketing has to be done right. Before kicking off your content marketing plan, remember to pay attention to these three key elements:

1. Goal-Setting

Before creating content, we must first understand the kind of information our potential customers are searching for and words they used to search for that particular information. These insights can be gained from keyword research, which we can then leverage for topic ideation. Each topic should revolve around a core goal, such as increasing brand awareness, building a list of potential customers, or promoting sales.

 

2. Content Creation

Once we have set our goals and directions, it’s time to create content that will engage our audience. High-quality content needs originality, relevance, and practicality. It also must balance readability and user experience (UX) in order to draw traffic and improve conversion rates. We will be explaining in detail about UX in a later chapter.

 

3. Content Management

After a piece of content is published, we must regularly evaluate its marketing effectiveness and value using different key performance indicators (KPIs). For instance, checking the traffic, engagement rate, and conversion rate can let us know if the content is meeting the expected goals. Based on these data, we can update and optimize our content to give our readers the most relevant information. 

📖 Continue Reading: Is Blog Writing the Most Effective SEO Content Marketing Strategy?

 

How Content Marketing & SEO Work Together

At this point, you may ask what the relationship between content marketing and SEO is. Do we need both? The answer is a big YES! We need both content marketing and SEO to complement one another in order for us to achieve the best marketing results.

We’ve mentioned that in SEO, quality content is king. If we only focus on technical SEO and fail to provide quality content to our readers, everything is futile. Remember that search engines are user-centric and aim to deliver the best search results. SEO without content marketing contradicts the purpose of search engines. Content marketing offers users relevant and valuable information that can improve click-through rates, bring backlinks to the website, increase the average session duration, and reduce the bounce rate. All of which are important ranking factors.

On the other hand, good content requires SEO efforts to help maximize benefits. A website that does not focus on SEO may experience technical problems ranging from broken links, orphan pages, coding mistakes to slow page speed, etc. These increase the likelihood of search engines not being able to crawl and index important pages, affecting the overall user experience and resulting in a decline in search rankings. It goes without saying that high-quality content needs SEO to back it up in order to improve page visibility and the speed of distribution.

By now, you should understand the decisive role content marketing plays in SEO. While SEO utilizes quality content, SEO helps increase the visibility of online content and gain more quality traffic. Both are indispensable. In the next chapter, we’ll delve into the different ways that you can enable rich results that will enhance the appearance of search engine result pages and improve click-through rates. If you have any questions about SEO services, contact our team at MWI Hong Kong today!