FAQ: Content marketing

Why would a company choose your organization if they have never heard of you? And can hardly find any information about you? It is therefore crucial that your target group gets to know you. This is possible with content, you generate awareness with this.

You want to connect with your target audience. They should start to see you as a reliable source of valuable information. In other words: show with content marketing that you are an authority in your field.

Why is trust so important? Very simple: it makes it easier to convert a prospect into a lead. And convert a lead into a customer more easily. But content marketing also helps to retain existing customers. With a good content marketing strategy, prospects become customers, and customers become ambassadors.

You can use many different forms of content to spread your message. Think of customer stories, white papers, web pages, (long copy) articles, newsletters, brochures and blogs. Or infographics, videos, e-books, magazines, social media posts and podcasts.

What type of content best suits your target audience? That again depends on your objectives and target group. If you are not sure of your case, let an expert inform you. Because it would be a shame if you spend a lot of money on content that ultimately doesn't catch on.

Know what's going on within your target audience. One way to find out is to see what frequently asked questions are on Google. Also know that some content inserts are very popular. Think of the 5 tips, the 7 best practices or the 10 best examples.

But… do you want to do exactly the same as your competitors? Or do you want your content to stand out? Because sometimes it is truly necessary to show your unique self.

Let's repeat it again: by knowing your target audience. Our advice is to pick one topic and create multiple pieces of content for it. After all, it makes no sense to go from one piece of content to another without recycling some of the existing material. So turn it into sort of a campaign and adjust your other marketing activities to this as well. Because repetition ensures that your target group will actually believe your message.

Absolutely! Some content is more suitable for creating awareness, but others act as a magnet to generate leads. We repeat it again: the condition for this is that you know your target group well and that you know how to develop distinctive content. Also make sure that the content is offered to your target audience in multiple ways and through the right channels.

The answer to this question, and you can feel it coming, is not that simple. Because again: it depends on your objective and target group.

We can give an example. You can of course place a blog on your website and promote it via a newsletter and your social media channels. But you also want it to be found through search engines. That is why you will always have to write the text with the SEO rules in mind.

Because writing a blog sometimes involves blood, sweat and tears, you naturally want to get the most out of it. So consider other options as well. Such as posting a rewritten version of the blog in the media through free publicity or paid options.

In this way you choose paid media (you pay for the placement), earned media (you earn the placement) and owned media (which you manage completely yourself).

Well, this is another question that doesn't have an unequivocal answer. It really depends on the business you are in and the size of your company. We can tell you that some continuity in the content is important. But we think it's actually more important that you put a lot of energy into the distribution of content than into the amount. Because: if no one reads your content, it is of little use to you.

It's pretty easy to find out how many people have read/heard/seen the content. Think of website traffic or figures such as the open rate and CTR that you can generate from your mailing or marketing automation tool.

You can also see how often a social media post has been shared or liked. In the online media you can request the figures from publishers, collect them via specific clipping services or measure yourself with free tools such as Hypestat.

However, it is more difficult to determine how your image has changed because of content marketing or how much more exposure you have built. To find out, you need to do research. And then we are suddenly talking about completely different amounts. It's up to you to decide if you think it's worth it.

Not everyone involved in the purchase of IT solutions has a technical background. Is your content too complicated? Then a business target group will definitely drop out. After all, they want to know how a solution can help solve their business challenges. Then you should not get bogged down in technical details.

Is the content too general? Then the seasoned IT person thinks you don't take him/her seriously. They do want to know everything about bits & bytes. So you will have to know exactly who you are targeting and what their level of knowledge is.

If you want your content to be found organically by search engines, you will need to develop the content with search engine optimization rules in mind. You then have to take into account, among other things, the title of your article, the subheadings, multimedia elements, the questions that the target group has about the subject in question – because you have to tailor the content to that – and provide both internal and external links. This advice is rather short-sighted, because SEO is quite complex.