How to use content marketing to grow your business
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Content marketing is a technique used by businesses that has a wide variety of benefits when it comes to boosting online presence and enhancing overall success.
In this blog, we’re going to talk to you about how to use content marketing to grow your business – and how Digital PR forms an important part of the process, alongside the efforts of SEO, content and creative teams.
What is content marketing and why is it important?
Content marketing for business essentially helps brands to build relationships with their audiences. It’s a strategic approach to digital marketing which involves creating and sharing materials that are relevant, valuable and engaging – helping brands to attract and stay in touch with these key audiences.
These materials could include landing pages, articles in the form of blog content and press releases, and assets such as infographics, images, videos, social media posts and more. If you’re familiar with Digital PR, you’ll know these are the key ingredients of a large-scale Digital PR campaign.
But content marketing can also include the likes of email marketing, ebooks, whitepapers, podcasts and webinars.
It’s important because this kind of content can introduce customers or potential service users to your brand in a subtle, less promotional way, and build trust and credibility with them – before they’re even ready to buy your product or choose your services.
Content marketing goes hand-in-hand with the ‘messy middle’ – which is known as the intermediate stage in a customer’s decision-making journey. This is when customers are aware of your brand, or the product or service they need, but haven’t yet decided to purchase anything and are in the process of conducting their research.
Or, they’re waiting for the right time to make the decision – perhaps they’re waiting to be paid or they don’t need a product until the Summer. But while they’re in this deliberation stage, you must make sure your brand is visible and up for consideration by the buyer, and content marketing is how you do it.
6 ways content marketing (done properly) improves business growth
Content marketing benefits come in abundance, so let’s take a deeper dive into everything you stand to gain from adopting this approach to your digital marketing…
1. Brand awareness and visibility
It sounds obvious, but by creating and distributing relevant, valuable and engaging content, you’re boosting your brand awareness and visibility and letting people know you exist. Creating SEO-optimised, written content that sits on your site is a key part of this, as is gaining links to your site through press releases that relate to this content.
According to Google, content writers should consider elements like meeting search intent, covering topics completely, using keywords naturally, leaving readers feeling satisfied, using expert sources, using unique and original insight, and more.
The more you do this, the more likely your content is to appear in search engines when people are searching for the topic you’ve written about.
By gaining press coverage and links through the distribution of your newsworthy content, you’re also bolstering your brand awareness by reaching an even wider audience.
Before writing any content or coming up with a content marketing campaign idea, your SEO team should conduct a thorough audit including keyword research to identify the goals you want to achieve. This can help to identify which keywords you rank well for, if any, and which need improvement. Plus, the state of your backlink profile.
2. Improve keyword rankings and drive traffic
When you do content well, you’re likely to improve your keyword and SERP rankings, thereby driving organic traffic to your site and helping you to stand out from your competitors.
We have a fantastic tool at Embryo called Intermingle, which was built by our chief innovation officer James Welch. It allows our clients to see on one page where they rank against their competitors for their most pressing keywords.
The more useful your content marketing campaign is, the more likely people are going to visit and engage with your site.
Digital PR is also a key driver of referral traffic and is the last part of the strategy in content marketing for business processes. The content you create must be newsworthy and good enough for the press, so once a piece of content is written for your site, a Digital PR expert will turn it into a press release.
Any campaign can have several press targets, not just one, and a bespoke outreach strategy will be designed. But overall, the aim is to gain high-quality links from news sites, back to your site, which of course will drive referral traffic.
3. Improve your site’s SEO health
The gaining of such links will improve your site’s SEO health. The key is to gain links from news sites with high domain authorities. The higher the DA of the site linking to you, the more benefits are passed to your site, and it’s a positive recommendation in the eyes of Google.
You can gain follow and no-follow links – a healthy mix of both is always advised. You’re more likely to gain a following link if your content is exclusive to one news site and follow links are often dished out by ‘niche’ or ‘business-led’ publications.
They often have lower DAs than national news websites for example, but sites that are considered experts within their industry are considered ‘librarian news sites’ by Embryo. Research shows Google highly values these sites, so a link or mention on one of these is also a very good recommendation in the eyes of Google, even if their DA is a little lower.
4. Authority and trust signals
Mark McGonigle, Embryo’s Delivery Director, said: “Using content marketing to grow your business is all about creating natural signals which drive organic performance. It’s a great way to show off unique data and content about a client, or the industry it’s in, which gives the brand authority and boosts awareness.”
