The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing in 2023

Let me ask you a simple question. Why do you buy a product from a particular brand?

The answer usually revolves around the following reasons.

You 

– Trust the product

– Believe in the product 

– Like the product

– Heard better about the product

What if I say you can achieve all the above things using a single marketing strategy? 

Yes, content marketing can build belief, trust, liking, and a better impression of your product or service. 

Not only education, but you can also create a better connection with your target audience using content marketing. 

78% of the CMO of top organisations believe customised content is the future of marketing. So what’s your take on content marketing for your business? 

If yes, moving forward you need a better understanding about it, from what content marketing is to how you can implement a perfect content marketing strategy. We got you covered in this blog. 

Let’s begin right away!

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing, simply, is a marketing strategy. If implemented correctly, it can attract leads, retain customers, and engage with your audience through blogs, articles, videos, podcasts, and more media. 

This kind of marketing builds expertise, increases brand awareness, and keeps your business at the top when your customer buy what you sell.

This doesn’t mean you can just publish content and get it all sorted out. You need to make the content personalized for your target audience and follow the trend to stay on top of the competition. 

You need to focus more on inbound strategies to ensure that your content is more natural. Perfect and natural storytelling is the king of content marketing.

A good content marketing strategy will produce more engaging and trust-building content for your business. 

Why Content Marketing?

Content marketing has been in the marketing world since forever. Content is everywhere; from tv commercials to a bit of notice, you can see it everywhere. 

But with time, it evolved from posters to newspaper ads to tv commercials to TikTok videos. But it still remains the one reliable strategy. 

According to data from Statista, 30% of marketers feel content marketing has more ROI than other marketing strategies.

91% of B2B marketers utilise content to spread the word about their product or service among their target audience. 

So what content marketing has in hand for 2023?

• To increase brand awareness.
• Improve engagement with your target audience.
• Building trust and loyalty.
• Educate your audience.
• Show your in-depth knowledge of your domain.
• Advertise your product.
• Increase revenue.
• Stay ahead of your competition.
• Get better positions in SEO and google search results.

There is a lot of impact content marketing can provide to any business. Also, you can’t follow the same template for all kinds of businesses. That’s where the content marketing types and strategies come in.

Let’s dive into that.

Types of Content Marketing

Content now has different forms. We’ve rounded up the 10 highest-converting content marketing types that work for any type of business.

1. Social Media Marketing

As on October 2022, there are more than 4.74 billion social media users. You can cover more than 50% of the population using social media channels.

Below are the top-performing B2B content marketing channels in 2022

• LinkedIn (77%)
• Facebook (37%)
• Instagram (27%)
• YouTube (21%)
• Twitter (17%).

Other platforms include

• Snapchat
• Tik-Tok
• Pinterest
• Telegram 
• Whatsapp
• Reddit 
• Quora

Social media is one of the best-performing marketing tools today. You can use it for both engagement and brand awareness.

2. Online Marketing

Online marketing mostly refers to the website of your product or service. A perfect home page of a website which explains the USP of a product/service is a good example of online marketing. 

A well-planned and researched online marketing will aid you in ranking better in Google’s SERP.

The best example of online marketing is the homepage of the following websites.

– Growth.cx

– Backlinko.com

You should always integrate SEO with online marketing to yield better results. You can measure the results of your online marketing strategy using different tools like Suitejar, SEMrush, Moz and more. 

3. Infographics

Infographics are defined as simple visualisation of information and datas in a single image. Readers love easy-to-understand marketing materials than spending a lot of time understanding a product.

Nowadays, content marketing is more competitive, and to stay ahead; you need to attract customers in less time. 

Infographics are a more engaging content format to attract more users. 

The best infographic has to be

• Simple
• Clear
• Informative

You can easily convert complex statistics into an interesting piece of content with well-designed infographics. 

4. Blog

Any content marketing strategy should include blogging because it is the area of your website that will be updated regularly with fresh content to keep people interested. 

You will frequently attract visitors to your website and begin to grow your brand’s audience through blog content.

For many leading websites, blogs serve as an opening door for an audience to enter the website. With proper SEO optimization, blogs can efficiently rank better than website pages and generate more traffic.

Below are the advantages of using blogs 

• Increased traffic rate
• Activities on the site
• Lead generation
• Backlinks
• Share of Voice 

5. Video Marketing

According to recent research, 90% of customers opt for videos to make a purchase decision. What makes video this special? The following are the reasons

– More humanization and personalised feel for customers.

– Videos boost conversion rates.

– Videos are an easy-to-understand medium.

– You can make it more fun and relatable.

– Videos are more memorable.

– You can effectively embrace recent trends in videos.

There are many histories where brands go viral on a single video. You can effortlessly share videos on many social media platforms as an advantage, and short videos are recent trend.

6. Podcasts

Podcasts are the upcoming content of recent times. Many businesses use podcasts to provide value to their customers. 

Companies can share their stories at any time to cover a specific audience. You can educate, engage and entertain your audience using podcasts. 

Spotify is the leading platform in the podcast industry. One of the interesting facts about using podcasts is they are less competitive. 

You can leverage the less competition feature to attract the target audience in the podcast space. 

7. Paid ads

Online paid ads are advertisements – businesses, or individuals pay to promote their products or services on the internet. These ads will appear on websites, search engines, social media platforms, and other online destinations. 

Paid ads are typically targeted at specific audiences and are designed to increase visibility and generate leads or sales. 

These ads are an effective way for businesses to reach potential customers and can be managed using various tools and platforms.

Types of paid ads

• Search ads
• Display ads
• Banner ads
• Social media ads

Some of the pros of paid ads are 

1. Easy targeting of customers
2. More measurable
3. Easier to rank
4. Promotes brand awareness
5. More re-engagement with users

8. Email marketing

Email marketing is the most cost-effective way to reach your customer regularly. You can increase sales at a low cost by reaching and connecting with your target audience with a great email marketing approach. 

It can be used to promote products, services, or events, as well as to share news and updates with subscribers. 

Many online tools allow businesses to create, send, and track the performance of their email campaigns.

9. Lead magnets

A lead magnet can be a piece of content like a whitepaper, e-book, free courses, webinars, samples, free trials, or newsletter. They provide information to the customers in exchange for their contact information.

Lead magnets are often used in content marketing as a way to build an email list or generate leads for a business. They can be effective in helping businesses to grow their customer base and establish a relationship with potential customers.

According to a survey, 58% of B2B content marketers agreed that virtual events, webinars, and online courses, delivered the highest outcomes for their content marketing.

Lead magnets are crucial in reaching your target customers and building loyalty. 

10. Testimonials and customer reviews

If you are aiming to top your niche. Testimonials and customer reviews will work better. Many top organisation uses this strategy to build powerful brand awareness.

You can easily stand out from your competition and attract many new customers. Adding testimonials to the websites will provide a better outcome. 

We came to the end of the list of types of content marketing. To have a clear understanding we have added examples of the above types in the following sections. 

Let’s move forward!

Content Marketing Examples

Look into the below examples to understand how a piece of content improve many aspects of business.

Instagram Ads

This Instagram post of Nike will give how perfectly made content can educate and excite users at the same time.

You can see many leading brands launch their products on social media. You may have a simple brand, but a well-optimised insta page and proper posting will provide you enhanced brand awareness. 

Blogs

Want to know how blogging can change the fate of your website. Just visit https://neilpatel.com/blog/. 

The value he provides to the customers is the main reason for his business’s success. He is one of the best bloggers in town and he always make sure to provide valuable content to his customers. 

Infographics

This infographic from IBM explains the sophisticated data and stats in a simple manner. The colour code and simple design give customers better understanding. 

Simple words, more numbers, and well-designed infographics provide more value to your customers and website authority. 

Videos

This new video ad of 5 star is a great example of how youtube ads can impact more customers than any platform. You can see the engagement rate of the video in its comment section.

They use simple words, texts, and people to illustrate their idea to users.

Lead magnets

Hubspot is the perfect example of lead magnets. They produce variety of resources like ebooks, and guides, and of course their free online courses, all have acted as magnet to attract potential customers and spread brand awareness. They have more people visit their website to learn courses and download e-books. 

They created an empire using lead magnets. You can’t simply scroll down a HubSpot page without signing up for any free services. 

Email marketing

Look into the email from Starbucks. Really tempting and provides an offer to satisfy your appetite. They used valentine’s day as their advantage and an offer to generate a lead. 

Tiktok

In this TikTok video, eBay used only 12 seconds to explain three things – tells a story, what is eBay? and how to do it.

They used low-budget and UGC elements. The casual type videos connect well with the users as they are not celebrities. They become one of the users. 

Paid ads

Here is an example of paid ads. You can see an ad on Google SERP. Semrush has provided an ad for their website. 

Content Marketing Strategy

Once you understand what content marketing is and its types, you need to know better about content marketing strategies that direct you to yield effective results. 

Using the below 7 steps will give you proper direction on creating a perfect content marketing strategy. For the long term, you need to plan in advance. 

STEP 1 – Understand your audience

Create a customer persona. Understand your audience, how they think and what they need. 

Create an empathy map – understand the problem faced by your customers and how you can add value to your customer.

Step 2 – Analyse content

Analyse which kind of content will provide value to your customer. Think about your company’s high level of business. 

Set content metrics that can be used to understand the strategy’s success. 

Step 3 – Audit your existing content 

A content audit will help you in analyse and improve your existing content. 

you can understand what kind of content connects well with your audience. 

According to research, 65% of the companies with successful content marketing strategies does content audit twice a year. 

Step 4 – Develop a content plan

Developing a content plan requires more resources and time than other steps. The following steps need to be covered to create an effective content plan. 

• Prioritise your plan
• Find resources for your content 
• Find relevant topics
• Explore topic clusters
• Do competitor research
• Design your content funnel
• Plan content production
• Create a content calendar

Step 5 – Create content

Once you finish the planning, you start the real action. Your content needs to meet different criteria to produce results. Some factors are to consider before creating content. They are

• Go with the trend
• Be original
• There should be content diversity
• Repurpose your content
• Use more user-generated content

Step 6 – Distribute the content

You have to distribute the content created into different types of channels like websites, social media, video platforms and more. 

Use organic and paid ways to earn customer trust and loyalty. 

Step 7 – Continuously analyse the performance

Once you publish the content, track the metrics and analyse the content from time to time. This will give you a proper understanding of your customer behaviour and what type of content works for you.

Tools to create effective content marketing strategy

The tools given below can help you form a simple, creative and trendy content strategy for your business. 

• Hubspot
• Google analytics
• Canva
• Trello
• Semrush
• Airtable
• Google docs and sheet
• Grammarly
• Ahref
• Buzzsumo

SEO & Content Marketing 

SEO means increasing the quality of your website using some technical process which brings traffic and visitors to your website. On the other hand, content marketing provides value to your users, which provides profitable customer action.

SEO and Content go well hand in hand and, if done perfectly will yield more results than you expect. Proper placement of keywords in a well-researched blog will provide you with traffic and leads parallelly.

The collaboration of the following will end in a great piece of content for any kind of business. 

1. Niche keywords
2. Quality content
3. User experience
4. Link building

Some essential guidelines to follow

• Focus on 1 to 2 primary keywords.
• Use keywords in the title 
• Use keywords in the body appropriately
• Stay on topic

SEO and content marketing are not separate teams. Both actually depend on one another.

Takeaway

We reached the end of the blog. Hoping you got a better understanding of how well-implemented content marketing can change the fate of any kind of business. 

Reach your target audience and increase conversion rate with good content marketing is possible. You can use more than one way to market the content to increase sales and brand awareness and increase your client base. 

Never forget to make a content copy that provides value to your customer, and that’s the key to content marketing. 

Before starting, create a content plan, form a strategy and understand your audience. 

SuiteJar is a free SEO/Content Marketing tool for content marketers developed by both SEO experts and content marketers to facilitate developing an effective content strategy. 

The 1st Page Ranker feature of the tool help you prioritize the contents that needed revamping and will provide insight into the keywords to be added, backlinks to be made and more to make sure that your blog gets sufficient boost to reach the SERP results. 

That’s it, cheers to making more revenue and clients from content marketing.