Content marketing has taken the world by storm, with 97% of surveyed brands reporting that they have a content marketing strategy. Yet, there are many misconceptions about what content marketing is, how to build a strategy, and how to achieve success.
Whether you’re building a new content team or refining an existing one, it’s important to know what falls within your job description as well as how to go beyond simply publishing content on a blog and hoping it’ll drive revenue. That’s what we’ll cover in this article.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. The goal is to attract and retain a specific target audience—and ultimately promote a product or service to drive profitable customer action.
Essentially, it involves using content to put your brand in front of your audience while educating, entertaining, and persuading them. Effective content marketing should produce a profitable return on investment (ROI).
97% of brands use content marketing as part of their marketing strategy.
Why content marketing is important
There are many reasons why content marketing is beneficial. Here are three to keep in mind:
Builds brand awareness: Content marketing is an effective way to help prospects find your brand. Many B2B brands use content marketing for this purpose, especially with search engine optimization (SEO). Your audience can find answers to their questions in well-optimized blog content, which puts you top of mind the next time they need your services.
Connects you with your audience: Unlike traditional advertising, content marketing allows your audience to engage with your content. They can share it on social media, link to it in their own content, download digital assets like ebooks, and base purchasing decisions on your case studies. Throughout the process, you effectively build trust and show them how well you can solve their pain points.
Leads to long-lasting rewards: Social media posts die out—even the viral ones. Email newsletters age out almost as soon as the next installment is sent. In contrast, the results of content marketing last a long time. High-quality content can rank at top spots on search engine result pages (SERPs) for years, continuing to drive traffic and revenue.
"Effective content marketing yields rich results. It can help you build awareness, nurture interest in your brand by keeping your audience engaged and provide a solid ROI for years to come.”
If you’re wondering what avenues are open to you regarding B2B content marketing efforts (and any kind of content marketing), here are some examples worth exploring.
Blogging: This is often the bedrock of content marketing efforts. It involves planning, writing, and publishing content consistently on a company blog.
Ebooks: Although ebooks are often prepared as a digital asset to be used as a lead magnet for email marketing, they play an important role in content marketing. These pieces of long-form content display your company’s subject matter expertise and position you as a thought leader in the industry. They're a great way to improve brand awareness.
Whitepapers: Like ebooks, white papers are longer-form content that provide in-depth information about a subject to your target audience. They are especially of interest for high-level stakeholders more inclined to read a well-prepared white paper.
Case studies: Case studies uniquely showcase your product or service: they show your audience what you’ve accomplished for past customers and how you can make the same success true for them. For that reason, this content type is excellent for the bottom of the funnel when your audience is one step away from converting to paying customers.
Copywriting: Copy is a distinct part of content and plays an important role in content marketing. Often the text copy on websites, landing pages, and even advertising webinars and podcasts increases your audience’s interest in your content. Be sure to invest in expert copywriters as you add content writers to your resources.
Podcasts: In a world of text content, podcasts are a valuable alternative. Although they’re nowhere near bottom-of-the-funnel effective, they spread the word about your brand, build connections with other brands in your industry, and position you as a thought leader.
Video marketing: Wyzowl’s 2022 survey shows that 92% of marketers use video as a major part of their content strategy—and for good reason. 87% of them say it has increased their traffic.
Videos show up in more search results, and they can help brands reach a new segment of their audience. At the same time, they make it easier to explain complex topics that may not translate as well over text.
Video marketing has proven effective in boosting ROI.
Good to Know: These are only seven examples of content marketing. For more inspiration, review our post about more types of content marketing. Whatever format you decide on, get to work building your content marketing strategy using our free content strategy roadmap.
What content marketing is not
A common misconception is that publishing any kind of content equals content marketing. But content marketing requires strategy, knowledge of audience personas, the use of specific channels, and measurement of certain metrics.
People often mistakenly include other types of marketing under the umbrella of content marketing. Knowing the difference is important because each type of marketing requires a different approach. Here are four things that content marketing is NOT:
Social media marketing: Because it uses similar content vehicles (text, video, visuals, etc.), it’s easy to assume that social media content is the same as content marketing. On the contrary, social media marketing uses different platforms, measures different analytics, has different goals, and often requires a different content presentation style and tone than blogs, ebooks, and even long-form video content.
