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Content marketing may be the biggest driver in online marketing right now. Various types of content marketing have helped build trust between brands and customers. Yes, these encourage sales. They also encourage something even more important: identification and community build around brands. How do you get content for marketing, though? What are the steps you take and how do you figure out what type of content you need?

Build Trust

The first thing content marketing does is it builds trust with your potential customers. Content marketing won't always directly be about a product or service. It might be about information or a passion that intersects with your brand. It might be about how your brand thinks or how it got to where it is.

Share Passion

Someone interested in a gym might click on an article about exercises they can do to burn fat, sure. They'll also click on an article about what motivated someone else to get themselves in shape. Just as much as they need to know different exercises, they also need to identify with a motivation for doing them. They want to feel like they're not alone in it, as if they're part of a community built around common information, understanding, or passion.

Better ROI

Outbound marketing has a very small conversion rate. It hovers just under 2%. Inbound marketing has a conversion rate of more than 14%. There's more to it than just this. You pay at a constant rate for outbound marketing. Every time it's featured, it's because you're paying for it to be featured.

Inbound marketing is based on SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Content creation takes advantage of the way that search engines work and prioritize articles in response to a search. You incorporate specific keywords that you anticipate being well searched and that differentiate you from competition.

You include these keywords in your content so that they come up in response to searches. You only pay for content once, and then you own that asset. A search that uses those keywords today or a year from now will still return your result. Every time it's featured, you're not paying for it.

Conversion Rate

That conversion rate is important to highlight. The nature of inbound marketing means that those coming to you are already interested in making a purchase. It's not a cold sale. They've decided that they are ready to investigate a purchase – they're more concerned about where to purchase from.

Customers who come in via inbound marketing are often going to sell themselves. Your content simply helps them have faith that you know about your product, you have a reason for making it the way you do, and that you care about it. These are more ideal buyers than those you simply click on an ad. They're more likely to purchase, and they're likely to purchase more.

Create Community

Regular content creation encourages followers. Those followers help sell each other on your product. They attract more followers. They help advocate for your brand. They build community around it. They make inroads for your brand advocacy into new spaces on social media that you may not otherwise develop access to.

Types of Content Marketing

Content marketing can come in many forms. One of the most common and most effective is blogs and articles. These posts can be informative and can cover topics that intersect with your brand but aren't outright selling it. Video is becoming an increasingly important component and can do a lot to help you capitalize on SEO. Often, coordinating with an influencer who creates videos can be a crucial move.

Chances are you've clicked on a quiz before because it speaks to an interest you have. That's content. It attracted you to a site, and maybe you clicked on more quizzes, articles, or videos after that first one. They're widely shared on social media, and encourage a lot of additional visitors.

Games and apps are also common. They're a little bit more of an investment. You want to deliver a certain level of quality as well as security. It's much easier to create regular quality writing than it is to create regular quality gaming apps. Often, these different types are balanced together. How they're balanced and mixed is part of your content marketing strategy.

Content for Marketing

How do you get content for marketing? Work with a marketing agency skilled in content creation. To give you an idea of their ability to meet your standards in content creation, they can provide you examples of what they've written before. The best part of this is that it gives you a range of content to look through. You can see how they developed content over time for someone else.

What's here covers the basics, and a content marketing agency does much more than create content. It's easy to plug SEO words into a blog, but if the blog itself isn't valuable or useful to visitors, your content won't work. Strategy develops paths that drive the value of your content to different communities and social media platforms.

A content marketing agency will also be able to do a lot of the back-end work on technical elements that give your site page authority. Search engine algorithms start with SEO keywords, but they measure a number of elements that can get you to the top of Google search results – the results people actually click on.