Content Marketing: How It Can Benefit Your Business
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is one of the most used marketing techniques in new-age businesses, which is a more modern form of a strategic marketing approach towards a product or service.
This technique involves creating and distributing content related to the said product or service through mediums such as blog posts, articles and social media posts (photos and videos), for the target audience and existing consumers. These forms of content describe the expertise of the company and build trust with its target audience to form a long-term relationship with them more engagingly.
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
In today’s times, good quality content holds a crucial place in the marketing strategies of a business. The current generation of buyers is more inclined towards content that is easier to understand and more engaging in providing information.
They need something to connect with the brands in a different way, which sets them apart from the other brands, and it is where content comes into play.
Using quality content based on virtues like lifestyle, emotion and real-time experiences, many brands are establishing themselves and driving sales these days.
History Of Content Marketing
The journey of content marketing started in the ‘90s. In a journalism conference in 1996, John F. Oppedahl came up with this term of ‘content marketing’ for the modernization of marketing techniques due to the introduction and large scale use of computers, emails and websites in various businesses.
Initially, content marketing started with brands creating their websites, on which they can share any form of information through text or visual data. In later stages, the businesses began to send newsletters to their subscribers on emails, which helped in promoting their product or service more than before.
A substantial shift in the development of modern content marketing happened in the early 2000s, when social media, SEO and multi-channel marketing began to be used in sync with each other. Due to more influence of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, businesses started getting bigger platforms to share their ideas and information, thus leading to better strategic approaches in content creation.
Then in the years of early 2010s came the era of smartphones, when businesses gained access to their target audience more easily. In the current day and age, almost all social media users access their accounts on a smartphone.
How Content Marketing Works?
Three stages should be followed in a content marketing practice. Here they are.
Awareness
In this initial stage, the focus area of content is addressing the main concerns of your target audience and doesn’t involve selling the product or service. All you need to do here is create content using the questions you ask your target audience and create content on the challenges and plan of action, which should be advisory or educational.
Consideration
In this mid-level stage, more emphasis is laid on informational content. Such content describes all those features and functionalities that the target audience is looking for and how they address the buyer's requirements. It should connect with the attributes of your business.
Closing
In this final stage, content is drafted for closing the sale. In this, the core message of your content should be on why should the target audience choose your product or service. It should have a deeper introspection about your business and its advantages with a description of all the necessary attributes.
Types Of Content Marketing Services
In modern times, a perfect strategy of content marketing revolves around the following ten types of content marketing services:
Blog posts
These are used for building brand awareness and connecting with the target audience. Using platforms like WordPress, you can create blog posts or articles to describe the latest updates and expertise of your business.
Infographics
For simplification of complex information which cannot be done in blog posts, you can use infographics. In this, more emphasis is laid on using visuals and bullet points to explain the solutions more thoroughly.
Videos
It is one of the most engaging ways to describe the information to the target audience. Thanks to the increasing popularity of YouTube and quick videos on social media platforms, you can create good video content for converting a lead.
eBooks
These are an extended form of blog posts and generally are compiled of long-form texts like a book. These eBooks can give complete information of every minute and major detail of the business, and customers can download them by giving you some data and information about themselves.
Case studies
These offer more proof-based information to the target audience. You can use case studies that have already helped other businesses and customers in the past, using demographics and data. It will help to make your customers aware of the positives of the product or service
Checklists
Checklists are essentially taken into use to ensure that your customers are following the correct steps towards their goal accomplishment. As a business owner, you can use checklists as free tools to track the growth and interest of your target audience towards your product or service.
Testimonials
Nothing works stronger than a testimonial or user review for creating the first impression about a product or service. You can use the feedback retrieved from your existing clients to create testimonials on your platform.
Influencer marketing
It is one of the newest forms of digital marketing. In this, you can hire a person who has a large follower base on social media platforms to advertise your product on his/her platform, using unique ideas and visuals.
Guides
These are small ‘how to’ kinds of articles and posts for sharing any knowledge with the target audience on specific topics in a conversational manner. These can also increase your presence and engagement with the customers.
Memes
To add a twist of fun to your marketing strategies and connect with younger audiences more, you can use meme templates to convey any information and update related to your business on the internet, particularly on social media.
“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” - Seth Godin
Why Are Content Marketing Services Needed?
All the content marketing services mentioned above are used for increasing the reach of a business more engagingly. While it will not consist of verticals for closing the deal or making a sale, it will only motivate the buyers towards the product or service. These services can be done either by the business owner himself, or he can hire an agency that can take care of all the practices and homework going behind them. With the content marketing services of an agency, the consistency and uniformity of a business remains intact as it is dedicated to your business. You can focus on other core competencies of your trade.
