Why Content Marketing should be the starting point

Today was one of them days when the light bulb came on and I had to start writing. It happened when I was on a call with a client discussing content marketing and I said:

Content marketing shoukd be the starting point as it allows for everything else to fall into place

This echoed wirh the client as well and gave me a topic I had to write about.

Content Marketing is the content you put out in the world normally via your own website and from this you are able to drive social posts, build on your organic search rankings, provide subject matter for email marketing and the list goes on. When they say content is king it doesn’t just apply to ranking on Google. Content is king because content can drive everything else you are doing with inbound marketing.

Lets look at a few things that can happen when you start your marketing strategy with content.

Drive Social Media

With a good content marketing and a content calendar planned out in advance you are able to have new, fresh ideas and pages on your site to post to social media re-engaging followers and becoming a go to source of knowledge for your industry. Without fresh content your social media feeds starts to become stale with the same old “buy our stuff” posts on repeat. Repating content and posts results in lower engagement which results in lower reach, a cycle that becomes hard to break.

Drive Email Marketing

In a similar way to repeative content on social media starting a negative spiral of user engagement is also true for email marketing. The more repeative your eamils to potential and existing customers the more that will unsubscribe or simply delete you when they see the email come in. Fresh new content on your website every week that is driven by what users are wanting to read about and topical to what is happening that week in the wider world keep people engaged and coming back. It also means you are not scratching around every week for what should go in this weeks newsletter.

Drive Search Rankings

Ok, while this is not 100% true and search keywords should have some influnce on your content calendar it is true that in the way that without a content marketing strategy you would not be going after any rankings on the search engines in the first place. That said not every new post on your companies blog has to be aimed at ranking for a set of search terms. As long as the content is relevent to your busienss and audiance Google will appreciate the new text. Not only will Google appreciate this but you could hit a gold mine when it comes to traffic in a area you wasn’t previously looking at with your SEO strategy.

After you sit back and think about this for a few minutes you start to realise how important content marketing should be to your marketing efrorts. The content writers in your team can make everybody else’s job a lot easier and deliver better results across the marketing specturm as a whole. Next time you are thinking of hiring someone for your marketing team consider a writer.