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| Content Marketing |
You're already behind if you're still writing 500-word blog entries.
Marketers with a lot of experience are used to dealing with change. You will be buried if you continue to apply the same techniques and approaches that worked 20 years ago.
For the past few years, it has been discreetly whispered in marketing circles that Google has been reducing organic reach. It has become increasingly difficult to reach the world's largest search engine's mysteriously decreasing first page.
The Markup specialists finally carried out an experiment that proved what most marketers already knew: Google gives you a lot of information to keep you on Google before offering you any organic results.
While these activities may create ethical and antitrust problems, you must deal with reality. It's past time for companies and marketers to consider the true condition of content marketing. It's not going to benefit your business to churn out dozens or hundreds of 500-word blog pieces.
That isn't to say that content marketing is no longer relevant. It implies you must consider the objective of content marketing and how to use it in ways other than keywords and blog posts.
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| The Future of Content Marketing |
Purpose of Content Marketing
Content marketing is a strategy for gaining the confidence of your target prospects and moving them through your sales funnel. The internet did not invent content marketing. It has been around for centuries.
The Poor Richard's Almanac, written by Benjamin Franklin to demonstrate his printing skills, was a sort of content marketing. Content marketing has created fortunes for brands as diverse as John Deere and Betty Crocker long before the first microprocessor was ever turned on.
For the past 20 years, we've associated content marketing with blog postings since they've been one of the cheapest tools in the marketing toolbox. Businesses have just lately begun to use video and podcasts as content marketing strategies.
Many marketers have become jaded. They thought that if they followed a few basic best practices, Google would always be there to bring organic traffic to their websites. While those days are long gone, blogs and content marketing are far from dead.
It implies you'll have to come up with fresh strategies to get your content in front of your target audience. In order to demonstrate your authority and competence, you must be more creative and rigorous.
Google is Killing Traditional Business Blogging
Previously, the best method to start practically any type of online business was to start a blog. You could publish high-quality posts with the confidence that the search engines would eventually find them. You could just publish more material if you wanted to grow your following more quickly.
Blogs can still be an effective tool for growing a business. However, it takes a long time to bear fruit. You can't additionally post a slew of short blogs. Your content should be more extensive than it has ever been.
You're up against more than just other bloggers; you're also up against Google's aim to push traffic within its own ecosystem.
Skyscraper posts or cornerstone posts of 2,000 to 10,000 words are now the best-performing blog material. These are far more expensive to produce, but if used effectively, they deliver a much larger return on investment than the now-disposable short blog postings.
To increase traffic to your material, you'll need to put in more effort. This necessitates a rethinking of your sales funnel design.
The Old Model and the New Way
Organic traffic was the foundation of the previous content marketing paradigm. You created information that was discovered using search engines. People were encouraged to contact you or subscribe to your mailing list as a result of the material. You might direct a prospect through your sales funnel after you got their contact information.
Organic traffic is now too slow and insufficient. You can still rely on organic traffic to power your business if you have enough time, say six months to three years. The majority of entrepreneurs and marketers don't have that kind of patience.
To generate visitors to your content, the new method needs you to either spend on social media advertising or expand the platforms you utilize to boost your organic reach. This usually entails extending out from blog articles and into other forms of media.
Content marketing is a technique for you to demonstrate your abilities to your target audience. It serves as a point of entry into your sales funnel.
You're doing something wrong if your material merely gets likes, views, and shares. Effective content marketing creates email list sign-ups and accumulates contact information.
Is Email the New Blog?
Email Marketing has always been a crucial component of every digital marketing campaign. You hold the key to someone's heart if you have their email address. You can get in touch with them personally. Direct marketing is the most effective approach to turn marketing money into profits.
You used to have to create a lot of content to get people to sign up for your email list. To generate email sign-ups, you now need to create fewer, higher-quality types of content. Instead of putting their finest content out on social media and the blogosphere, smart firms are saving it for their email lists.
Email newsletters are expected to supplant blogs as the primary source of long-term content marketing, according to services like Substack.
Investing in high-value content as a lead magnet to develop email lists of your ideal consumers is far more cost-effective than writing a million blog entries. Once you've added someone to your mailing list, you may send them an email with the same text you used on your blog. Emails, like blog entries, help to nurture your audience's relationship with you. Email, on the other hand, gives you a far better sense of how effective something is.
You might also focus on your audience's most pressing demands.
The best part is that Google isn't harvesting your email content to keep people in their ecosystem. You have a direct connection to the folks who are most likely to buy from you if you use email.
Content Curation
Another important distinction in current content marketing is the function of curation. The truth is that none of your clients lack information. They don't require you to tell them what to do or why they should do it. They can just ask Siri or Alexa for help.
What your audience requires is a mechanism to sort through all of the available data. While every company must still develop fantastic content, they must also concentrate on curating material for their clients.
Curation entails compiling the best of the internet into a simple package for consumers to consume. You'll also want to add some of your most impressive work. More people will trust you as a result of your curation. They'll also come to appreciate your distinct brand voice.
If you like music, you probably enjoy listening to Spotify playlists created by your favorite musicians. Playlists are an example of curating. They fall under the category of content marketing.
Some businesses are wary about curation because they don't want to lose their clients. They don't believe their customers will return.
Taylor Swift made a Spotify playlist for Women's History Month in March 2020 that featured a number of other female musicians. Was Swift concerned that her audience will become interested in other musicians and stop listening to her music? No, since that's a complete blunder. Swift's career benefited from the playlist, and it served as a positive signal to other creative artists.
Curation demonstrates to others that you are confident enough in your brand voice and business value to showcase the excellent work of others.
Reimagining Your Sales Funnel
Information marketing in the future will necessitate the creation and curation of content across several mediums. You may try Apple Podcasts, TikTok, or YouTube. However, a sales funnel is required regardless of where you develop content. Your content marketing must be based on a strategy.
You used to want to get as many people as possible to visit your website or blog. Your own website is still required. But now you want to get people to sign up for your mailing list by sending them to a specific lead magnet or landing page. It may be a bribe, such as a free PDF, or it could be a skyscraper blog post that anybody can read.
Curating content may help you grow your email list more quickly than writing all of your own original content.
However, you must first build an email list, and then develop a strategy for nurturing those leads into paying clients.
You're right if you believe this sounds eerily similar to the previous method of funnel construction. The only difference is how you use content to entice individuals to subscribe to your email list.
A weekly blog is no longer necessary. Changing the type of material you use to attract your ideal customers could help you obtain the outcomes you want faster.
Because they are built on human psychology, content marketing, and direct marketing will never perish. However, just as John Deere won't use the same content strategies in 2020 as it did in 1920, you shouldn't use the same content strategies today as you did in 2000 or even 2016.
To drive traffic and produce leads, the ideal content marketing does not rely on Google or any other single platform.
Empathy, originality, and adaptability are required in the future of content marketing. Spend today reimagining ways to demonstrate to your prospective customers you can help them, rather than churning out another conventional 500-word blog post.
That's what successful marketers have done in the past and will continue to do in the future.