Examples Of Content Marketing
There have been a few examples in the recent past, which have shown the importance of a strong content marketing strategy or a paid program in yielding positive results for the brand. One of the biggest and proven examples of content marketing is that of Amul India, which uses meme-styled content using animated characters in line with current affairs to promote their highlighted product, Amul Butter. Then there is BMW. While many luxury car brands focus on back seat comfort and features, BMW has carved a niche for itself by promoting the thrill of driving in its visual ads using the tagline ‘sheer driving pleasure’.
How To Get Started with Content Marketing
Content marketing is not an overnight process. It requires long term planning and execution with results coming gradually. Here are the five steps with which you can give a systematic start to your content marketing:
Step 1: Understanding the customers – Before starting, you should be aware of the questions and challenges faced by the customer about your product or service. Understand what type of content is consumed by your target audience, based on which you can build up topics and format and select the right platform for the content.
Step 2: Defining the brand – Based on the insights gained in step 1, you, as a manager, need to mould the definition of your brand and the product or service you are coming up with. You also need to make your target audience aware of those things that differentiate your brand from others.
Step 3: Development of strategy – Before making the right content for your product or service, you need to prepare a strategy for accomplishment of efforts, the sizing of the target audience, the preferable topics and formats from the perspective of customers, promotion or distribution plan and key performance indicators (KPI).
Step 4: Content creation and amplifying – For this, you can select any one of the ten types of content marketing types mentioned above and prepare one. This content should be relevant to the platform on which it will be published. It should provide the relevant information required by the customer on a particular topic.
Step 5: Readjustments in content marketing strategy – To make sure your content marketing efforts are yielding the results you want or not, you can track your KPIs and metrics to monitor the performance of the product or service. Based on these results, you can make alterations to your existing content marketing strategy.
A Useful Content Should Be At The Core Of Your Marketing
You cannot create anything in the name of the best content and feel that it would work for your business. It is where the importance of relevant and useful content comes in. It has the following advantages to give a boost to your business:
- A longer engagement of your target audience
- Better traction on social media
- Building-up of trust factor in your professional audience
- Generation of more quality leads
- Higher conversion rate due to the more original content
- Higher rate of visibility with better SEO
- Increase your presence and importance in the industry of your business
- Create your brand awareness
- Building-up of a loyal fan base and customer retention
- Saving money on marketing strategies
SEO And Social Media
When it comes to content marketing, it is better to consider social media and SEO into a single strategy, even though both have different techniques and goals. There are several reasons how social media enhances opportunities and increase your organic rankings in SEO. Thanks to social media, your business becomes more visible, which can lead to the creation of more links. It also helps in quicker indexing of content, as a result of which the social interaction data will enhance your SEO content. It is a great platform and a hub spot to identify the right type of audience for your SEO content, build search demand for them and conduct keywords research.
“It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best promoted content that wins.” - Andy Crestodina
How To Build An Audience For Content Marketing?
Various sources can help you to form your target audience for your business through content marketing. One of the easiest and oldest ways is offering email-based subscriptions to people. Using many email marketing tools, you can convert visitors to your website or social media accounts, into subscribers. You can also use the option of browser-based push notifications, for which your website visitors can give their consent to receive pop-up notifications on their devices.
However, in recent times, the proper use of social media for content marketing has become rampant. Publishing of blog posts on Facebook and LinkedIn and sharing of content on Instagram and Twitter through social media followers are the current trends of widespread channeling of information.
FAQs
What is digital content marketing?
It is a marketing strategy that involves creating, publishing and distributing useful content. This content should be relevant to your target audience.
What is the role of content marketing?
Instead of closing the deal in a business directly, content marketing as a stage helps to guide a person to consider the product or service through content and then close the deal. For this, the content prepared should be on point, engaging and informative.
What are the examples of content marketing?
There are various forms of content marketing, such as blog posts, social media posts, videos, e-books, testimonials and infographics.
How do you use content marketing?
For content marketing, you need to prepare relevant content for focusing on adding as much value and authenticity as possible. The content should enhance the voice of your brand, and help in engaging with your customers better by addressing their negative feedback as well.
Who uses content marketing?
While content marketing was initially used as a strategy by leading global brands, it has become so relevant that even small scale businesses and one-person ventures use it in today’s day and age. It has set a perfect example of the growth of digitization in recent times.