Email marketing: This form of marketing requires the use of email marketing clients and the direct distribution of content to your audience’s email inboxes. Organic search often cannot access content shared in email newsletters. It demands a measurement of different metrics than content marketing.
Advertising: Content marketing differs from advertising. While content marketing shares valuable information regarding your product or service, nurtures customer relationships, and indirectly promotes your brand in the process, advertising is a one-way process. It focuses on selling your product, not necessarily demanding any other form of engagement.
Product announcements: Product announcements and updates are often shared on company blogs as part of content marketing, but these fall into product marketing rather than content marketing. They focus on supporting your current customer base, showing that you're a company that ships features, and positioning your product in the market instead of driving traffic and generating awareness.
3 Essentials to an effective content marketing strategy
The hardest part of content marketing is building a strategy that helps you hit your targets. We spoke to a few content marketing experts about the crucial elements of building a content marketing strategy that works.
Know your audience
Building an effective content marketing strategy begins with your audience. Ask yourself:
Who are you trying to reach?
What do they do?
What are their pain points at work?
What kind of content will they find valuable?
How will your content outshine your competitors’ for them?
Gary Warner, Marketing Manager at Joloda Hydraroll, agrees. He says:
"Once you understand your target audience, you can start developing a strategy for creating and sharing the right kind of content to attract them. If you take the time to do this upfront work, you'll be well on developing an effective content marketing strategy to help you achieve your business goals."
Your content marketing strategy should support business growth, increase lead generation, drive sales and revenue, and lead to an overall return on investment. To achieve this, your strategy should align with your business goals.
Eric Doty, Content Lead at Dock, agrees. He recommends:
"Match your content strategy to your business model. If you need a high volume of low ARPU (average revenue per user) customers (e.g. you’re a low-cost SaaS product), focus on channels with high potential volume: SEO and social. If you need a low volume of high ARPU customers, focus on sales enablement content such as case studies, testimonials, and FAQs."
Although the buying journey is never linear for potential customers, understanding the content marketing funnel helps you build a strategy that satisfies your audience at every point of their journey.
That’s what Jenna M. Thomas, Senior Content Marketing Manager at One Trust, recommends:
"My number one tip for building an effective content marketing strategy is to build a customer journey map with distribution channels and asset types matched to funnel stages. That way, you can spend the bulk of your time creating and distributing content that will be most impactful for the business' specific goals. For example, if this quarter's goal is to shorten sales cycles, you can focus on mid- and bottom-of-funnel content. If the priority is upsell, you can focus on enablement content."
Once you’ve built a strategy, the next step is knowing which metrics to measure as you implement it. Here’s what the experts recommend.
Organic traffic
Traffic is a primary metric that helps teams measure their brand awareness and the number of people finding their products, services, and content. Although it’s recently been tagged as a shallow metric, many content marketers still deem it an important starting metric to look out for.
Here’s what Eric says:
"I’ll go a bit against the grain of current trends and say organic traffic. The huge push for attribution has led people to deprioritize surface-level metrics, but if you’re writing content that’s relevant to your audience, organic traffic should be a great indicator that your content is resonating with your audience."
Beyond tracking new customer visits, it’s vital to see whether new visitors enjoy or benefit from your content. Engagement metrics help with this.
Will Yang, Head of Growth at Instrumentl, recommends monitoring these types of engagement:
"There are a lot of different metrics that can be used to measure the success of a content marketing campaign, but I think one of the most important is engagement. This could be anything from the number of social media shares to the amount of time someone spends reading an article."
This metric is important because social shares often reveal how much of an impression a piece of content made on the reader. Social shares also have a compounding effect because while revealing a solid engagement rate, they foster additional engagement with little to no effort on your part—it’s free content distribution.
Matt Jackson, an ecommerce SEO consultant, agrees. He says:
"Social shares are a good way to measure how well you're engaging your audience. It also can be an indicator of whether you need to spice up your content or you are hitting the mark."
For some marketers, conversions are all that matter. They shouldn’t be the only metric, but conversions are still a critical metric to measure. After all, content marketing is marketing. The goal is engagement with conversions in view. Depending on your business goals, conversions can look like demo sign-ups, product purchases, any attributable MRR, or even mailing list signups.
Kate Wojewoda-Celinska, Content Manager at Spacelift, explains the value of conversions:
“While traffic is a good indicator of how well your content resonates with your audience, conversions tell you how effectively you're turning website visitors into customers. If you see an uptick in conversions, it means your content is persuading people to take action and become leads or customers.
Backlinks
Unless you have the budget for backlink outreach, getting backlinks to your site and content can feel daunting. But it doesn’t have to be. Creating useful content and taking time to collaborate using journalist feedback services like a Help a Reporter Out or Help a B2B Writer can be a great way to score solid backlinks.
Fernando Lopez, Marketing Director at Circuit, underscores the importance of backlinks as a metric:
"Backlinks are a crucial metric of your content marketing success. When other authorities and influencers think your content is valuable enough to link to it, you’ll build a broader audience more quickly. And most importantly, backlinks give you an SEO boost that brings you up Google’s search results page, building traffic and credibility with users."
Content marketing is no child’s play. If you’re building a new team, you’ll need all the help you can get. Here are six more tips and best practices to follow.
Include videos in your strategy (but in the right way)
Videos are all the rage, but are you using them correctly? You can give your content an edge by using video content for:
Tutorials
Product explainers
Webinars
Repurposing blog content
However, keep in mind that video content marketing differs from advertising. Patrick Casey, Director of Growth Marketing at Felix Health, explains:
"Advertising takes more of a direct approach to generating sales inquiries for your business. One area I see the most confusion is through the latest video marketing trends. For example, companies are using reels to highlight the features of their offer. Beyond being self-inflationary, there’s little value added in these short-form clips for the target audience. It doesn’t nurture any long-term partnership with consumers. Instead, consumers either like, engage, and purchase through these posts or ignore the brand’s online presence altogether."
Good marketers follow the data, not just what’s trending. Consistency and publishing high-quality information are important, but also be sure to check that your hard work pays off and your audience finds your content appealing.
Zoe Biehl, Head of Content at Venture Kite, explains:
"Don’t discount the value of accurate, regular data. Assess metrics every week or month and stay on top of your content marketing that way. You should know right away if your website takes a serious dip in traffic, for example. And that data should help you conduct further investigation to rectify the issue. Ignoring data will slowly distance you from your audience—and rankings."
When all else fails, your audience is your North Star. You’ll never go wrong creating content just for them.
Will agrees:
"One of the best ways to stand out from the crowd when it comes to content marketing is to create truly original and helpful content. This could be something like an infographic or an eBook that provides valuable information to your target audience"
While going viral can produce a surge of attention for your brand—and even land you some conversions—sustained growth can only result from consistent marketing. To help you be more consistent, consider having an editorial calendar to keep track of planned content and even partly-formed content ideas.
Maximilian Wühr, CGO & Co-Founder at FINN, explains:
"One-off content marketing pieces will never be as successful as ‘slow-and-steady’ strategies, even if it goes viral. To build your brand as a true industry authority, you need to prove your knowledge spans more than one relevant topic. Building trust takes time, and you should aim to publish content at least a few times a month or more, depending on your industry and content format."
Good to Know: The GatherContent platform has a built-in editorial calendar, so you can plan your content in the same hub where you write, review, and publish. Get started with our free editorial calendar template.
Collaborate with your network
With the surge in content being produced globally, it’s hard to break through the digital noise to reach your target audience. Another way to enrich your content and make it stand out is by collaborating with fellow industry experts.
Fernando says:
"Make your most powerful content pop by centering content on your expertise and leaning on your existing network. This may mean partnering with relevant influencers or asking influential colleagues to share your content. Users are far more likely to click if they trust the source. If you haven’t yet established your content marketing strategy and built industry authority, you can piggyback off your network to build traction."
Build your content marketing efforts on GatherContent
As intimidating as it seems, successful content marketing is possible when you know how to create an effective strategy, measure your progress, and use the right tools. That’s where GatherContent comes in. Our content marketing platform provides a one-stop hub for content planning, creation, collaboration, and publication.
We’re all about efficient content creation. The GatherContent newsletter shares weekly tips for growing a content team and scaling your content production using the best tips and resources. Get on the list today.
Content marketing has taken the world by storm, with 97% of surveyed brands reporting that they have a content marketing strategy. Yet, there are many misconceptions about what content marketing is, how to build a strategy, and how to achieve success.
Whether you’re building a new content team or refining an existing one, it’s important to know what falls within your job description as well as how to go beyond simply publishing content on a blog and hoping it’ll drive revenue. That’s what we’ll cover in this article.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. The goal is to attract and retain a specific target audience—and ultimately promote a product or service to drive profitable customer action.
Essentially, it involves using content to put your brand in front of your audience while educating, entertaining, and persuading them. Effective content marketing should produce a profitable return on investment (ROI).
97% of brands use content marketing as part of their marketing strategy.
Why content marketing is important
There are many reasons why content marketing is beneficial. Here are three to keep in mind:
Builds brand awareness: Content marketing is an effective way to help prospects find your brand. Many B2B brands use content marketing for this purpose, especially with search engine optimization (SEO). Your audience can find answers to their questions in well-optimized blog content, which puts you top of mind the next time they need your services.
Connects you with your audience: Unlike traditional advertising, content marketing allows your audience to engage with your content. They can share it on social media, link to it in their own content, download digital assets like ebooks, and base purchasing decisions on your case studies. Throughout the process, you effectively build trust and show them how well you can solve their pain points.
Leads to long-lasting rewards: Social media posts die out—even the viral ones. Email newsletters age out almost as soon as the next installment is sent. In contrast, the results of content marketing last a long time. High-quality content can rank at top spots on search engine result pages (SERPs) for years, continuing to drive traffic and revenue.
"Effective content marketing yields rich results. It can help you build awareness, nurture interest in your brand by keeping your audience engaged and provide a solid ROI for years to come.”
If you’re wondering what avenues are open to you regarding B2B content marketing efforts (and any kind of content marketing), here are some examples worth exploring.
Blogging: This is often the bedrock of content marketing efforts. It involves planning, writing, and publishing content consistently on a company blog.
Ebooks: Although ebooks are often prepared as a digital asset to be used as a lead magnet for email marketing, they play an important role in content marketing. These pieces of long-form content display your company’s subject matter expertise and position you as a thought leader in the industry. They're a great way to improve brand awareness.
Whitepapers: Like ebooks, white papers are longer-form content that provide in-depth information about a subject to your target audience. They are especially of interest for high-level stakeholders more inclined to read a well-prepared white paper.
Case studies: Case studies uniquely showcase your product or service: they show your audience what you’ve accomplished for past customers and how you can make the same success true for them. For that reason, this content type is excellent for the bottom of the funnel when your audience is one step away from converting to paying customers.
Copywriting: Copy is a distinct part of content and plays an important role in content marketing. Often the text copy on websites, landing pages, and even advertising webinars and podcasts increases your audience’s interest in your content. Be sure to invest in expert copywriters as you add content writers to your resources.
Podcasts: In a world of text content, podcasts are a valuable alternative. Although they’re nowhere near bottom-of-the-funnel effective, they spread the word about your brand, build connections with other brands in your industry, and position you as a thought leader.
Video marketing: Wyzowl’s 2022 survey shows that 92% of marketers use video as a major part of their content strategy—and for good reason. 87% of them say it has increased their traffic.
Videos show up in more search results, and they can help brands reach a new segment of their audience. At the same time, they make it easier to explain complex topics that may not translate as well over text.
Video marketing has proven effective in boosting ROI.
Good to Know: These are only seven examples of content marketing. For more inspiration, review our post about more types of content marketing. Whatever format you decide on, get to work building your content marketing strategy using our free content strategy roadmap.
What content marketing is not
A common misconception is that publishing any kind of content equals content marketing. But content marketing requires strategy, knowledge of audience personas, the use of specific channels, and measurement of certain metrics.
People often mistakenly include other types of marketing under the umbrella of content marketing. Knowing the difference is important because each type of marketing requires a different approach. Here are four things that content marketing is NOT:
Social media marketing: Because it uses similar content vehicles (text, video, visuals, etc.), it’s easy to assume that social media content is the same as content marketing. On the contrary, social media marketing uses different platforms, measures different analytics, has different goals, and often requires a different content presentation style and tone than blogs, ebooks, and even long-form video content.
Email marketing: This form of marketing requires the use of email marketing clients and the direct distribution of content to your audience’s email inboxes. Organic search often cannot access content shared in email newsletters. It demands a measurement of different metrics than content marketing.
Advertising: Content marketing differs from advertising. While content marketing shares valuable information regarding your product or service, nurtures customer relationships, and indirectly promotes your brand in the process, advertising is a one-way process. It focuses on selling your product, not necessarily demanding any other form of engagement.
Product announcements: Product announcements and updates are often shared on company blogs as part of content marketing, but these fall into product marketing rather than content marketing. They focus on supporting your current customer base, showing that you're a company that ships features, and positioning your product in the market instead of driving traffic and generating awareness.
3 Essentials to an effective content marketing strategy
The hardest part of content marketing is building a strategy that helps you hit your targets. We spoke to a few content marketing experts about the crucial elements of building a content marketing strategy that works.
Know your audience
Building an effective content marketing strategy begins with your audience. Ask yourself:
Who are you trying to reach?
What do they do?
What are their pain points at work?
What kind of content will they find valuable?
How will your content outshine your competitors’ for them?
Gary Warner, Marketing Manager at Joloda Hydraroll, agrees. He says:
"Once you understand your target audience, you can start developing a strategy for creating and sharing the right kind of content to attract them. If you take the time to do this upfront work, you'll be well on developing an effective content marketing strategy to help you achieve your business goals."
Your content marketing strategy should support business growth, increase lead generation, drive sales and revenue, and lead to an overall return on investment. To achieve this, your strategy should align with your business goals.
Eric Doty, Content Lead at Dock, agrees. He recommends:
"Match your content strategy to your business model. If you need a high volume of low ARPU (average revenue per user) customers (e.g. you’re a low-cost SaaS product), focus on channels with high potential volume: SEO and social. If you need a low volume of high ARPU customers, focus on sales enablement content such as case studies, testimonials, and FAQs."
Although the buying journey is never linear for potential customers, understanding the content marketing funnel helps you build a strategy that satisfies your audience at every point of their journey.
That’s what Jenna M. Thomas, Senior Content Marketing Manager at One Trust, recommends:
"My number one tip for building an effective content marketing strategy is to build a customer journey map with distribution channels and asset types matched to funnel stages. That way, you can spend the bulk of your time creating and distributing content that will be most impactful for the business' specific goals. For example, if this quarter's goal is to shorten sales cycles, you can focus on mid- and bottom-of-funnel content. If the priority is upsell, you can focus on enablement content."
Once you’ve built a strategy, the next step is knowing which metrics to measure as you implement it. Here’s what the experts recommend.
Organic traffic
Traffic is a primary metric that helps teams measure their brand awareness and the number of people finding their products, services, and content. Although it’s recently been tagged as a shallow metric, many content marketers still deem it an important starting metric to look out for.
Here’s what Eric says:
"I’ll go a bit against the grain of current trends and say organic traffic. The huge push for attribution has led people to deprioritize surface-level metrics, but if you’re writing content that’s relevant to your audience, organic traffic should be a great indicator that your content is resonating with your audience."
Beyond tracking new customer visits, it’s vital to see whether new visitors enjoy or benefit from your content. Engagement metrics help with this.
Will Yang, Head of Growth at Instrumentl, recommends monitoring these types of engagement:
"There are a lot of different metrics that can be used to measure the success of a content marketing campaign, but I think one of the most important is engagement. This could be anything from the number of social media shares to the amount of time someone spends reading an article."
This metric is important because social shares often reveal how much of an impression a piece of content made on the reader. Social shares also have a compounding effect because while revealing a solid engagement rate, they foster additional engagement with little to no effort on your part—it’s free content distribution.
Matt Jackson, an ecommerce SEO consultant, agrees. He says:
"Social shares are a good way to measure how well you're engaging your audience. It also can be an indicator of whether you need to spice up your content or you are hitting the mark."
For some marketers, conversions are all that matter. They shouldn’t be the only metric, but conversions are still a critical metric to measure. After all, content marketing is marketing. The goal is engagement with conversions in view. Depending on your business goals, conversions can look like demo sign-ups, product purchases, any attributable MRR, or even mailing list signups.
