Content Marketing is a strategy of creating a set of online materials such as blogs, videos, articles, case studies, newsletters and whitepapers that can help to develop and grow a group of relevant audience. Content marketing does not promote a product or brand overtly but fuel interest in them by developing generic messages. A lot of brands use content marketing to express the brand’s reliability and to gain the prospect’s trust.
How is it different from traditional marketing?
The content generated by a brand would be relevant to their product/service offered. But unlike older times, where a brand is promoted openly and without shame, content marketing deals with a different strategy – education and awareness. Instead of promoting their brand, they promote ideas around it such as understanding recent trends, industry analysis, and general customer behavior. If done at the right time and in the right way, this can establish an organization as one of the market influencers or industry experts. Now, what could be a bigger brand booster than that?
To break this down further, let’s consider an example. A cab service provider wants to enter an already competitive and tight market. They can market their services through direct marketing such as promotional coupons, discounts etc. But through content marketing, they can talk to the audience about one of the pain-points that most of the commuters face. This could be long routes, passenger security or any other such things. This will give the readers/target audience an impression that they understand the market well. This will slowly raise their brand reputation as well as business growth.
Reasons why you should invest more in content marketing
1. Online is the new real-world!
Let’s get this straight! The internet is the new real-world. This study clearly shows the number of internet users and how it has increased over a period of time. With a whopping 3.58 Billion people onboard and still growing, it is the easiest medium to communicate anything to a wide range and category of people through multiple platforms. Having a content strategy that suits the online marketing can take your business to miles. Thousands of miles, quite literally!
2. Improves Social media marketing strategy
One of the top three marketing priorities of CMOs is a strong social media marketing strategy. It is a platform that drives traffic to a website, only behind blogs. But without strong content that regularly gets published, your social media strategy will fall flat on its face. Relevant and interesting content will push your social media marketing strategies to the fullest potential. It will also add value to your followers making them want to come back.
3. Target the specific audience
For decades, one of the major roadblocks in marketing has been the difficulty to filter out a relevant target audience/prospects. Content marketing has made it quite easy. There are many websites, blogs, interactive forums and engaging platforms that are domain-specified and has a huge relevant follower base. Content marketing helps to target these audiences and spread the message by drafting the material relevant to the audience.
4. Boosts SEO
After the concept of SEO was introduced, every organization and websites were frantically going after it due to fear of missing out! They hired SEO specialists, optimized their website and invested a fortune in it thinking of it as a magic potion. But what they failed to understand was, without a strong content meticulously drafted with keywords, their online traffic won’t budge. And that is exactly what happened! Your SEO and content should go hand-in-hand to generate the desired traffic and most importantly, to maintain it.
5. Diverse mediums
Content marketing uses different mediums at once. One of them is sponsored content platforms that can be leveraged to bring more traffic to your website. Sponsored content is basically publishing your content on a third party platform that is relevant to your message. It will improve backlinks and drive traffic to your own website from a relevant audience. It can also help with the PPC campaign and SEO.
6. Leadership through education
Content marketing offers an open door to become one of the industry leaders at a minimum cost. To place yourself as a competent player in the market, you need not spend big bucks and do costly and time-consuming promotions. It can be done effectively through a strategized content marketing. Write thought-leadership materials, show the audience what you know about your industry, open up on the industry challenges and offer your perspective about it. Through a strong content, you can educate people and build your influencer status. Sponsored content platforms can also be leveraged for this purpose. Either way, it’s always a win-win!
7. Power of visual content
Although long form content is here to stay and dominate other forms, visual content adds a lot of value to the readers. Content marketing through visuals such as infographic, videos, and images have proven to increase the traffic. Content in visual form is easy to comprehend and consumes minimum time for readers. It also presents the message in an unconventional way that can stimulate the interest of the audience.
8. Compliments other strategies
Content marketing is not a separate initiative disparate from other marketing strategies. It is complimentary in nature. Content marketing can be associated with social media marketing strategies to improve the reach. It also helps with the SEO initiatives for websites such as increasing the number of backlinks. It can also add value to your landing pages and generate a call-to-action for audience engagement.
Conclusion
On a concluding note, the number of enterprises and individuals using content marketing strategies is at an all-time high. The audience of the digital era is particularly not the font of explicit selling of your product/service. They are diligent and looking for real value. Content marketing provides exactly what they need and hence generate better output. This research shows that content market generates three times more leads than outbound marketing with cost savings up to 62%. It has become the most important. So if you are waiting for the perfect time to begin your content marketing, it was yesterday and the next best time is now!
See also: Useful Tips for Creating Relevant Facebook Content
