Audience First: Core Principles of Successful Content Marketing

More often than not, users dislike feeling pressured into making a purchase, and brands can sometimes be overly assertive with their sales pitch. Nevertheless, when brands prioritize customer needs and provide genuine solutions, they can establish enduring relationships that benefit both parties. Striking this delicate balance is essential.

Content marketing helps to close that gap by personalizing your brand. By delivering useful and relevant information about product and company values, you can establish a long-term relationship with your customers — turn them into allies.

A loyal user eases your marketing efforts and boosts earnings. But how do you create captivating and engaging content? That’s the ultimate question we’re answering in this article. Scroll down to learn why content marketing is important, how to improve your marketing materials, which audience is better to target, and what you should do for your content to bring in value and conversions.

Content marketing explained

“Content is king”

Bill Gates

Content marketing is readable, watchable, or audible content that carries along with it an advertisement or a lead into a funnel. It helps to drive more sales and foster customer loyalty. It also fosters long-term relationships and is different from social engineering which may contain misleading information. Content marketing materials include, but are not limited to:

• Blog articles, like the one you’re reading
• Podcasts, useful when audio is the only option
• Email newsletters featuring useful items (such as infographics, eBooks, guides, tests & quizzes, or templates)
• Social media publications (e.g., Instagram posts & Reels, Telegram posts, LinkedIn posts, Facebook publications, X tweets, YouTube videos & Shorts)
• Paid publications on third-party websites (also featuring relevant and useful content)

Content of quality offers a solution. This is one of the underlying principles of marketing: sell solutions, not products. The problems or needs your audience has are referred to as pain points. These can span from lack of time to financial vulnerability, and your content should offer a way to solve these pains with the product you promote.

The benefits of content marketing

Publishing content is the best way to articulate your brand values — 96% of all marketing decision-makers admit the efficiency of content marketing. Consistent, relevant, and valuable content helps to retain the audience better. It helps to achieve the following:

• Informing the audience about the product
• Guiding the audience toward the purchase
• Building trust and loyalty
• Establishing new marketing channels for extra engagement, feedback, and support
• Improving user retention and customer LifeTime Value (LTV)

Maximizing the benefits of content marketing

Content that resonates with the audience enhances the potential of any traffic source. Make sure that your chosen format corresponds with the requirements and the trends of the traffic source, too. Let’s not forget that content goes beyond text and includes short clips and image posts (Instagram), long videos (YouTube), brief messages (X), and a slew of other formats.

Know your publishing time for maximum impact. Depending on what your vertical and marketing goals are, your ideal publishing time will be different. An article about betting on the FIFA World Cup published during the event and in between the tournaments will see different results.

Quality content has a good chance of going viral. Once you fine-tune the format, tone, and timing of your campaign, you have all the chances to hit gold and share a truly useful piece of content that will make people talk. Viral content is a prime example of word-of-mouth when advertising occurs with little-to-know involvement on your part.

Traffic sources and suitable verticals

As we have mentioned previously, content marketing can take many forms, and we won’t go too far by stating that any vertical needs content marketing. Users might feel reluctant to adapt to brands that are new to them. Content marketing personalizes a company, highlights its values, and tells a story people can relate to. 

One of the most personalized and relatable types of content today is influencer marketing. Much like traditional publishers with ad placements, influencers have access to a certain audience. Unlike distant brands or websites, opinion leaders possess personal appeal and charm, which bring them one step closer to the audience.

An influencer’s personal qualities are often more important than the traffic source itself. YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, and Telegram are great platforms, but the real attraction is toward the persona of the opinion leader who pitches the product to their flock. A good influencer who has a great rapport with their subscribers can leverage a small platform, while a slapdash approach will ruin even a well-developed account with millions of followers.

Platform specifics are not as influential but still matter. YouTube is better for long-term organic traffic, Instagram is designed for quick conversions, and TikTok is great for brand awareness. When it comes to the audience specifics, consider this:

• Twitch is designed for players, so sports betting and gaming products are a solid pick for this action-driven audience
• Instagram with its “lifestyle” approach is a paradise for eCommerce and nutra, with decorative cosmetics, health and skincare supplements, and home decor items
• X features more old-school celebrities, musicians, and actors who use the platform to foster a personal connection with the fans, which is good for long-term goals
• YouTube is a jack of all trades better suited for showcasing than storytelling, so make sure to show the benefits of the product rather than telling about them. Nutra, gaming, sports betting, eCommerce, travel, and almost any conceivable niche all belong here.

Email newsletters excel at retaining the audience. By design, emails hit a finite user database and give the subscribers a sense of belonging to a closed society (a club if you will). People like feeling special and having access to valuable information made with their needs in mind. This channel is best for distributing long-form content such as guides, quizzes, or eBooks by linking it to the letter with a short and catchy intro explaining exactly why it’s so useful to the readers.

