How Content Marketing Supports a Digital Marketing Strategy

Marketing is like a symphony, where each component plays its unique part, but the sum is greater than its individual parts. Understanding the role each marketing facet plays, and how it resonates with your target customers, lets you create a balance to enhance your overall goal. You want your marketing to balance gaining attention and improving your credibility. But for something as varied as digital marketing, what does that look like? 

Well, programmatic ads are excellent at gaining attention since they can match your customers’ interests and demographics. Whereas, your content strategy helps you develop your authority and credibility. As you invest in these facets, you’ll gain more traction. As prospects see your content demonstrating your expertise and capabilities, they’ll become more receptive to your other advertising.  

Content marketing heightens your brand credibility, supporting your broader digital marketing strategy by giving you items to share and evidence to back up your claims.

Brings in Traffic with Improved SEO 

The primary goal of content marketing is to improve its SEO – which it does – but it also helps you increase traffic through your other channels. Content gives you purpose when posting to social media or sending out marketing emails to your subscribers, letting you share substantive items through these channels. It lets you share items with purpose, provide value, and demonstrate your expertise.  

Giving customers something they can learn and benefit from what you share helps bring in traffic to your site because it creates secondary reasons to click into it. Those are all opportunities for prospects to learn about you and from you, whether or not they’re a customer (yet). Your blog posts or videos can answer questions and guide people so that they learn more about what they need by learning how you can help them. 

Improve Customer Relationships Through Email and Social Media 

In the same way, you can share content to reach new customers, sharing values lets you nurture relationships with people who’ve either already purchased from you or are considering doing so. Content marketing gives purpose here too, where you can anticipate concerns or needs and create specific pieces accordingly. If you’ve created a video about your service’s benefits beyond your customer’s initial reason for hiring you, your email marketing can highlight that. Or if you’ve discovered a separate need they have you can help with, you can create a marketing email or social media post to help inform customers about more reasons they should partner with you. 

Content marketing can inform and structure your other digital marketing if you leverage it in these mediums. As you develop it, you create a backlog of expertise to flexibly respond to questions and interests. That way, if you see someone posting on social media about a problem or question, you can answer it and refer them to a specific blog post or video for more information.   

Increase Conversions from Other Marketing 

Obviously, if you’re using content marketing in email and social media, it will increase conversions through those mediums, but the cumulative increase in credibility and awareness of your expertise and quality impacts unrelated digital marketing, as well. Prospects who’ve interacted with your content and know you briefly through that will be more receptive to programmatic display and SEM ads they see from you. They’ll have less misgivings about clicking on one of your ads because they know what your brand does and that it’s a quality enterprise.  

It takes multiple touchpoints with customers to gain their trust and encourage them to click with you and make a sale. Content marketing creates touchpoints and makes your other, less in-depth ads more qualitative. These processes work together to achieve something bigger and grow your brand in the process. 

Strengthen your Digital Marketing with Quality Content 

Content marketing takes time to develop. You can create content based on what information you learn your customers need by tailoring it to questions they have and by developing it for channels they frequent. It’s an effective medium in itself, but it can also act as a multiplier for your other digital marketing, especially if you tie it into your marketing and sales strategy. At its core, content is about creating shareable value, and all it takes to make the most of that is a good way to share it.