Content is a must for any company looking to build trust online. According to Hubspot, 47% of buyers engage with 3-5 pieces of content before directly engaging with a company. What does this mean for you? It means that content is a must for any digital marketing strategy. By creating a digital marketing strategy with content at its heart your business will be in a much stronger position when looking to engage and convert leads to customers.
Content is a great way in which to engage with your prospects, and this is true for them at any stage of the buying cycle – Awareness, Consideration and Decision stage – value-packed content helps your customers understand your company better and make them more likely to trust you and contact you.
Here are some great ways in which you can use content marketing to help build trust and drive leads to your company.
Blogging
Always blog posts are great, we always recommend that you put in some research to this prior to writing them. Are people searching for what you plan to write about? Is it giving value to the reader? Are you offering anything new or something interesting? These are all important questions that you need to consider when blogging.
You need to also think about content from the point of view of your customers, on this blog for example we want to write about marketing advice for sole-traders right up to managing directors and marketing managers of SMEs that may be looking for some digital marketing help, so we cater on a range of subjects that research has shown are of interest.
If you are an electrician then write about how to change a plug – or better yet make a video about this and share it all over YouTube, Facebook and on your website, you need to give great value and that value turns into trust and more business.
Make sure that you also come up with a digital marketing strategy for your content that is topical – Christmas, Halloween and other holidays are great ways to come at topics with a different spin and angle.
Gated Content
Gated Content is content where you ask people to do something in order to gain access to the content. This could be to share the article to social media to gain access to a something specific, or you could ask people for an email in order to add them to a list and send newsletters to them for ongoing marketing.
What works for one company may not always work for another, so as ever test, test and test.
If you are an accountant you could set up a PDF with some insightful tips, such as 10 “Tips For A Start-Up Business” and then ask for people to give them their email address in exchange for it – just make sure you give some great advice and add in your business number and brand it to your business in order to gain trust with the person reading it.
Engaging video
Video is one of the most engaging forms of content. Video can be used at every stage of the buying process and really helps people engage with your company. Here at Digital Jumpsuit, we use video on a near daily basis, this is in the form of live videos that we post over on our Facebook Page (be sure to give us a like over there so you can watch these) which are full of topics about businesses and marketing.
Remember that your videos should be insightful, memorable, engaging or shareable. Think about who you are speaking to and what their pain points maybe.
Link building
Although not content, link building is vital to ensure that content has the desired effect and helps you increase your leads from the content you produce. Link building is basically a form of PR, and involves you emailing relevant blogs and people in order to gain awareness of your content – this could mean that you get links from other websites, a mention/link in a newsletter or shared on social media – all extra promotion is vital to help you gain more visitors and awareness of your content.
Great content should be the heart of any digital marketing strategy and always ensure that the content you produce is interesting and valuable to your potential audience.
If you have any questions please feel free to ask us on our Facebook or Twitter accounts, or contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