What content is suitable for content marketing

Content of quality fosters long-term commitment. Retaining the users is always cheaper than acquiring them anew. Moreover, if your blog is interesting, people will come in naturally, thanks to a higher SEO ranking.

1. Problem-solving: people search for advice all the time on the internet. By having content that solves their query, they will gravitate toward your website or blog if you can offer answers.
2. Relevant: why would a stamp collector be interested in a museum of wine corks? While curiosity gap and clickbait are both valid marketing tools, you need to deliver on your promises and make sure your content gives real value. Think one step ahead and understand what your target audience needs to hear, because your piece of content will have to contend not only with the competition but also with the users’ short attention span and lack of time. 

3. Digestible: tell a story, don’t read a lecture. Use just enough words to achieve the AIDA stages:
   1. Attention — are they listening to you?
   2. Interest — are both your offer and method of presentation interesting?
   3. Decision — is your CTA good enough?
   4. Action — are you sure there are no dams on the users’ way to conversions?

Scripted content VS live content

Let’s touch upon the dichotomy between live and scripted content pieces since various forms of content marketing can involve both options. Statistically, it takes 10,000 hours to become good at an activity, live performances included. That’s why scripted content is easier for starters, but live performance resonates better. 

Advantages of scripted content:

• The foundation of any content: script is a text, and writing is the best way to plan things out, and this includes images, videos, or podcasts
• Careful planning: it’s easier to fix any mistakes
• Consistency: voice, tone, and unique selling points
• Audience trust: because you stay consistent with what has already been said

Advantages of live performance:

• Extra emotions: most real-time mishaps cause genuine responses, help bond with the audience, and have higher viral potential
• Additional engagement: live performances go well with event marketing during sales, presentations, game finals, and other relevant dates
• Less alienation: thanks to inevitable improvisation, live shows display a more humane side of the business, add face to an otherwise faceless corporation
• More interaction: going live by commenting or even joining the activity is a chance for users to be closer to the hosts

In terms of hitting your campaign goals, it’s best to balance scripted and live content to achieve engagement, retention, and consistency. Remember, live content doesn’t exclude preparation. The preparation for on-air events should be even more rigorous because the risk of slipping is much higher, but the reward is worth it.

Practical advice for marketers

What exactly should be done to make your content marketing better? — Yep Ads answers:

✔ Know your audience. Examine GEO, product, and cultural nuances to prepare yourself. Armed with initial knowledge, don’t forget to go deeper with Google Trends, Country Comparison Tool, and Search Console Insights.

✔ Plan out your campaign and goals. Get to know your offer using SWOT analysis and Business Model Canvas. Pro tip: use these frameworks before you opt for any offer. Take into account local climate, holidays, and device preferences. Remember, Christmas in Australia and Austria is different.

✔ Content marketing does not have to stop at lead generation. The Top of Funnel (ToFu) is aimed at brand recognition and includes infographics, guides, and general articles. The Middle of Funnel (MoFu) is reserved for leads, e.g., manuals, topical research, and reviews. The Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) is about reassuring that your product solves a problem: reviews, feedback, and User-Generated Content (UGC).

✔ Consider partnering with influencers for long-term growth. If you need immediate results or are budget-conscious, opt for social marketing or paid placement ads. While influencers can be valuable allies, they alone cannot solve all your marketing challenges.

✔ Use the AIDA framework. Quick recap: attention, interest, decision, action. Your content must grab attention and suggest a solution. Bring value and know how to communicate that value, the rest will fall in line, because people are hostages of their needs, fears, desires, and emotions.

✔ Communicate with clarity. Language accuracy is a must, there is no greater damage to one’s credibility than grammar mistakes. To make your texts more professional and trustworthy, use Grammarly or any other browser extension to supervise your narratives.

✔ Perfect social media marketing (SMM) with AI. Tools like Hootsuite enable you to plan and schedule automatic posting — convenient, when you want to spend just an evening to lay out your content strategy. Coverposts on the other hand turns clunky articles into neat blog posts for social media. The range of AI applications for content and affiliate marketing is vast, so you have a lot of options to explore and choose from. Just remember that AI by itself is not that great, use your judgment.

✔ Learn from others. By learning how others tackle similar problems, you can start implementing their solutions in your content generation. Special for you, we’ve prepared a compilation of informational sources for affiliates. It goes beyond just content marketing and includes SEO-related articles, affiliate marketing forums, and news portals.

Conclusion

Content marketing personalizes your communication with the audience. Problem-solving, relevant, and timely content helps to bring your audience one step closer to conversions.

As long as your content solves a problem and is easy to understand, it can take any format and be published on any platform; on top of that, it’s compatible with any vertical. However, some content categories are better suited for certain verticals, e.g., games go best with Twitch campaigns, while nutra thrives on Instagram.

Need a hand? Contact Yep Ads for assistance. Our specialists are always on the lookout for how to improve your profit generation. Remember, we’re in this business together, partner.