Authority and trust are among the content marketing benefits because you’re informing and entertaining your audience, rather than promoting something directly. Visuals, like assets, are a big part of authority and trust because they signal that you have expertise if they’re done well.
That’s why companies choose to use creative infographics to showcase their data or content, or even create interactive landing pages that personalise the consumer experience.
You build up this trust and authority by being consistent, authentic, transparent and reliable, and offering educational content.
Social media is a vital part of how to use content marketing to grow your business. If your content is good enough, which it should be, the use of social media will amplify its reach – and give readers a platform to engage with you directly or find out more about your brand.
You can reach an even wider audience by taking out ads on your posts, too. To get people to engage with your content marketing content you should seek to be informative, but evoking emotion is another popular way to do so.
If you think about the stories you see online that you share with your friends and family or talk about at work, it’s because they’re either shocking, new, interesting, funny, unbelievable, or sad. It’s good to have this in mind when thinking about the context of any content marketing campaigns.
6. Increase leads, conversions and revenue
If you’ve read down this far, you’re likely going to have an idea now about how all of this can then in turn lead to leads, conversions and revenue for your brand. Whether it’s immediately or later down the line, content marketing helps brands to draw in engaged users and genuine potential customers, as opposed to people who aren’t interested in or don’t need what you’re offering.
SEO + Content + Digital PR = Digital marketing success in 2024
There are several reasons why using SEO, Content and Digital PR together equals content marketing success. At Embryo, each of these three teams works in unison on a campaign that can be spread out over time, for example, four months.
SEO is the starting point, at which an SEO specialist will:
- Conduct a competitor analysis to see how a brand compares with its rivals
- Look at the average amount of links needed in the industry to compete with them
- Conduct a backlink profile analysis of the brand
- Do a health audit of the brand’s website
Then, to help with direction for content:
- Look for long-tail keywords that have informational intent to support main pillar pages – e.g for a chair company, if there’s an ‘office chair’ page on the site, content could be created around ‘types of office chairs’, that will internally link back to commercial pages
- Once keywords are established, things like search volume, traffic potential, keyword difficulty and how many referring domains the top-ranking pages have for that term, are considered
- Look at the first page results on Google to determine the site ranking for those keywords, and if the brand could compete with them
- If so, focus keywords for the content marketing campaign will be provided
Once you have these, you can start to ideate for the basis of your content marketing campaign – taking into account what would work well on-site, and in the press.
Once this is decided, content writers would write the on-site content using a framework based on what Google likes and values. The keywords would be incorporated into the piece, alongside the other techniques we described above – and more.
This should help the brand to rank better for those keywords, naturally, and drive traffic to the site.
Then, the final piece of the puzzle is Digital PR. As we’ve covered, Digital PR is a huge driver of not only referral traffic but also backlinks. If Google can see that respected news sites are linking to a brand’s site, or their piece of content, it can impact SERP and keyword rankings – and even improve the domain authority of the brand’s website.
Embryo’s content marketing approach for a football shirt retailer
We recently decided to do a content marketing campaign for a client in the football shirt retail industry, titled: ‘AI image generator predicts 12 countries’ Euro 2024 shirts’.
This was timely, with the international game set to kick off in June, and we knew that people were searching for any news of kit leaks or launches and that search volume would ramp up as the tournament nears. We also knew that our client planned to release a Euro Mystery Box.
We used the image generator Midjourney to design 12 of the biggest and best-known teams’ shirts, using their country’s flag colours, and in a retro design but modern style. Once these were ready, our content team wrote the on-site content which incorporated keywords from the keyword research around football shirts and Euro 2024, and was set out in a way that Google favours.
This on-site content was then turned into a press release and outreached to the press. While the outreach is still in its infancy, it gained coverage in the UK news and lifestyle publication Reader’s Digest. This site has a DA of 73, and the story included two follow links – one to the blog content, and one to the homepage.
Joe.co.uk, which has almost 1M followers on Instagram, also posted the campaign to their socials – drumming up lots of user engagement.
It was also posted on the client’s social media.
This is an example of relevant, valuable, and engaging content that gets people to engage with the brand, but it doesn’t appear promotional or sales. By doing this project, we were able to make people aware of the brand and get the piece of content to appear in search engine rankings for different keywords.
Experience growth with Content Marketing Packages by Embryo
If you think a content marketing package could benefit your business, please get in touch with us by calling the Embryo office on 0161 327 2635, or emailing [email protected].
We can design packages of all sizes to suit a wide variety of businesses, with the expertise of our talented teams and individuals.
