You may be surprised to find out that content marketing produces three times as many leads as more traditional outbound marketing methods. It also costs 62% less! (Content Marketing Institute) With statistics like this and the current digital landscape, content marketing should be a must for all businesses. Mastering content marketing can completely transform your business. Whether you are looking to increase leads, build a loyal following, drive your sales, or enhance your brand’s visibility.

This process not only builds trust and loyalty but can also be the powerhouse behind profitable actions.

Content marketing involves actively creating and sharing content designed specifically for your target audience. It tends to be shared as educational, informative or entertaining media that helps build credibility in your field, trust with your potential clients and drives your conversions upwards.

We are all sick and tired of traditional marketing, forcing its way into your everyday life. Businesses and brands are pushing and paying for interruptive adverts that contain very little value. This is quickly becoming a marketing strategy of the past, with content marketing pulling audiences towards brands. This natural pull is created through providing the real value that audiences are actively seeking.

At ThanksTom we are constantly encouraging and helping our clients to create blog posts. Blogging is where a business or brand regularly publishes written articles on its website. They share updates, insights, and their specific expertise on topics relevant to their audiences. It’s a great method of establishing authority in their particular industry or field.

We also encourage blogging to help boost a business’s SEO, often by addressing their audience’s questions and challenges. If you are thinking “what is SEO?” or “Why is SEO important?” Check out our blog post all about SEO here.

Everyone has a podcast at the moment, right? Well, there’s a reason for that. Imagine your target audience is split into three types of people. 

1. People who like to read books.
2. People who prefer to watch a film.
3. People who love to listen to audiobooks.

We’re not saying these preferences are mutually exclusive, but podcasts will appeal to those who prefer auditory information. Podcasts can provide intimate conversations, connecting personally and authentically with listeners.

These in-depth resources can be especially useful in sectors such as B2B, finance, education, technology, and healthcare. Anywhere where target audiences are making decisions by looking for more detailed and evidence-based information.

White papers and case studies help you showcase a deeper expertise, demonstrate proven results, and help you build trust and credibility within your industry. Often, research insights and real-world success stories are highlighted to position your business or brand as an expert and trusted authority.

Now, we are talking about quality content that is consistently delivered over time. Not infrequent blogging or a random Instagram reel, but something more assured and valuable. This quality content helps build a ‘bond of trust’ between your business/ brand and your audience.

According to HubSpot, “70% of marketers actively invest in content marketing” to build audience trust (HubSpot, 2022).

Brand loyalty is when a customer has a consistent preference for one brand over any others over time. This can be seen where we will repeatedly purchase one preferred brand and create positive word of mouth about said brand.

It makes sense that audiences will prefer brands that appear to genuinely care. By consistently delivering valuable information to them, you are encouraging longer-term loyalty and repeated interactions with your business.

Establishing brand loyalty is incredibly important when ‘loyal’ customers become less price sensitive, more profitable, and advocate for the brands they are loyal to. They are seen as powerful assets in creating sustained business success.

You can foster a community around your brand with meaningful interactive content that encourages active participation. Typical ways of achieving this are by inviting your audience to comment, share, vote, participate in discussions, share feedback, and share their own stories. The result is an audience who feels not only seen and heard but who develops a stronger emotional connection to your brand.

With more loyal and active community members, a brand’s visibility improves through social sharing. This has the added bonus of increasing user retention across a brand’s digital platforms.

We encourage our clients to think about their calls to action. Specific prompts are designed to take prospective customers (an audience) to the next step in a sales funnel. These next steps can be such as downloading a guide, requesting a demo, signing up for a newsletter, or even as simple as making a purchase, depending on where they sit in the process.

Well-designed and carefully placed CTAs within your valuable content are a more natural way of gently guiding an audience towards a conversion than a hard sell. This method feels like a natural extension of the audience’s journey and has been shown to enhance user experience and increase all-important conversion rates.

Content marketing’s ability to enhance search engine rankings has to be the number one reason why we promote it to clients.

According to SEMrush, businesses that blog regularly receive 55% more traffic than those who don’t (SEMrush). This becomes even more prevalent with the current trend towards voice search and answering audiences’ most asked questions in your blog.

Entwined with the SEO aspects of content marketing is providing content that is ‘keyword optimised’. It aligns your content with target audience searches, attracting more relevant traffic to your brand and ultimately increasing conversions.

