If Content is King, Content Marketing is all of its Disciples

You know all of those great articles you read online that help you get answers to your questions? Or those “how-to” videos you watch on YouTube? Well, my friend, whether you realize it or not, you’ve been utilizing the power of content marketing — a digital marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to drive profitable customer action.

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Today’s need for an integrated marketing strategy starts with a strong content strategy.

At Incite Creative, our holistic approach delivered as part of our CMO services incorporates content marketing strategies that positively impact our client’s bottom line. You see, by “feeding the beast,” we say — creating great content on our client’s web pages and blog posts — we are keeping the search engines well-fed. In turn, they will rank your website higher than your competitors that are content-deprived.

incite creative content marketing

What Does Content Marketing Include?

When most people hear the word “content,” they assume that it is something written. That’s mostly true, but it also includes video content.

And as noted above, it’s not just the creation or writing of the material that generates brand awareness. The magic happens when a great piece of content connects with the right distribution channels. And the most successful content marketing efforts occur when a single piece of content can be leveraged and adapted into several other touchpoints. This tactic saves time and money and will position you as a thought leader on a given topic and create engagement along the customer journey.

Imagine for a moment that a prospect types into a Google search or asks their Alexa to find “red widgets near me,” and there you are! There’s your website landing page all about red widgets, there’s a blog article you wrote about the benefits of red widgets over blue ones, and there’s a link to a helpful YouTube video where you show people how easy it is to install a red widget. There are three search results out of the gate and more opportunities to come. If you can land the highly coveted featured snippet (answer box) for “What is a red widget?” for example, you’ll reap the investment of your content marketing efforts.

Although not an exhaustive list, here are several examples of what content marketing includes:

  • Email marketing and automation
  • Articles and blogs
  • Press releases
  • Social media posts
  • Online reviews
  • Webinars
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Lead magnets
    • Ebooks
    • Case studies
    • White papers
    • Checklists
    • Infographics
    • Templates
    • Resource guides

Email Marketing & Automation

Email still reigns as one of the highest ROI-producing marketing initiatives. When marketers are learning to balance data and emotional connections, email is a low-cost way to speak to a broad audience while still keeping the message personal.

Here are the many ways Incite Creative can help you use email as part of your content marketing plan:

  • Build Relationships: Build connections through personalized engagement.
  • Brand Awareness: Keep the company and its services top-of-mind when prospects are ready to engage.
  • Content Promotion: Use email to share relevant blog content or useful assets with our prospects.
  • Lead Generation: Entice subscribers to provide their personal information in exchange for an asset that they’d find valuable.
  • Product Marketing: Promote products and services.
  • Lead Nurturing: Delight customers with content that can help them succeed in their goals.
email marketing
editorial calendar

Articles & Blog Posts

Creating and maintaining a blog is one of the best ways to keep your website current and feed a content marketing strategy.

We recommend creating a monthly editorial calendar and creating opportunities to generate articles targeted to what the audience wants/needs along the customer journey, and incorporate video teasers where applicable. At Incite Creative, we have invested in trending topic monitoring tools to help guide what’s hot and what’s not. We also have tools at our disposal that can help update existing content — that which is performing well but needs an SEO refresh.

Social Media Posts

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and so on. With so many social media platforms, how do you know which one(s) to focus on?

We can help you with that, but the point here is that social media platforms are an excellent outlet for distributing your content. By including a summary of the full article and then adding a link to it and a couple of relevant hashtags, you will increase your opportunity for another search engine ranked piece of content.

Hands holding smartphone with social media network icons.
Consumer reviews concepts with bubble people review comments and smartphone.

Online Reviews

You can take some pressure off of yourself by leveraging user-generated content such as online reviews.

They are a powerful addition to your content marketing mix in that they enhance your business’s reputation and gain credibility and loyalty. When used strategically, reviews can be just as compelling as any content you create. For example, telling someone how great your company is will only go so far. But prospects reading a review from a legitimate customer who once had the same pain point they currently have will be much more trusting of a third-party endorsement.

Once you’ve started to obtain online reviews, you can then share them via other distribution channels such as your website and social media platforms. When you acquire reviews regularly, they provide a constant influx of fresh content for the search engine spiders to digest, especially if reviews are posted on authoritative platforms such as Google My Business.

Videos

Video marketing is now an essential component of every marketing strategy.

Apart from being a rich, visual medium, there are many perks to making online video marketing part of your content marketing strategy, including:

  • Influence buying decisions
  • Give the people what they want
  • Rank higher in search
  • Increase traffic
  • Get more backlinks
  • Bump up conversions
  • Reach decision-makers
  • Boost email open rates
  • Generate more social shares
  • Grow revenue

Some clients are hesitant to start a video marketing campaign, afraid of the cost and time commitment perceived requirements. However, the days of big crews, many lights, and lengthy production turnaround times are no more. While we work with several video production firms and respect their work, sometimes time and or budget require a different solution.

At Incite Creative, we utilize many efficient and effective video maker tools on behalf of our clients and are happy to recommend the right solution to fit your marketing needs.

Video camera blog recording.
webinar promotion

Webinars

According to InsideSales.com, 73% of marketing and sales leaders say webinars are among the best ways to generate quality leads because they are:
  • highly engaging and significantly less expensive than hosting a live event.
  • they work across the entire customer journey (from thought leadership discussions to live demos)
  • they generate high quality leads for sales by obtaining lead data, engagement ratings, polls, and even survey answers to help sales teams initiate personalized outreach to qualified prospects. For these reasons and more, webinars make a great addition to your content marketing strategy.

Some clients are hesitant to start a video marketing campaign, afraid of the cost and time commitment perceived requirements. However, the days of big crews, many lights, and lengthy production turnaround times are no more. While we work with several video production firms and respect their work, sometimes time and or budget require a different solution.

At Incite Creative, we utilize many efficient and effective video maker tools on behalf of our clients and are happy to recommend the right solution to fit your marketing needs.

Podcasts

Podcasts have the following potential benefits:
  • Increased Traffic Generation
    • Using podcasts can help you reach out to new audiences.
    • Podcasts can help in building familiarity with a wide range of audiences. Listeners usually subscribe to the series and regularly listen. As long as the audio series continues, your audience is quite likely to keep listening.
    • Additionally, your audience may recommend the podcasts to others who may be interested in them, thus increasing your reach considerably. The result can lead to improved traffic generation quickly.
  • Helps in Building Better Relationships with the Audience
    • Even though a podcast is a single medium, it helps in building effective relationships with the listeners. It gives the feeling that the listeners know the person speaking on the podcast. People listen to podcasts because they have something in common with the speaker and the brand the speaker is representing.
    • Such a good relationship helps in building trust and encourages listeners to be associated with the brand. The association leads to improved conversion. People are more likely to buy something from a friend than a stranger.
  • Relatively Easy to Create
  • Podcasts are Highly Engaging
  • Improves Public Speaking Skills
Shot of a businessman making a podcast on his computer
The HR Team infographic

Lead Magnets

Ebooks & Digital Resource Guides Online, easy-to-read electronic books (Ebooks) are a great content marketing strategy for lead capture via your website, email, and social. They convey thought leadership, industry expertise, and dramatically increase visibility. The most efficient means of creating an Ebook(s) is to leverage blog articles into a themed compendium that is professionally designed, search engine optimized, and distributed. It is often available for free via download when a user provides their name and email address information — gated content —  which is excellent for future lead nurturing. Case Studies Case studies that showcase your company’s services to personas with similar pain points and incorporated for prospective customers to access could be very beneficial to provide context for your process and unique value proposition. By showing your in-depth expertise, you can better generate high-quality leads. Infographics The search for infographics increased by over 800% in just two years. That compelling statistic is why we recommend including them in your content marketing strategy. These visual gems come with plenty of benefits and could be valuable, mainly to help convey the customer journey and distill complex information. Infographics are also very effective methods to build backlinks and online engagement.

The Role of Form and Function in Content Creation

It’s one thing to write a single article or post a blog teaser video. While that’s a good start, creating quality content and consistently creating opportunities for your target audiences to opt-in and engage with it is the real secret to online success.

It’s also a matter of what kind of content you’re creating. No one wants a hard sell. Instead of pitching your products or services, your goal is to provide truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues. In turn, they will consider you a thought leader and follow you. And when the time comes for them to purchase or refer, you will be top of mind.

And while you are writing for human prospects, you need to tend to the needs of the web crawlers responsible for ranking your content. Working with a team like Incite Creative that knows how to search engine optimize your content will ensure that you’re getting the most out of your content marketing efforts.

Sold on Content Marketing but Short on Time?

If you’re like most business leaders, you understand the concept of content marketing and see the potential, but get overwhelmed but the thought of figuring out what to write, how to create a video blog, what to post and when.

Inevitably, it never happens, or it starts strong and then fizzles out after a month or two. That’s where we come in.

At Incite Creative, we can take the burden off of you by taking the lead on creating a monthly editorial calendar that will support your overarching business goals, and see to it that the content marketing plan is consistently implemented.

HubSpot: The Ultimate Content Marketing Platform

To have a successful content marketing initiative, you need to serve up personalized, relevant information via customer journey mapping. You can achieve this by building personas around your customer types, and then creating content to nurture them through the pre, post, and ambassador stages of the relationship via automation. The process involves an integrated combination of online and offline brand touchpoints. In this customer-first, customer-centric model of sales + marketing + service, it’s essential to have a pre-built sequence of brand touchpoints along the way, and track as much as possible through a CRM (customer relationship management) dashboard. Incite Creative can help you do all this. HubSpot is an all-in-one growth platform that helps companies grow better by attracting visitors, engaging leads, and delighting customers. As a Certified Hubspot Solutions Partner, we can help you get started with this fantastic platform that includes an integrated inbound marketing system for:
  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Service

Together, we can integrate all the steps in the buyer’s journey, creating a personalized experience for every member of your contact database, giving you the automation you want, and the insights you need to grow.

If you’re looking to create the best user experience to help attract new customers and retain existing ones, look no further than Incite Creative.

Our CMO services include a robust content marketing approach as part of a holistic marketing plan.

We have been working with Dina and her team for almost two years now. After a total rebrand, a new marketing strategy, and a bigger digital presence, we have been able to expand our campaigns and attract new customers. We appreciate the depth of knowledge they have to help us understand how things have changed dramatically over the past several years, and adapt our strategy in a more deliberate way. Thank you, Incite Creative!

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Ellen Platt, MEd, CRC, CCM
President & Certified Aging Life Care Manager