What Content Marketing can do for your Business
What Content Marketing can do for your Business
Content Marketing is no longer alien to us thanks to the age of the internet. But not many people actually understand the concept or what it aims to do. It is obviously clear that it has something to do with marketing, but how is it any different from the traditional sales pitch, you ask?
Well, this blog is going to dive deep into the world of content marketing and answer all your Whats, Whys and Hows.
Let’s start with a standard, widely accepted definition of content marketing. The Content Marketing Institute says,
Content Marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the object of driving profitable customer action.
Now, how is it any different from all the other marketing strategy that goes on all around? Well, the difference lies in the focal point. Content marketing does not sell any product as such, but it focuses on delivering relevant information which will help the buyers in making more informed choices. The keyword here is relevant content and the goal of the strategy is to attract potential customers as well as repeat buyers.
Content Management and Customer Engagement
Content marketing aims at achieving customer engagement. It is essentially an online strategy- using blogs, newsletters, webinars to reach today’s tech-savvy consumers while at the same time attracting visibility for your business, without ending up in the spam folder.
Content marketing seeks to influence and eventually alter consumer behaviour in favour of a particular brand or a company. It is aimed at a target group of audience and strives to bring to them the kind of content they will be able to utilize, build a balanced idea about certain products or services without outright promoting the same.
This strategy seeks to gain the trust of customers by helping them make informed choices. Trust that might eventually turn into loyalty.
Content Marketing and Optimisation
Content marketing goes beyond promotion. It aims to influence media rather simply by borrowing some space on it, something that advertisements do.
Effective content marketing rewards the business in the long term by building up a loyal customer base that is willing to listen to your brand because your brand has already established to them that it isn’t here to waste their time on promotions but rather is providing them information on issues that are actual concerns.
This is vital for the SEO strategy and also impacts your brand’s Search Engine rankings because relevant information will get people talking about you, eventually improving your visibility.
Content marketing also lets you connect to your client beyond the immediate products and services you are offering- an effective PR strategy that also creates a lot of traffic for your website.
Now, how exactly does it happen? Unless and until it is some way valuable or helping the potential clients to address real issues, it is no different from spam.
When you are providing the best relevant information, your website link is automatically showing on top of Google results.
The higher you rank, the more visible you are to the people who are looking for that exact information you are providing. So even though they are not looking for your company or your services, they will now connect with you.
Content Strategy
While curating a strategy for content marketing, it is essential to keep the specific goals in mind- whether you want to increase your brand visibility or nudge potential customers towards your company-the relevance of content will depend on the target audience. There are four basic approaches you can consider while developing an effective content strategy.
The first is, Entertainment:
Since content marketing aims to create customer engagement, an effective way to do just that is triggering an emotional response through your content.
Viral videos or branded campaigns such as videos, quizzes and games help people emotionally connect to a brand, particularly those who are not yet aware of your brand as the solution to their consumer issues.
The second is an Inspirational Content:
Content which seeks to elicit the same kind of emotional responses if not more intense. It inspires the audience to take action about something personal and remember the brand by that message.
The third approach to be Adopted is to Educate People:
Depending on your target audience, you can provide educational content through eBooks, newsletters and blogs that will help address particular issues, and in turn, redirect their loyalty to you as a brand.
The best Choice Approach:
The last one is to convince your audience that your brand is the logical best choice. You can do this through branded demo videos or demonstration events.
There is an approximate 63% of enterprises that do not yet have a dedicated content marketing strategy that complements the Digital Marketing goals of your business. While developing a content marketing strategy, there are several key points to remember:
- Your buyers’ persona and their content preferences
- The kind of organizational goals you are looking to achieve overall
- The measuring KPIs that you will need to gauge if your strategy is successful
These constitute the technical part of the strategy, as for the tools used in the strategy such as blogs, podcasts, infographics and so on- blogging is the one we will discuss here.
Blogs as part of a content marketing strategy are tailored to a target audience, to address certain stages in a buyer’s journey arch.
Blogs that are optimized to a relevant audience and high ranking keywords will consistently generate more organic traffic, as long as you are clear about the goals you aim to achieve through your blog and the kind of specific content that will get you there.
Marketing today has become dependent largely on the use of social media, but more than that- the real struggle is to stand out amidst all the clutter that ends up daily in consumers’ spam folders.
The key to successful content marketing most definitely lies in figuring out what is relevant to your target audience; content that will appeal to them, engage them, rather than forcing them to take an action.
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