You may have the most beautiful website design there is, but it’s actually quality content that drives traffic and engages readers.


Indeed, content---whether in the form of text, images, graphics, audio clips, videos, or combinations of all these items---are the backbone of your website.


A content marketing strategy is necessary to make your content a functioning tool to generate customers, provide them with a memorable user experience, and scale your business. But to create an effective strategy, you need to separate the facts from the myths about content marketing.

1. Myth: The more content you write and publish to your website, the higher your website will show up in search engines.


Fact: Just like in life, more doesn’t always mean better. This is the same principle with content. It doesn’t matter if you have a massive amount of it, if your content is poorly written, grammatically incorrect, confusing, uninteresting, bad quality, or not useful to your audience, people will simply leave your site and look for a website with more valuable content.


Rather than focusing on generating more content, focus on creating top quality content. In content marketing, quality is often preferred to quantity. Understand your audience and what piques their interest. Study how they consume content then develop a content plan (e.g. an outline, list of topics that would interest your audience, your general content theme and feel, etc.).


Using all these information, start creating quality content that are meaningful, memorable, useful, and engaging to your target audience.


2. Myth: As long as you post high quality content, your search rankings will increase.


Fact: While top-quality content is fun to read, it wouldn’t do much of anything unless readers can see it. Therefore, you need to make sure your content is visible.


Optimize your content for search engines by strategically putting relevant keywords in the body, headers, and meta descriptions. You can determine the best keywords to use through keyword research tools such as Keywords Everywhere and Google Keyword Planner.


Inbound links are also important in SEO. If your content is relevant, other websites will link to yours, squeezing in significant amounts of link juice to your site and telling search engines that you are an authority in your field. Also put outbound links, or links from your site that points to other websites. Your outbound links should also point to authoritative sources to ensure credibility.


Then share your content through your social media channels to further expand your reach.


Finally, repurpose old content. Repurposing refers to recycling content into different forms of media. For example, you can repurpose an old blog into an infographic, a podcast, a Facebook or Instagram album, or even a short video. The only limit to repurposing content is your imagination!

 

3. Myth: If your business is B2B, you don’t need content marketing.


Fact: Content is useful in explaining a complex process or describing a product or service, which makes it great for B2B types of businesses.


Why? Well, B2Bs often employ longer sales cycles than B2Cs. That means prospects---or the businesses you deal with---spend more time understanding and studying your processes, product and service features, and more. This creates opportunities for you to truly engage, educate, and nurture prospects through your content.


For example, you can write content to guide businesses about your processes, products, and services. You write about client testimonials and reviews to encourage them to avail of your offers. You can compose well-researched and technical articles to back up the effectiveness of your offers.


4. Myth: Content marketing is considered digital. Offline or traditional types of content are not part of content marketing.


Fact: Content marketing is not limited to the Internet. It’s not just about blog articles and digital video, images, and graphics.


Content also involves offline and more traditional resources such as brochures, flyers, and sales kits. They include billboards, posters, and big ad signages. Old, traditional marketing aren't called classics for nothing!


You need to remember that content marketing is not just about text and imagery. It’s about creating an overall experience for your customer. It’s about composing a story that leads back to your business.

 

5. Myth: It is easy and cheap to make quality content.


Fact: Anyone can make content. Many people can write, take photos, and create videos.

However, making top-tier, useful, impactful, and engaging content requires a thorough understanding of your market and the dynamics of your industry. And those who have that capability include experienced writers, professional photographers and videographers, technically oriented developers, and strategic thinkers. Asking or hiring these providers to work for you costs money.


6. Myth: Your content marketing is considered successful if it can earn ROI and generate sales quickly.


Fact: Content marketing does not promise overnight results. In fact, even the best content marketing strategy takes time to flourish.


However, you can track your strategy’s progress. For instance, you can study metrics that measure page views, bounce rates, subscriptions, number of unique visitors and views, number of social shares, and more. From this information, you can determine brand awareness, conversions, and customer retention levels.

 


As you can see, content marketing is essential for building your brand and for ensuring a satisfying user experience. But you need to understand how it really works so you can truly reap its benefits. With a proper content marketing strategy, you will be able to gain retain customers and provide them a pleasant experience as they browse through your website. Naturally, you will be able to grow and scale your business as well.