Kate Wojewoda-Celinska, Content Manager at Spacelift, explains the value of conversions:
“While traffic is a good indicator of how well your content resonates with your audience, conversions tell you how effectively you're turning website visitors into customers. If you see an uptick in conversions, it means your content is persuading people to take action and become leads or customers.
Backlinks
Unless you have the budget for backlink outreach, getting backlinks to your site and content can feel daunting. But it doesn’t have to be. Creating useful content and taking time to collaborate using journalist feedback services like a Help a Reporter Out or Help a B2B Writer can be a great way to score solid backlinks.
Fernando Lopez, Marketing Director at Circuit, underscores the importance of backlinks as a metric:
"Backlinks are a crucial metric of your content marketing success. When other authorities and influencers think your content is valuable enough to link to it, you’ll build a broader audience more quickly. And most importantly, backlinks give you an SEO boost that brings you up Google’s search results page, building traffic and credibility with users."
Content marketing is no child’s play. If you’re building a new team, you’ll need all the help you can get. Here are six more tips and best practices to follow.
Include videos in your strategy (but in the right way)
Videos are all the rage, but are you using them correctly? You can give your content an edge by using video content for:
Tutorials
Product explainers
Webinars
Repurposing blog content
However, keep in mind that video content marketing differs from advertising. Patrick Casey, Director of Growth Marketing at Felix Health, explains:
"Advertising takes more of a direct approach to generating sales inquiries for your business. One area I see the most confusion is through the latest video marketing trends. For example, companies are using reels to highlight the features of their offer. Beyond being self-inflationary, there’s little value added in these short-form clips for the target audience. It doesn’t nurture any long-term partnership with consumers. Instead, consumers either like, engage, and purchase through these posts or ignore the brand’s online presence altogether."
Good marketers follow the data, not just what’s trending. Consistency and publishing high-quality information are important, but also be sure to check that your hard work pays off and your audience finds your content appealing.
Zoe Biehl, Head of Content at Venture Kite, explains:
"Don’t discount the value of accurate, regular data. Assess metrics every week or month and stay on top of your content marketing that way. You should know right away if your website takes a serious dip in traffic, for example. And that data should help you conduct further investigation to rectify the issue. Ignoring data will slowly distance you from your audience—and rankings."
When all else fails, your audience is your North Star. You’ll never go wrong creating content just for them.
Will agrees:
"One of the best ways to stand out from the crowd when it comes to content marketing is to create truly original and helpful content. This could be something like an infographic or an eBook that provides valuable information to your target audience"
While going viral can produce a surge of attention for your brand—and even land you some conversions—sustained growth can only result from consistent marketing. To help you be more consistent, consider having an editorial calendar to keep track of planned content and even partly-formed content ideas.
Maximilian Wühr, CGO & Co-Founder at FINN, explains:
"One-off content marketing pieces will never be as successful as ‘slow-and-steady’ strategies, even if it goes viral. To build your brand as a true industry authority, you need to prove your knowledge spans more than one relevant topic. Building trust takes time, and you should aim to publish content at least a few times a month or more, depending on your industry and content format."
Good to Know: The GatherContent platform has a built-in editorial calendar, so you can plan your content in the same hub where you write, review, and publish. Get started with our free editorial calendar template.
Collaborate with your network
With the surge in content being produced globally, it’s hard to break through the digital noise to reach your target audience. Another way to enrich your content and make it stand out is by collaborating with fellow industry experts.
Fernando says:
"Make your most powerful content pop by centering content on your expertise and leaning on your existing network. This may mean partnering with relevant influencers or asking influential colleagues to share your content. Users are far more likely to click if they trust the source. If you haven’t yet established your content marketing strategy and built industry authority, you can piggyback off your network to build traction."
Build your content marketing efforts on GatherContent
As intimidating as it seems, successful content marketing is possible when you know how to create an effective strategy, measure your progress, and use the right tools. That’s where GatherContent comes in. Our content marketing platform provides a one-stop hub for content planning, creation, collaboration, and publication.
We’re all about efficient content creation. The GatherContent newsletter shares weekly tips for growing a content team and scaling your content production using the best tips and resources. Get on the list today.
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