When you hear content marketing, you most definitely think about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and viral YouTube videos. But that is not all about it. Instead of pitching your products or services, in content marketing you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers. Your goal is to help them solve their issues.
Here is one definition what content marketing is. “It is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
So why are we talking about this? Because traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective by the minute. If you want to be a forward-thinking marketer, you need a better way to interact with your prospects and customers. This isn’t, however, a new thing, because it has been around far longer than the Internet. Maybe you remember our previous blog about storytelling in marketing. Storytelling and content marketing can be linked with each other. Because content marketing is all about storytelling, and humans have told stories for as long as they could speak. Great stories always captures people’s attention.
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Content marketing is good for your bottom line — and your customers
Specifically, there are three key reasons — and benefits — for companies to do great content:
- more loyal customers
- increased sales
- cost savings
How does this happen?
Making an excellent content is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience. If you give them high-quality content that is very relevant to them on a consistent basis, it increases the loyalty. Eventually, when customers make a purchase decision, their loyalty already lies with you. They will purchase your product and prefer it over competitors’ options.
With this strategy, you want to show to your customers, that you care about them. That is a contrast in one-off advertising. Today, more than ever before, people want to feel like you care about them. The world is louder and noisier than ever before, and attention is our most valuable resource.
What does that mean?
This all means, that you need to really understand your customers, prospects, and audience. Once you do, you can then create content that solves their problems and grows your business. Because growing your business is of course your ultimate goal. But you can’t do that unless you first attract paying customers.
Content is the present – and future – of marketing
Go back and read the content marketing definition one more time, but this time remove the relevant and valuable. That’s the difference between it and the other informational garbage you get from companies trying to sell you “stuff.” Companies send us information all the time – it’s just that most of the time it’s not very relevant or valuable. That’s what makes content marketing so intriguing in today’s environment of thousands of marketing messages per person per day.
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Marketing is impossible without great content
Regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, content marketing should be part of your process, not something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing:
- Social media marketing: Content marketing strategy comes before your social media strategy.
- SEO: Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content.
- PR: Successful PR strategies address issues readers care about, not their business.
- PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.
- Inbound marketing: Content is key to driving inbound traffic and leads.
- Content strategy: Content strategy is part of most content marketing strategies.
How can my company get started with this?
In 2020 the competition is fiercer than ever. Best way to start is to create a good plan for your content. With a good plan in place, you can take the first step to achieve success. First you need to audit your company’s present content. What is your top-performing content and what is the low-performing content? What is the frequency and ranking key words? The better you understand your current performance, the more knowledge you’ll have to help you develop the future performance.
Secondly, you need to set the goals for marketing. You need to know exactly who you’re targeting with your content to. Effective as content marketing can be, you most likely won’t get a ROI (return on investment) if you have no target. Without goals, your marketing activities lose focus and it becomes difficult to judge its success or failure.
Thirdly, you need to determine the type of content to publish. Content is not a synonymous with the written content. Over the years, various other content formats have grown in popularity.
As a part of the content marketing plan also create a content calendar. It is probably the best way to plan and organize upcoming content. It sounds like a big commitment at first, but you can rest assured it’ll pay that time back in the future.
A content calendar helps you to:
- save time by being organized
- post consistently
- make fewer typos, and also reduce the risk of big mistakes
- remember all the relevant moments
- track what works, and improve it
Other essential aspects of creating a content marketing plan is to carry out audience research and have a plan for content promotion. For the promotion, you can use for example guest posts, social media, search engines, emails, or advertising. And don’t forget to measure your content marketing success and ROI. To get any result from content marketing, you have to execute a campaign. After acting, you also need to track your campaign’s performance.
Would you like to have professionals doing your content? Marketigation is your partner in digital marketing. Contact us already today.