Unless you are completely alien to the world of marketing and business, you must have heard of content marketing and what all it entails. To provide a rather detailed reference of content marketing, it involves the creation, publishing, and sharing of custom-produced content that is aimed at engaging & acquiring customers for a business. It does not include crude marketing tactics.
It works by implicitly influencing the audience and motivating them to connect with a brand or a business. Content sharing is what makes that happen. The content comprises various forms mainly including – video, blog, infographics & visual content, Email, webinars & courses, and social media posts. Some other subsidiary forms include podcasts, e-books, and PowerPoint or SlideShare presentations.
Here’s how Content Marketing helps you boost your business
You can increase your sales and expand your clientele using content marketing
Unlike many other digital marketing tactics, content marketing doesn’t just increase the flow of traffic through your website. It actually increases the conversion rates for your business in addition to attracting more traffic. The principle behind content marketing is to focus on convincing the consumer through your content. Since inbound marketing fetches much more sales and leads than outbound marketing, content marketing helps your business garner more customers.
You hold better influence over your prospect customers through content marketing
Suppose that a person looks up ‘website development’ on Google and, you, being a website development company, happened to have published an article or a blog on website development on your business website. Your article appears in the search results and the user visits your website. In this way, many other people end up on your website. Since you were the one to have helped them and guided them in their pursuit of making a purchase or simply learning about a topic (— a topic related to your business, services, or products), you have earned their trust and established your credibility. Hence, whenever they need to do business in your field of business, they will be highly inclined towards doing business with you or purchasing a service or product from you. Thus, content marketing enables you to build strong & positive customer-relationships which lead to a good brand reputation in the market.
It is better than traditional marketing schemes
traditional marketing:
Traditional marketing methods majorly revolve around making people aware of a brand or a product. And we do acknowledge that this is one of the basic, fundamental objectives of marketing. Although, traditional marketing is something which is done by businesses that are unsure about their target audience and can afford to be generous on spendings as well. Thus, it can be regarded as an indefinite and not really a smart approach to marketing. Especially not by the standards of today’s business landscape. There are almost no intricacies in the way newspaper advertisements or billboards engage people. Literally every newspaper reader and every person driving down the street will see the advertisement while the ad can be completely irrelevant for large percentages of that audience. Traditional marketing entails almost no advanced functions & features like those of niche marketing, streamlined & efficient targeting, etc.
content marketing:
Content marketing, on the other hand, is one of the most successful facets of digital marketing. One major characteristic trait of content marketing is that it is smarter than its fellow marketing practices. It requires knowledge, expertise, and even experience pertaining to the business being marketed. However, the advantages that this brings in-turn, impressively reciprocate the input.
With the brain-power that goes into content marketing, it is easily a more efficient and more effective avenue. Through content marketing, you can implement high accuracy targeting without even having to do anything from your side. The consumer practically engages himself. You coherently get better results than that of traditional marketing. Your website gets respectable volumes of quality traffic.
Moreover, content marketing absolutely wins over traditional marketing when it comes to how much they both charge. As compared to the latter, the former is extremely cost-effective. So it easily wins over traditional marketing in the economic aspect.
In the end, content marketing offers a more mature and refined overall process for marketing a business. Obviously, more relevant and more suited to today’s customers’ needs & wants.
Content Marketing enhances your Brand Awareness
This is one really hefty advantage on part of content marketing. As a budding or growing business, there’s no amount of brand awareness that should satisfy you. No matter however much you gain of it.
Content marketing can be your well of brand awareness if implemented appropriately. This is because the content that you push out adds value to your brand.
You need to make sure that your content marketing strategy aligns well with your brand and its persona. The audience should be effortlessly able to correlate your content with your brand. Great content reaches a big audience and how well your content can draw people to your brand is how much clout you garner. The math of building brand awareness through content marketing is as simple as that.
Now you may find yourself wondering as to what the factors behind the merits of Content Marketing are. The rationale behind the way it functions is not really that complicated. Here are a couple of explanations for the same.
Today’s audience is hungry for content and the marketing landscape is content-oriented.
Statistics show that people prefer literary or audio-visual marketing content over crude marketing tools like banners, billboards, flyers, etc. Such content also proves to be more effective. Due to the profound appetite of knowledge and awareness in today’s consumer, he turns to the internet for answers to his questions & problems. And for queries or curiosities pertaining to product service, business, etc, what better place than an organization that engages in that very business, to satisfy the need and curiosity of a person. When a brand markets their business through smartly crafted content, they are providing their audience with firsthand information on a multitude of aspects surrounding their business. This dynamic of content-hungry audience and content manifesting brands is rewarding for the latter i.e. the businesses engaging in content marketing.
Google is all about content.
It appreciates great quality content and it drives more than 60% of online traffic to the average website. It is substantially greater than the traffic that other popular online platforms like Facebook deflect towards an arbitrary website. Google has its own bots that evaluate content quality by analyzing a multitude of parameters encompassing your content. Basically, Google prioritizes user-satisfaction over anything and it adopts pretty stringent practices to ensure that its user gets what they’re looking for. Thus, effective content marketing gets you in the good books of your biggest source of traffic and it shows in the results.
To summarise — As per today’s market standards, Content Marketing is one of the more advanced, sophisticated, and effective tools of marketing. It demands little in comparison to what it gives in return. Content development is a cost-effective activity too and thus results in a high return on investment. And the universal applicability of content marketing as a marketing strategy makes it suitable for all kinds & sizes of businesses. Thus, if you own a business and want to add to your customer-base considerably, Content Marketing is a really promising avenue for you.