As a marketing representative for your company, you are likely to at least be aware of content marketing. Content Marketing is here to stay, and if you are not utilising it, then your competitors have got a significant advantage if they are. In order to successfully implement a content strategy into your business, you will need buy in from the higher ups.
So how do you convince the boss that it’s time to dive in?
You’ll need to have the answers to some of the most common questions surrounding the ‘point’ of content – so here they are…
What Is Content Marketing And What Can It Do For Our Business?
Simply put, Content Marketing is the creation of content types to market your business. Content types include blog posts, guest blogs (contributing to other sites), infographics, videos and many more.
It’s a vast spectrum, making it an incredibly creative method of engaging current audiences and enticing new ones.
The business benefits of Content Marketing are numerous, here’s just a few:
- Creating awareness of your brand
- Supplementing your SEO strategy – Google has reared its head towards fresh, quality and unique content as a significant ranking factor
- Keeping both your current and target audiences informed, educated and entertained to encourage sales or leads (content can be created for all stages of the buying cycle – read more here)
- Building a community, and establishing your business as an authority in your industry
You might already be creating particular content types such as on-site blog posts, but these are rarely enough.
So, when your superior asks why you should invest more time in it, your response should be: the need to formulate a variety of on and off-site content in order to rank well in the SERPs.
If this response leads to a blank emoticon style response like this 
, then here are the follow-up questions to expect.
How Much Time And Money Will We Have To Invest To Get Results?
As with any Digital Marketing, this will largely depend. With PPC you can set specific budgets when bidding, whilst Content Marketing and SEO are different beasts.
Whether you manage content in-house or enlist the expertise of an agency, the more investment you put in, the better.
If time is constrained internally for creating any type of content, is it really going to be the best work? What’s more, you will also need to consider the time needed to promote that content. This is why many businesses will outsource their content.
“But how do I know how much budget to put aside for this?” says the boss – Content Marketing is a consistent process that should be adapted regularly to get the best results.
Consider breaking down the budget into realistic costs on a monthly basis for each quarter and see what is possible from there.
What Is The ROI With Content Marketing?
In order to ensure that the time and/or money invested in content is worthwhile and bringing in business, you will need to be able to set clear goals from the beginning so you can monitor your campaign progress. View my video below for a basic guide on choosing goals:
To track those goals, you can use various tools such as Google Analytics (GA) for referral traffic and engagement with particular content types (this is where Average Time On Page can be insightful as a starting point).
GA is also useful for setting up specific Goals for sign-ups to see whether your content is converting. With these goals, you can also assign a monetary value to a conversion to see whether the time invested in particular content types is worthwhile.
What’s more, Content Marketing is an excellent source for engaging customers at particular buying stages. If you are aiming to reach customers that are on the fence, you can create persuasive content to nudge them. Track the customer journey using Funnels on GA that lead the customer from that content to your ‘Thank You’ landing page after a sale.
Another metric to consider which is easiest to track is the amount of social shares and/or comments your content is generating. Whilst it is difficult to assign a cash amount to this engagement, it is a good indication of how successful a piece of content has been, which could in turn lead to a sale or lead (or at the very least an increase in awareness of your brand).
In short, you and your manager should be aware that the ROI will only be clear if you are certain of the intention of each piece of content, and that you make it easy for the customer to convert.
Isn’t It Enough To Optimise Our Existing Content For The Search Engines?
No. Your site should always be evolving with new content to keep it up-to-date. This is not just to improve your rankings, but to also be considered a ‘live’ source for visitors.
Got stagnant copy from a few years ago, and a blog that hasn’t been updated since 2012? Would you stick around if you were a visitor?
Without a paddle in the fast-changing tides of SEO, it’s not always easy to keep up-to-date with the changes in Google’s algorithms and requirements – what may have been enough a few years ago will certainly not be enough now.
Your boss needs to know this pronto, before you start to see a drop in rankings, and a knock-on effect on visitor figures.
How Do We Establish Consistent Ideas?
Lots of us like to get creative. Here in the Koozai Content Cave, we love to sound out ideas. However we always remember, and you should too, that the goals come first and the content needs real purpose.
If you know your industry well, it is pretty simple to brainstorm ideas – but you need to get into the customer’s head. You also want to consider the keywords to target – whilst the days of keyword stuffing for SEO purposes are well and truly gone, you still need them to help shape content ideas and for your content to be found at all.
So your boss is concerned that there’s no time to form these ideas? It’s well worth knowing that many ideas can come from customers’ questions that are filtered through from your sales team.
It’s the everyday actions and issues that form the most valuable content for your customers.
How Do We Stand Out Against Our Competitors?
The age old question. There’s never an easy answer, and content is certainly not an exception. Millions upon millions of pieces of content are being created every day, meaning it’s easy to get lost in the midst of it all. That’s why yours needs to stand out and be counted.
The best way to do this is to be different – tap into your customer’s interests to target them with information they want, rather than what they can find in countless other places.
“But how can we be unique in our industry?” – By thinking outside the box. As cliché as that sounds. Look at this great piece of content from MahiFX on trading your friends as an example. Not the most thrilling of industries (no offence, guys!), but they’ve still managed to create something that blew up on social.
So there we have it, some of the key questions your boss is likely to ask about content marketing with the answers to help you out.
Have I missed any questions out that you or your manager are pondering? Let me know in the comments!
Want to know more about what Koozai can do with your campaigns? Find out more about our Content Marketing services.
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Good post. Helpful in content marketing strategies as well as in interviews.
Great post Cat, I think many bosses as well as business owners still struggle to get their head around content marketing. The main reason for it probably the difficulty when it comes to measuring ROI on content marketing.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the comment, and glad you enjoyed the post. I think a big barrier sometimes can be that it’s something a business will ‘get round to’ – in the meantime, competitors already have the edge by creating regular stuff.
I think a great way of measuring ROI is to set up Goals in GA to see which content is converting.
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