Does Content Marketing Really Work?

Struggling to stay ahead of the competition? A solid content marketing strategy could be the difference between falling behind and running circles around your competitors. 

But how do you get there? 

Will you spend hundreds (or thousands) on ads or influencers? Write hundreds of blog posts with an AI tool? Delegate everything to a freelancer or intern?

I may be biased, but if you ask me, content marketing is the #1 way to get the word out there about your brand and grow your business. If you’re doubting the power of content marketing, I wouldn’t blame you. But read on as I show you that yes, content marketing does work. 

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing helpful content in the form of blog posts, social media posts, videos, podcasts, and so much more. 

Writing content is a great way for you to showcase your expertise and why they need your expertise so that they can succeed and hopefully become a customer. To get a reader to become a customer, you need to have a call to action at the end of your content so that your reader will know what the next steps are. 

As your readers engage with your content more, they will see your company as a credible source of information. This can be crucial to gaining traction on SERP’s and through your SEO as having brand authority is truly helpful in growing your audience. 

Examples of Content Marketing in Action

Successful content marketing all starts with a strategy and a team ready to carry it out. Here at Centori, we have helped many businesses grow their SEO through effective and strategic content marketing strategies. 

Narakeet: 1000% increase in clicks with 0 blog posts or backlinks

If you need proof that content marketing works, just ask Gojko from Narakeet.

Narakeet specializes in a text to speech software that supports over 50 languages and accents. Narakeet started off in a niche market with low competition and was performing well, but once VC-backed competitors moved in they began to decline.

Having worked with numerous consultants and freelancers that only gave them generic advice, the Narakeet team was at their wits end wondering what to do next. 

Narakeet needed a strategy, so that’s exactly what we built with them:

• Define their goals: Every good strategy needs a SMART goal to guide it and give focus to everythin else that we do.
•  Identify their customers: In order to build a strategy that brings in results (ie customers) we need to know who Narakeet’s best customers are along with their goals and challenges.
• Build a strategy to match their buying journey: Armed with goals, customers, and pain points, we were ready to architect a strategy that met those customers at every stage of their buying journey. 

We took Narakeet’s greatest strength, which is their text to speech software, and shifted the focus of the website from being a collection of blog posts to acting more like a product. We helped them create a landing page for each language and accent to bring their text to speech software to the forefront and add value to their customers. By doing this, we helped Narakeet make their website answer their customers' questions right off the bat, which is, I need text to speech software for (language). This strategy helped Narakeet increase their clicks by 1000% and their traffic by 137% in a short amount of time.

How Insoles.com took on Amazon… and won

Who doesn’t love an underdog story? Insoles.com is a company specializing in insoles that is competing with big giants like Dr. Scholls, Walmart, and Amazon. 

It’s easy to take a spray and pray approach to keywords to try to take a slice of the market share. Rather than do that, we sought a unique approach to content that could set Insoles.com apart. 

To do this we:

• Conducted keyword research to better understand the types of keywords someone searches when they shop for insoles.
• Ran a customer survey to understand why people buy insoles and how often they buy them.

We found that there are three primary reasons someone buys a pair of insoles:

• For a specific type of shoe
• To relieve a painful condition
• For an activity

Amazon and REI can’t go that niche, but Insoles.com can. We engineered the site to answer these questions and quickly became the go-to resource for buying insoles online:

This strategy allows Insoles.com to have answers to customers' questions right from the home page. This allows customers to find the right insole for them and for Insoles.com to get more traffic from their newly optimized content strategy. 

How to Ensure That Content Marketing Works for Your Business

Now that we've seen some examples of how content marketing can work for other companies, how can you make it work for your business? 

Research Target Audience

Before you start creating your content or doing any type of content marketing, you should first determine who is your target audience. This is one of the first things that any marketer thinks of because once you know who your customers are, then you can start figuring out what their needs are, what types of questions they are asking, etc. Your content should act as an answer to their questions so that they can see you as their place to go for solutions. That solution is your product or service that directly addresses their needs. 

Perform Keyword Research

When creating your content, your customers/audience should be at the top of your mind throughout. You can start to get into their mindset by researching what questions they're asking so that you can deliver the answers they want. Performing keyword research and survey research could help you get a glimpse into the mind of your audience by hearing directly from them on what they care about. 

Implement Research Data into Content

After gathering data and performing research, you can then begin to jot down ideas on how to fit your audience's questions/needs into your content. Whether that looks like writing an article that informs them or implementing it directly into your website, it's vital that your content answers their questions. As you move along with your content strategy, measuring performance and keeping track of your KPIs can guide you on whether you should continue or make adjustments for the best results. 

Create a Compelling Call to Action

Finally, you always want to have your reader/customer perform an action at the end of whatever content you decide to push. If you're sending out an email blast, add a call to action at the end to guide your reader to the next step and move them along the search funnel. If you're writing a blog post, provide readers with a downloadable resource so that they can learn something and keep your business in mind.

Reasons Content Marketing Might Not Work

Since we've discussed what effective content marketing looks like, let's take a look at what might make content marketing not work for you?

No clear strategy

First, a strategy that isn't clearly defined or isn't present to begin with can spell disaster for your traffic, leads, and ultimately conversions. For content marketing to work for you, a clearly defined plan should be developed and followed to see the best results. This means measuring your progress along the way to make sure that you're hitting your goals that you set when creating the strategy/content marketing plan. Also, making sure that you're adjusting your strategy as needed is also important to avoid failure. 

No plan for content promotion

Not promoting your content could also leave your content marketing plan out to dry. You can't always rely on organic traffic to do all the work for you. You need to make sure that you're making sure that you're properly promoting your content so that people will know that it even exists at all. This could mean sending out email blasts, posting on social media, sharing on linkedin, and pitching your content to colleagues and other professionals in your network. 

Content does not provide value

Lastly, content that doesn't provide value to customers won't see any success since there's nothing for your audience to take from the content. If your content is just fluff and jargon, it won't motivate anyone to read it, let alone perform any call to action that you have in the content. There is nothing more damaging to your content strategy than having content that is poorly written and overly reliant on external tools such as AI. Also, content without a call to action is dead in the water. If readers aren’t being told the next steps, then they’ll just move on and forget about your content entirely. 

Level Up Your SEO Strategy With Our Complete SEO Strategy Guide

Creating a content marketing strategy that works can be the difference between drowning and swimming laps ahead of the competition. Knowing your audience and knowing what they want is key to ensure that any strategy that you create is set up for success. 

Not sure where to start? Download our free SEO Strategy Guide for a complete walkthrough of our process to bring your SEO to the next level!

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