How content marketing works

If you’ve ever wondered how content marketing works, you’re not the only one.

Content marketing can cause confusion.

What is it?

How does it work?

Is it just social media?

This uncertainty can make managers reluctant to spend money on it. Although it’s a highly effective form of marketing, tracking the ROI can be trickier than some other types of marketing. With paid ads, for example, you can directly track your spend with your leads and conversions.

By comparison, content marketing generally takes longer to start driving results, and tracing the customer journey from finding you to buying from you typically has more steps. This shouldn’t put you off though: it’s entirely possible to monitor the success of your content marketing and to calculate its ROI. Plus, unlike paid ads, the impact of content grows over time – meaning the more you publish and the longer a piece is live, the more views you’ll receive.

How content marketing works: the principles

According to the Content Marketing Institute:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Unlike running adverts, most content isn’t designed to explicitly sell. Rather, you’re publishing information to help your audience. Your content answers their questions, enhances their understanding, and ultimately provides value to them. This is the stage where we turn to Google with a question, and read a blog or watch a video to get the answer.

This is an advantage of content marketing over paid ads: the latter is primarily a tactic for selling to people who are ready to buy right now. This means instant sales, but a smaller audience because most people aren’t ready to buy at that specific moment. (This isn’t to imply ads aren’t effective, just that their purpose is complementary to content rather than a direct replacement.)

Content works in a different way: we, as potential customers, seek out specific information at different stages of our buying journey. On day one, we might be researching the benefits of something or how to accomplish a task – like which tyres to put on a car or whether life insurance is needed.

After that, we may start looking into the different types and comparing one brand against another.

We continue this process, gradually increasing our knowledge until we’re ready to make a decision.

The content marketing funnel

This process of acquiring more knowledge and becoming more familiar with a service, product, or company is known as a funnel, and it’s a crucial part of effective marketing.

Unfortunately, it’s also where a lot of marketers go wrong.

Often, content marketers will only consider one stage of the customer journey, and it’s usually the stage of the customer being ready to buy. There’s logic to this: by talking to people who are ready to buy, you’d hope for quicker sales. 

The downside is you completely ignore a much wider pool of potential customers.

With a funnel, you have content that addresses the different stages a customer goes through:

• Informative content that answers top-level questions, for people who are curious about something but aren’t yet ready to buy
• Content for people that have a problem and are exploring ways to solve it. “Problem” can be anything from a leaking hosepipe to wanting a six-pack
• Then you have content for people who are actively looking for a solution. This is where they’re weighing up their options, and your content will put you on their list of choices
• The next stage is where they’re starting to make a decision. This content goes into more depth, because the customer is deciding not only which solution they want, but which company they think is best
• Finally, the stage where they’re ready to buy

By creating content that helps people in the earlier stages of the funnel, you earn goodwill and trust. Those potential customers will come back to you each time they want to learn more, and the trust increases the chances that you’re the company they’ll turn to when they’re ready to buy.

On the other hand, if you only appeal to people who are ready to buy already, you have two problems:

1. You’ve alienated a large pool of potential customers
2. You’re talking to people who have likely been following content from other companies and built trust with them. Your content now has to work incredibly hard to win those people away from their preferred businesses.

The takeaway: consider the different stages your buyers go through and create content for each of those stages. This will make you more relevant, more useful, and help you to always have a fuller pipeline.

How to automate content marketing – and its results

By this stage, you might be thinking this sounds like a lot of work. But actually it doesn’t need to be.

The beauty of content marketing is that much of it can be entirely automated.

You’ll need to regularly create and release new content (which can be outsourced to save you time), which is what will help new people discover you.

This new content can link to previous pieces and put people into your funnel, and with automation  you only need to set it up once.

Let’s say your content is your blog. You publish new posts, and each post has a call to action to download something or join your newsletter. The download you offer only has to be created once and can stay on your website for as long as it remains relevant. Ideally you would also have an email sequence created, and when someone downloads that resource or joins your newsletter, the sequence is automatically triggered and sends them a series of emails on your chosen schedule. These emails can include more information about you, links to additional resources to help them, and a call to action to talk to you or buy from you.

In other words, this automated funnel turns visitors into buyers without you having to do any additional work. Plus, you’ll be able to see the performance analytics for each blog and email, so you’ll know exactly what people read and clicked on to become a paying customer.

That’s content marketing in a nutshell! If you’d like to find out more or talk about your own content strategy, get in touch today.