While content marketing once only served the purpose of differentiating your businesses from competitors, it has now become vital. Content marketing is the cornerstone of the most successful online marketing campaigns. Behind every major brand there is valuable and relevant content that is truly connected to the business’s audience. But what is content marketing exactly?
Content marketing aims to create and distribute valuable, relevant and consistent content to increase and retain visitors. Its ultimate goal is profitable customer interaction. But why is this element of your marketing strategy so important?
Content marketing is about attention and connection
If you check how traditional advertising and marketing strategies have worked over the last 100 years, you will see that most of them solely focused on short-term profits. These include TV commercials that deal with a product, flyers that might give customers some discount – but once these reach their target audience, most of them are ignored or thrown away. You have to come up with something that will attract people’s attention.
The moment you start helping your audience solve issues through content or blog posts, you connect with your audience. Over time, they will look at you, your business and your blog as a credible source of information, and if you continue to write valuable content, your users will know where to go for answers. Content marketing is all about storytelling – and people’s attention is unwittingly turned to those who tell great stories.
The benefits of content marketing over traditional ads
People often try to mute, disregard, or get rid of ads as soon as possible. However, if you tailor your content to the needs of your readers, users will spend hours learning about your products and services. People may spend months thinking about buying a product but until the time comes and the purchase happens, they will voluntarily read the content you have created.
Many times people decide not to buy a product or service because they don’t even know how valuable it is or how much they need it. But types of content like blog posts and Youtube videos can answer a lot of questions and give you the opportunity to show people that your really offer valuable products.
As you provide more and more free content to your readers, customers will reach the point where they want to respond to the benefits they get. For instance, if your blog helps them getting better at online marketing and make more money, they will come to the point where they want to buy a service from you, so they will eventually give you something in return for all the free content.
More than Blogs
I know from experience that many people think that content marketing is the same as writing blogs. Well, this is not true in this form. Well-written blogs play a leading role in many companies’ content marketing strategies. However, a good strategy requires more than just writing one post per week, and the content itself covers much more than blog posts as well.
Content includes all information created for readers and users. It includes blogs, articles, e-books, videos, comments, posts on social media platforms, infographics, pictures, content on your site, landing pages, product information, e-mails. And this list is by no means exhaustive.
Many businesses think that weekly blog posts will do all the work for content marketing tasks. It may be true in some cases but often this practice has very little or no result at all. Today you need to take a more holistic approach to your content marketing strategy if you want to achieve more significant results.
Content marketing will support all other elements of your marketing strategy
Most small businesses have tons of tools in their online marketing strategy. From email marketing to social media to PPC advertising, there are a variety of tactics you can use to reach your ideal audience.
And do you know what these strategies have in common? Great content! Your business needs to create engaging, flawless content as part of the tactics used in the online marketing campaigns. You need to design content for a specific campaign that will appeal to readers and encourage them to take the next step.
The best feature of content marketing is that it integrates with every other area of your internet marketing strategy. It’s like a glue that holds your campaigns together and ultimately helps them succeed. Without great content, only ideas can exist. Ideas, however fantastic, remain ideas in themselves.
Proper content marketing contributes to SEO success
The importance of content marketing may become clearer if you look at the role that content plays in building your business and improving search engine optimization (SEO). SEO plays an important role in improving the online visibility of a business – so if you want to improve your SEO, you need to create optimized content.
Content optimization is one of your most effective SEO tools. The more content you have on your site, the more pages search engines need to index and show to users when listing the search results. Of course, multiple pages don’t necessarily generate more traffic, but it does give your business the ability to rank your page for more keywords. For example, if you create blogs on different topics and each of them is relevant to your target audience, you will be more likely to get your web pages ranked higher in the search results for keywords related to that topic.
Not to mention the fact that the more content your site has, the more reasons you give your visitors to stay on the site. Again, this can have a positive impact on search engine optimization as we know that longer time spent on a site is one of the indicators to Google that your site offers valuable content.
Users can share your content on social media
If your content offers a solution to a common problem, it is stuffed with important and useful information, your readers or even other businesses may share your content on social media. Right after search engines social media is the best way to familiarize your audience with what you are creating.
The more people see your content, the better. And now that we live in the digital and smart phone era, a compelling message can be enough to promote your content.
Final thoughts
Content marketing will certainly not lose its importance in the near (or distant) future. In fact, it is growing faster and faster as competition between businesses is growing. If you want to build a successful online marketing strategy, content marketing may be the difference between success and failure. You cannot simply skip its importance.
Keep in mind that video content is an integral part of content marketing and its importance is growing exponentially. Statistics show that 5 billion videos are watched daily on YouTube alone, so you might also want to consider making videos.
The primary aspect is to pay proper attention to the quality of the content and its distribution among the right channels. I hope this blog has helped you, no matter the size of your business. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions!