As a business person, you can't just sit around and wait for customers or clients to find your company. You need to be proactive in getting them to come to you. In a world where people spend considerable time staring at their screens, what's the best way to achieve this?
Content marketing is vital. It takes advantage of social media, blogs, traditional media, video, and image-sharing websites to spread awareness about your business. The process is strategic as it involves creating, sharing, and publishing your content via the mentioned media.
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
The Marketing Rule of 7 implies that it takes at least 7 interactions for a potential customer to consider purchasing your product or services. No matter the outstanding quality of your products or services, few people will buy from a company they have barely heard of.
Content marketing is essential to show your target market how your products or services can help them achieve their goals. It also helps to build a relationship with the market and get brand loyalty. This is an essential step toward creating a community or a niche for your brand.
Benefits of Content Marketing
Content marketing, for starters, helps endear your brand to the audience. This is the first step toward creating a bond with them. This connection enables your target market to begin trusting your company, products, and services. It further generates leads and eventually sales.
Consistent content creation also has its advantages. The resulting visibility means that search engines start to pay attention to what you're doing, and thus you experience improved SEO. You should also benefit from increasing conversion metrics, especially on blogs as well as image and video content.
How Does Content Marketing Fit into my Overall Marketing Strategy?
Since content marketing requires a strategic approach to creating, publishing, and sharing content, it is a marketing strategy in itself. In a world that banks heavily on the internet, content marketing can be the key to driving up the metrics of other types of marketing.
Marketing disciplines and techniques such as SEO and social media marketing can gain significantly from the content you put out. It, therefore, indicates that you can have content marketing as a first approach towards promotion or as a force multiplier when combined with other marketing efforts.
Advantages of prioritizing content in your marketing strategy
Your business will be heavily reliant on the internet to reach out to your audience and make sales. It is, therefore, vital that you have a robust online presence.
Content marketing makes it easier to reach many, thus building your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. These are signals Google and other search engines use to determine whether your company, website, and service offerings are worthy of showcasing higher up in the SERPs.
Additionally, content marketing tends to be as much as 60% cheaper on average, while simultaneously generating thrice as many leads as traditional outbound marketing. Even then, you won't just jump into it; it's imperative to brainstorm regarding your content needs.
Pitfalls when content marketing is an afterthought
Simply put, you risk staying in the shadows while the rest of your competitors are out on the field, jostling for attention from your intended target market. 82% of B2C businesses in the US are engaged in content marketing.
Content marketing allows you to reach a market while creating copious amounts of data. Your business could immensely gain from mining this data to find that rich vein of gold that you can focus your marketing efforts on. This is something you cannot achieve by not taking content marketing seriously.
Types of Content Marketing
Content marketing takes many forms, and what you use depends on your target market or the exact nature of your products and services. Here are some of the most common ones.
Blogging
Blogging is written content, such as this article, that allows you to inform your target market and prove your competence, mastery, and knowledge. Blog articles permit the writer to be as creative as the company's guidelines allow while promoting various aspects of the business.
Video
There are various forms of videos. You can have educational and discussion videos on platforms such as YouTube, or quick tips and fun videos on TikTok. Note that YouTube is the second-largest search engine, and video has a high reach and conversion rate in comparison to other content forms.
Infographics
It's a way of posting data, so it's easily understood by the audience and is also effortlessly shareable. The graphic utilizes short sentences with icons or emojis to relay the message. Infographics work well when breaking down complex topics or instructions into bite-sized chunks.
eBooks
Here is a content type that's easy to overlook but offers convenience for people reading it. Whenever a lead comes across your products or services, they may not fully understand them. An ebook offers the chance to learn more about your product, how to use it, and its benefits.
Ebooks are downloadable, implying that people can read or refer to them in their own time. In addition, you can leverage the process of downloading the ebook to get the emails or contacts of leads and add them to your direct marketing campaign.
Listicles
They are articles that include a list or checklist of items with the sole purpose of educating or instructing readers. Say you want readers to perform a specific function on your product or service, like building a website, a listicle will give them directions on achieving a goal.
Listicles can also appear in fun and informational forms. Some of the most common examples of listicles include "Top 20 Movies of 2022", "10 Steps To Rekindle A Lost Love", and "15 Steps to Financial Freedom."
Webinars
Most companies employ webinars when engaging industry experts on various topics. Webinars can also launch new products or explain the inner workings of multiple products.
Whitepapers
For people familiar with government, legislative, or judicial processes, a white paper can invoke some level of seriousness. The uses of a white paper may have spread to more than just strategic planning of governmental agencies, but the definition of a white paper has remained the same over the years.
Simply put, a whitepaper is an authoritative and in-depth look into a specific subject, its problems, and solutions. Think of them as problem-solving guides.
White papers can work hand in hand with ebooks to provide your business with an avenue to present its value proposition to prospective clients. An important thing to understand about drafting a white paper is that the problems and solutions must be based on facts and evidence, unlike blog posts and video content that can be persuasive.
Courses
The internet is revolutionizing education in so many ways. With the ability to record and curate videos, it's easy to put together a list of videos and documents to educate users on a specific topic. This is the whole idea behind the proliferation of online courses.
Courses are directed learning experiences. They are made up of
- educational material such as videos, articles, images, and weblinks
- communication and feedback in the form of messaging and discussion forums
These courses can be presented in a variety of ways, like lectures, documents, interactive exercises, or group work. Progression and qualifications are obtained through online tests. The final grade awarded can be due to the tests, forum interaction, or a combination of exercises.
Courses can be academic or professional, such as those offered by Udacity and EdX, or they can be for personal learning and achievements, such as those found on Udemy.
Examples of Content Marketing Done Well
What makes content marketing genuinely engaging and ultimately successful for a company? Various attributes are necessary for a content marketing campaign to strike the right chord with an audience. Let's look at a few examples done right.
Share A Coke Campaign
Coca-Cola came up with a simple campaign. It all started in Australia, where they took 150 of the country's most popular names and printed them on the bottle labels. The result was an explosion of excitement that soon spread worldwide.
This campaign worked because it made the Coke bottle a personal affair. You'd see people looking for Coke bottles with their names on them. If they wanted to surprise a friend with a drink, they'd look for one with the friend's name on it.
McDonald's Q & A
Speculation about what's contained in McDonald's foods has been rife for years. That was until McDonald's Canada decided to take the bull by the horns. They came up with a simple campaign. If you have any questions about McDonald's, they commit themselves to answer all of them.
They ended up answering around 10,000 questions.
This simple campaign dispelled many rumors and endeared McDonald's to its fanbase. They were open and honest, allowing people to build an outstanding level of trust in McDonald's.
Superdrug Holding a Mirror To Society
While this is usually the work of experts in the humanities, Superdrug decided to break out of line and do it themselves. In their quest to raise awareness about body positivity issues, they asked 18 graphic designers to Photoshop an image of a model according to the beauty standards of their respective countries.
The result was an explosion of coverage from mainstream media establishments, including Business Insider, the New York Times, and The Telegraph, to celebrities with huge followings sharing the outcomes.
Still Not Sure Where to Begin?
Well, that's why we're here. At Eternal Works, we pride ourselves on the knowledge and experience we've gathered over the years. We have been getting businesses like yours in front of relevant audiences with relevant content for some time now.
How do we do that? Simple. It all starts with an audit of your marketing and content. Then, we can help you craft a bulletproof content marketing strategy for your company's growth. Are you interested? Schedule a call with us today.
