We have all heard the saying 'content is the king' in digital marketing, but what does this mean and why is content marketing so important to your overall digital marketing strategy? And does generating and publishing content really help in growing your business?
If you have ever wondered about the above questions, this article is for you.
To answer the above questions, the first question we need to answer is What is content writing in digital marketing?
According to SEO Guru, Brian Dean content writing is the process of planning and creating web content. Creating web content includes writing blogs, social media posts, creating video tutorials, video blogs, podcasts, infographics, photographs, or publishing landing pages, web pages. Anything that your company publishes on the internet can be classified as web content.
Now let us answer another question: Why do they say 'content is the king' in digital marketing? And why is content marketing such an important part of your digital marketing strategy?
What does it really mean: content is the king? To understand this, let us first understand how a search engine matches a search query to a web page. When a searcher (human) types a query in Google (or any other web browser), many spiders or bots crawl through web pages trying to find the closest match to the query. One of the ways they can match the query to your web page, is if they find similar keywords (or keyword phrases) on your page. This means that when you write a blog or publish any content on the web, you must optimize it and make it easy to read. What does it mean when we say the content is easy to read? When we produce content (writing articles, blog posts) it should be proofread to make sure it is free of error, and the information presented is easy to find. This is what makes content creation so important.
We have talked about written content, but what about other forms of content like videos, infographics, photographs or podcasts. How does the search engine bots find them and match them to queries? These alternate mediums of creation normally have some accompanying form of written content with them. Think of ALT tags for images. ALT tags for images are used to describe the content of the pictures that are uploaded so that they can be understood by a wider range of audiences.
We come back to the most important question: Why is content marketing so important to your digital marketing strategy?
Creating and publishing content is a way of attracting people (traffic) to your web property (in this case website). The content you create is what helps people understand what your business is about. The more authoritative, trustworthy and informative a piece of content is, the more likely it is going to be consumed (read for blogs or social media posts, seen as incase of infographics, videos, and photographs, or heard as in case of podcasts).
The importance of content marketing: When people read your blog (social media, watch a video or a podcast) they are sending your a message. By interacting with your content they are letting you know that they are interested in interacting with your content (and by extension, your brand).
By creating high quality content and distributing it regularly, you as a business owner, are letting your visitors know that you are attentive to the digital trends of your customers and value their presence.
How do you measure the success of your blog (or content marketing)?
To measure and quantify things we need numbers. These can be found using any analytics software on your website, like Google Analytics.
To find the traffic visiting your blog, open Google Analytics. Find Behavior in the menu. Click on it to expand the dropdown menu. Choose Site Content. Tap on it, there is another dropdown menu. Select All Pages. All these steps are shown in the above diagram.
The above diagram shows the traffic flow to each page of my website. I have 6 pages on my master domain. The number of pageviews gives you the traffic breakup to your pages.
Similarly content distribution platforms like blogger or Facebook, have Stats or Insights that the account admin can access.
To sum it up, we have discussed what content marketing is , and why is it important to a the overall digital marketing strategy for a small business. Then we explained how to measure the success of any content marketing strategy.
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