What is Content Marketing?

Traditional marketing techniques are getting outdated every passing day. To keep up with the dynamic world of marketers, it is essential to commensurate with the changing trends. The world of content marketing has so much to offer and holds the key to create a significant impact on your target audience in just a click.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on creating and disseminating relevant, valuable and consistent content to build a strong relationship with your target audience. Consistently high-quality content helps build brand loyalty and attracts more customers to your brand, which eventually increases your sales.

With content marketing, you can show your customers you care and improve your customer experience. Instead of pitching your services or products, you provide potential customers with meaningful content and help them solve their problems.

Content marketing should not be confused with regular adverts and automated algorithms. With content marketing, you cater your content to help provide helpful insights to the potential customers so that they are attracted to your product. You seek to provide real solutions to the problems faced by the customers and create unique and engaging content focused on delivering value to the consumers.

Why Content Marketing?

Content marketing provides quality content to the users and helps them better understand your brand and its products. Content marketing can address some of the common issues faced by marketers.

Organic traffic: Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors your website gets through a search engine. Increasing the organic traffic to your portal is essential as it creates trust and awareness among people towards your brand. The more visitors you get, the more likely it that people will purchase your products. With content marketing, you create content to address the issues people face, and thus, when a person types a phrase on a search engine, your website would pop up, attracting more visitors to your content and website.
Brand awareness: It refers to the extent to which customers are familiar with your products and business. Brand awareness is essential as people often buy from brands they trust and recognize. With content marketing, you can understand your audience, analyze their data to improve performance, draft a suitable content strategy and acquaint your audience with your company’s qualities.
Increasing engagement on a budget: To increase customer engagement, your brand should be look trustworthy and reliable. Content marketing provides a treasure trove of reliable, valuable and relevant content to the customers. It helps increase their engagement and connects people with your brand.
Creating value for the customer: Creating value for customers includes addressing their problems and offering those products that they want. With content marketing, you establish brand loyalty among the customers by providing high-quality content for a positive experience. By giving them customer value without asking for anything in return, you can create an impressive impact on the visitors and help them understand your brand.

Types of Content in Content Marketing

To connect better with your audience, you must choose the correct content type that suits your customers. Some of the types of content are:

Blogs: Blogs are an effective way to build an online presence and quickly receive more links and traffic on your website. To attract customers, you should write about the products and services you offer and how those can benefit the potential customers. You can increase your content’s reach by posting snippets across various social media platforms and repurposing content to make slideshows or videos.
Infographics: It is the art of using minimalist designing and simple graphics to explain your business and its activities to the target audience. Good infographics can create a vast impact on the users by significantly increasing your brand presence.
Cheat Sheets/Checklists: Checklists and cheat sheets are convenient to create and provide significant value for the customers. A step-by-step guide explaining something can help the audience better understand the content and connect better with your business.
Worksheets: Worksheets are ideal for converting actionable advice into hardcopy material, useful for brainstorming and note-taking. Worksheets help customers meticulously analyze and inspect the content and understand the brand.
Templates: Templates help gather all information from worksheets, checklists and guides, into a single content that briefs your customers about how to do a specific task. Templates can represent your content in a simplified manner that is understood by the audience.
EBooks/Whitepapers: Whitepapers and ebooks are in-depth guides and reports that help users find a relevant solution. Using whitepaper content, you can establish your brand as a go-to expert to solve problems. This information-dense content is helpful to educate the customers while generating leads and increasing their engagement.
Case Studies: Case studies are valuable content that increases the customer’s trust. This content includes success stories of the past that illustrate how your business helped a client solve a problem. With case studies, you can educate the customers about your previous performances and gain their trust and loyalty.
Demos: Demos help customers gain better insight into how a product is used and handled. Demos are the show-and-tells for your products to educate the customers about the benefits and uses of a product.

Distribution Channels for Content

The content you create needs to be distributed via effective channels so that it reaches the desired audience. The commonly used content distribution channels are:

Owned Channels:These are the channels owned by your company or business that include your brand’s social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and others. These are the most convenient channels to disseminate information. Customers can view the details on your social media platforms and connect with your brand.
Earned Channels:These are the shared channels and involve others sharing your content. It may include media coverage, guest posts and other shares. Earned channels include any people and platforms sharing your information for free. It may be due to great content that people may relate to or other informational content.
Paid:Paid distribution channels include media that requires payment for distributing content. These typically include pay-per-click advertisements, sponsored content, paid social exposure and others. Paid channels help distribute information among the target audience at a price.
Search Engines:Search engines play a significant role in the distribution of content throughout the internet. Search engine optimization is used effectively to allow your website to rank better in the search results. More companies strive to optimize towards SEO to attract more traffic and generate better leads.

NOTE: SEO needs an intense technical website structure for content to be discovered and ranked by Google. Investing in a hi-tech website structure and optimizing your content accordingly is essential to benefit from the vast reach of SEO.

Content Mapping Based on The Consumer Journey

Awareness

It is the initial stage of customers’ journey that helps a customer know about your brand and become aware of your products and services. The possibility of converting a lead into successful sales is low at this stage as not all visitors who click on your website will be willing to buy your products without getting complete knowledge about your business. To understand the information required by the prospective customers, you can use third-party intent data, IP tracking and shared cookies. Free ebooks, checklists, whitepapers and videos can be used as appropriate content formats at this stage.

Consideration

Once the potential customers engage with your data, your first-party behavioral and demographic data become a driving force affecting the content you share. The consideration stage is the most crucial stage that impacts the conversion of leads into customers. The content should focus on displaying your solution as the best possible answer to the customers’ queries and problems. Businesses can use case studies, catalogs, free webinars and samples to cater to the needs at this stage.

Decision

If a customer is in the decision stage, it is your responsibility to ensure there are no hindrances and the buying process is made easy. You can use the historical data to analyze the content required by the customers to support their decision-making process. Using free trials, consultations, free quotes or estimates, live chat, and demonstrations can help you make the final stage seamless and avoid losing potential customers.

Content marketing can do wonders for your business if you know how to make the most of it. Content marketing is your solution to make people aware of your brand and connect with you.