Focusing on sharing unique insights and trends is great. But if you truly want to position your brand as an industry expert, then you will need to consistently deliver accurate and in-depth content that reflects a deeper understanding of your field. It’s great to be visible, but it’s better to be visible and credible at the same time. An audience that finds valuable, fact-based, and insightful content on your channels will begin to rely on your brand as a trusted source of information.

Within your niche, this recognition will elevate your authority over time. When your content allows you to become the go-to resource for peers, customers, media, and influencers, you are truly positioned as an industry expert.

When talking about returns on investment (ROI), content marketing offers a much better ROI than traditional adverts, with benefits being sustained for a much longer time than the initial publication. Videos, blogs, and guides do not stop working after a budget is exhausted and can continue to attract audiences over time.

With content marketing being more affordable and sustainable over time,e it can build a lasting foundation for your brand’s visibility and audience engaging

Evergreen content remains relevant and valuable over an extended period without requiring frequent updating to maintain its value. The content is not tied to specific events or trends, making it timeless. It is focused on core topics relevant to your audience that endure in value over time.

This type of content continues to attract audiences and build authority well after initial publication.

In this context, this is particularly relevant to content marketing and search engine optimisation.

When we work on a client’s SEO strategy, we will discuss their content marketing. When we look at a client’s content marketing, we will refer to their SEO strategy. Combining the two boosts online visibility, resulting in improved traffic both immediately and in the long term.

Valuable content incentivizes email subscriptions, boosting email open rates and nurturing audience relationships.

We know firsthand that creating valuable content incentivises an audience not only to sign up for email subscriptions and mailing lists but also to boost email opening rates. It is effectively nurturing an audience’s relationship with a business or brand.

Working with clients who are looking for industry ‘omnipresence’, we know that engaging content can be very shareable.

Content marketing helps increase a business’s reach on many social media channels, effectively driving engagement and growing an active community around a particular brand.

When a business speaks directly to a customer’s interests and needs through its content, it can naturally complement their inbound marketing. Inbound marketing usually involves a way of drawing potential customers in, for example, email campaigns, blogging, answering relevant questions, automated nurturing campaigns, or creating conversion-optimised landing pages. In essence, content marketing is a foundational component of inbound marketing. Without the content inbound funnel would not be able to exist.

A good example of this would be a software company writing a blog post on productivity tips. This post offers a free guide in exchange for their audience’s contact information. This is then fed into an automated nurturing sequence. It is the seamless integration between a business’s content and inbound marketing that drives long-term trust in audiences and conversion with customers.

Further ahead, we anticipate that more advanced automation and deeper personalisation will be required in content marketing. Augmented reality and virtual reality have the potential to be readily accessible across the globe. With these technologies evolving, businesses will need to adapt to providing dynamic experiences tailored to individuals and move away from static, generic content.

We often recommend that our clients experiment with these tools now so that their technological integration will be able to meet the expectations of more and more sophisticated audiences in the future.

As we mentioned earlier, when looking at AR and VR, interactive and immersive content is already beginning to transform the way that audiences interact with brands. The relevant types of content help change passive viewers into active participants. Good examples are polls, calculators, 360-degree tours, interactive infographics, quizzes, and augmented reality.

This content provides more of a memorable ‘experience’ for audiences, the deeper engagement allowing them to be in control of how they explore the content at their own pace. With interactivity comes increased time on page and data collection opportunities.

As we have previously mentioned, voice search is on the rise. According to Google, 27% of people active online are already regularly using voice search on their mobile devices. With the rise of voice assistants in their pockets and smart speakers in their homes, more users are searching the web using natural spoken language.

Businesses should adapt by creating more conversational content, moving away from focusing on how people type and thinking about how people talk. We already encourage this when working with our clients’ content – structuring it for featured snippets, using long-tail keywords, using FAQs, and answering common questions.

With the growth of voice search, optimising for it will not only improve businesses’ accessibility but also allow them to capture audience segments where their competition is still emerging.

The utilisation of AI tools has already become a game-changer for marketing teams. The ability to streamline the content creation process alongside improving efficiency and consistency is seen by many as a godsend! AI isn’t just text generation, it can segment audiences, help with A/b Testing, generate video scripts and the videos themselves as well as quickly repurpose content for use across different platforms in different formats. We’ve recently used AI to analyse which blog topics are most likely to perform well based on real-time search data and trend analysis.

AI is at its most helpful when it reduces the number of repetitive tasks involved in content marketing, meaning businesses can spend more time focusing on their strategy and creativity (although AI can also help with these, too!).

As the technology evolves, brands taking advantage of it will be able to gain a significant advantage in terms of their agility, responsiveness, and content quality.

The foundation of any successful content marketing strategy is the ability to clearly define your content objectives. There is no way of accurately measuring the effectiveness of your efforts without a clear, pre-defined direction.

This is where measurable goals come into play. They allow you to provide a framework for your decision-making and, over time, track your progress.

Examples of common content marketing goals:

1. Increase website traffic from organic search and referrals.
2. Boost lead generation.
3. Improve customer retention.
4. Enhance social platform engagement.
5. Drive sales upwards.

In order to make such general goals truly actionable, we can borrow a framework from more traditional marketing practices. The SMART model looks like this:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

With more clarity, you can align your team and inform your content planning, ensuring that you are able to evaluate your success accurately.

Don’t forget this method can be used as part of a dynamic long-term strategy. Setting measurable goals ultimately allows you to refine your strategy based on what you see working (and what does not!).

Regular monitoring (and reporting from) your online analytics allows a business or brand to assess its content’s performance. It also creates a valid space to refine strategies within and optimise for better levels of social sharing and conversion rates. Tracking key metrics can provide you with valuable insights into what content really resonates with audiences and the content that is in need of improvement.

75% of marketers say their campaigns are more successful when they use their metric data to inform their decisions (HubSpot, 2023).

Regular content performance reviews ensure that your strategy remains aligned with your business goals whilst helping identify top-performing content and providing insights for future planning. It allows for real-time testing and adjustments of campaigns, maximising your ROI by staying responsive to audience behaviour and market trends.

Real-world examples demonstrate content marketing’s effectiveness, showing tangible impacts on your business. The narrative provided by case studies can highlight specific actions taken, strategies, goals, and measurable outcomes. These all make them a powerful tool for proving ROI.

For example, one of our clients published an in-depth case study on their blog where a customer regularly using their services saw a huge improvement in their health over a six-month period. This piece of content, re-distributed across many social platforms, led to a 39% increase in lead conversions for that particular health service.

These stories not only validate your approach but also give potential clients confidence in your expertise through presenting before-and-after metrics.  Make sure you include visual data and client testimonials to further strengthen your credibility. That way, your results are both more persuasive and more relatable. 

A customer’s needs should be addressed by content at each stage in their journey with you. They should be seamlessly guided towards conversion through awareness, consideration, and finally, the decision.

Awareness: Potential customers within an audience begin discovering they have a problem or a need. Several solutions have been found to be highly effective at this stage, including explainer videos, educational blog posts, and social media content defining the problem.

Consideration: Potential customers begin actively looking into solutions. At this stage, you can position your brand as a viable solution using methods such as detailed case studies, webinars, opinion evaluation, and comparison guides.

Decision: In the final stage, they are ready to make a purchase. Product demonstrations, testimonials, and pricing pages will help reassure them and help seal the deal.

If you strategically map your content to each specific phase, you can create a personalised and helpful experience whilst ensuring your content actively moves potential clients towards becoming loyal customers.

You may or may not have different departments within your organisation. Even sole traders wear the many hats that represent the departments of larger businesses. Collaboration between the product, sales, and customer service teams (or hats!) will ensure that your content effectively supports your business’s wider goals.

Each department (or hat) can provide valuable insights and interact with your audience from a different perspective.

For example;

Product team (or hat): Can provide in-depth information about benefits and features, using case studies that may inform technical blog posts or support documentation.

Sales team (or hat): Can highlight frequently asked questions or common objections. This will help in the creation of content targeting buyer hesitations.

Customer Service Team (or hat): Can turn recurring customer challenges/ misconceptions into informative educational or how-to content.

A more collaborative approach means that your content will become more relevant, strategic, and aligned with your audience’s real-world needs. This then makes sure that your content attracts leads whilst supporting conversions, customer retention, and satisfaction. Essentially, this alignment drives business growth.

A common misconception is that content marketing is merely another marketing channel. It certainly is not. It nurtures relationships, builds trust, and drives measurable results as a long-term strategy.

You can position your business to compete and be a field leader by creating valuable, consistent, and audience-focused content.

You can make content much more than a source of information, it becomes an influence through the integration of SEO, social media, email, and your wider business goals. Content marketing has been proven to increase lead quality, build brand authority, and enhance customer loyalty. It has the power to transform how your chosen audience sees and chooses you.

Whether you are just starting out or are looking to refine an existing approach, now is the time to invest in, experiment with, and evolve your content marketing strategy.