Is Content Marketing Right For Your Business?
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Content is ubiquitous—it accounts for every post, every tweet, every video, blog post, and infographic. Essentially, content is the medium brands use to communicate their goods, services, and value propositions to potential customers.
Content is an ocean, and harnessing its power effectively can work wonders for your business’s brand awareness. However, most companies fail to utilize content marketing correctly and instead end up lost—adrift in a sea of blog articles, Instagram posts, and wasted energy.
If you want to do it right, you need first to decide what type of content marketing—if any—is right for your business. This article will examine what businesses stand to benefit the most from content marketing and which ones are better off sticking to other marketing channels. If you don’t have the dedicated in-house resources to do your own marketing you consider using a content marketing agency.
To get a better idea of whether content marketing is right for your business, let’s first explore the goal of excellent content marketing.
What Is the Goal of Content Marketing?
The benefits of effective content marketing take some time to see. Many business owners grow impatient with it and fail to trust the process. It’s important to remember the overarching goal of content marketing so that you don’t become lost in the weeds, chasing vanity metrics and producing content that isn’t helping you reach that overarching goal.
The primary goal of content marketing is to build up your brand’s reputation as an authoritative, useful, and valuable resource that helps potential customers find the answers to their questions. This is often accomplished by curating a catalog of quality, niche-specific content that engages customers, encourages brand loyalty, and (eventually) creates a self-sustaining community.
Ask Yourself Honestly: Would Your Brand Benefit From This?
Businesses that benefit from solid customer engagement or from being an authoritative resource for consumers can benefit from a content marketing strategy. But this is not all businesses!
Some questions to ask yourself:
- Are people curious about your good or service?
- Is your good or service adjacent to popular industries—sports, health, music, or entertainment?
- Is your good or service considered niche, specialized, or rare?
- Is your business in an industry related to medicine, finance, law, or other authoritative, professional sectors?
If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, then there is a good chance that your business could benefit from content marketing. However, if you own a business that doesn’t rely on consumer engagement or being an authoritative source of information, then this strategy might not be best for your business.
What Kind of Business Does Content Marketing NOT Work For?
For example, if you own a moving company, curating a blog is a waste of time in most cases. The topic of ‘moving’ will likely be covered by far more authoritative interior design and home-making blogs. Your marketing budget would better serve your business if you allocated funds to traditional advertising, SEO, and PPC.
But why?
Let’s face it—people aren’t generally curious about the methods moving companies employ, their logistical philosophies, or other related topics. Moving company customers simply need their stuff moved from point A to point B.
The Takeaway
Content marketing is great for many businesses—but not all businesses. Now that you’ve considered whether or not content marketing is right for your business, we can explore what it actually takes to produce good content.
What Does Good Content Marketing Require?
Several factors contribute to creating great content that (1) engages your customers authentically, (2) builds site authority for your specific niche, and (3) increases conversions.
To reap the benefits of content marketing, you’ll need the following:
- Time and Patience
- A Content Marketing Strategy
- Authentic, Specific Content That Provides Value
- A Basic Understanding of Search Engine Optimization
The Material and Immaterial Benefits of Content Marketing
Remember, the effects of a solid content marketing strategy are not immediate. It can take a year or two before you start to see your organic traffic climb. That’s why it’s important to remember that content marketing is a long-term strategy.
However, there are some material indicators that your plan is working. Using Google analytics and standard SEO tools, you can monitor your site’s search metrics.
- You can observe which content is driving traffic to your site and which content is not performing well, using these insights to craft new, targeted content.
- You can optimize old content to see if on-page SEO can improve your content’s performance.
- You can get a better idea of the demographics of your site’s visitors and strategically target content towards those demographics.
The best way to know if content marketing is right for you specifically is to try it.
Roni Davis is a content strategist, blogger, and legal assistant operating out of the greater Philadelphia area. She produces content for the Law Offices of Stan Gregory, a worker’s comp lawyer in Cherry Hill.
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