Content marketing types that deliver the BEST results for small and medium businesses.
SEMrush shared their recent results of the content marketing landscape and how it can impact businesses. Judging from the results, content marketing is definitely thriving, but how can you make it work for your business?
Among the Healthcare, Ecommerce, Education industries, the top three preferences were:
- In-house writers
- Freelancers from their own network or referred writers
- Writers from sites like Upwork and Fiverr
From what I can see, there are a lot of businesses that are unaware what options are open to them, with many thinking they have to employ someone full-time to meet the demands of their content marketing.
Top Content Marketing Goals in Order of Importance
- Build brand awareness — 46%
- Increase traffic to your website — 41%
- Improve sales results — 40%
- Build engagement on social media — 29%
- Onboard and retain clients — 27%
- Lead generation — 23%
- SEO — higher positions in search engines, more backlinks, more referring domains — 20%
- Other — 6%
The top three; build brand awareness, increase traffic to the website and improve sales results, are cited as the most important elements when looking at improving content marketing. I find it very interesting that lead generation and SEO are bottom of the table. This indicates that through building brand awareness and increasing traffic to the website that you will naturally improve your sales results. However, improving your SEO is important if you want to gain a higher position in the search engine results.
Industry is one major influencing factor when it comes to content marketing goals for each business. B2B places more emphasis on lead generation while B2C companies focus on increasing social media engagement.
The Usual Suspects?
Well, it’s no surprise that email marketing is the top runner, followed by blog posts, product descriptions, and videos. This suggests that we’re seeing greater website traffic and conversions (or more sales) through the more finely segmented email marketing. However it depends on your business as to the success of the various types of content marketing.
For instance, the three most popular types of content marketing within the healthcare industry are blogs / articles (to build brand awareness and generate leads), emails and videos are also used to achieve business goals. Within the manufacturing industry it’s product descriptions, organic posts and videos. So, as you can see the type of content you create needs to correlate with your industry, your audience and your business goals.
B2B Top 5 Content Formats
The most popular forms of content marketing within the B2B sector are:
- Blog posts / articles (55%)
- Case studies (38%)
- Emails (36%)
- Press releases (34%)
- Website copy (32%)
It is essential to monitor all your results so you can see what’s working and what isn’t. Always look at your results against your business goals and see if they are helping you achieve your plan.
Take Aways
We suggest using a few successful marketing tactics to reach your business goals rather than trying everything and not doing it very well. We would also like to highlight the importance of testing different types of content to determine your audience’ preferences and ensure that what you create has the impact you had hoped for. Essentially, you have to be sure that your content is well produced, has a clear objective and resonates with your target audience.
If you would like to go over anything to do with your marketing, website or content, I’m always here to help you. Simply call on on 01752 393261 or book a complimentary discovery session here.
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