“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.” – Andrew Davis
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?
Traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective by the minute; as a forward-thinking marketer, you know there has to be a better way. Today, your content needs to reach your audience in a way that feels natural (a.k.a. Inbound). A common way of doing this is by creating a narrative for your content — or telling a story.
Content marketing is the process of creating valuable, relevant content to attract, acquire, and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.
BENEFITS OF CONTENT MARKETING:
1. Higher SEO Ranking
A big advantage of content marketing is that it helps you optimize for SEO. SEO or search engine optimization helps you improve your ranking on Google or other search engines. When you have good SEO, your website is more likely to show up on the first search engine results page or SERP.
2. Build Trust with Target Audiences and Potential Customers
The next item in this list of the benefits of content marketing is building trust with your audience. When your target audience finds your content and learns from it, you build up your brand. You also develop rapport and trust with your target audience. The next time they need guidance on something, they’ll come to your website to learn. Because of this, they’ll love and trust your brand for it.
3. More Brand Visibility
Notice that many shares on social media are blog posts, infographics, and other types of online content. People share such things with their friends or on social media when they enjoyed the content. This behaviour is always a good thing for a business.
4. Good Content Marketing Increases Sales
If you want to increase your sales, then create more content. You don’t even need to market your products in your blogs to see an increase in sales. As we mentioned earlier, you only need to create relevant and useful content to build trust, once your target audience trusts your brand, they’ll also trust your products. If you happen to sell products or services, your audience will also consider buying them.
5. You Generate More Leads and Get Higher Conversions
In online marketing, you don’t need to get sales to generate leads. All you need is to create content that your target audience wants to see. This includes blogs, articles, videos, infographics, and more.
6. You Set Your Brand as an Authority and Thought Leader
Finally, the last reason for putting out good content is to establish your brand as an authority. This is helpful if the content you’re putting out there is informative and educational. When consumers notice you are knowledgeable in the field, they’ll turn to you for information.
TYPES OF CONTENT MARKETING:
There are many different types of content you can create as part of your marketing strategy, including:
Blog posts: Distil your content marketing strategy into your blog schedule or strategy. The company blog can and should be used to cross-promote other content, which will help keep posts on a consistent schedule.
eBooks: eBook content should follow some sort of narrative structure, and include a lot of good, visual design. The goal of an eBook is to educate, but it’s important to keep language consistent with your brand voice.
Video: High-quality video content can also be used to expose your brand to YouTube’s large and active audience.
Podcasts: Auditory content offering useful information, guidance, or tips.
Infographics: Use as little text as possible and let the imagery tell the story.
Cheat sheets: These are short—two or three pages at most, so you’ll want to use text formatting to make them easy for a reader to quickly scan through. Link or point to other resources for more in-depth learning.
Webinars: Online video presentations, often live-streamed, that allow viewers to participate and ask questions in real-time.
Workbooks and templates: These resources are great ways to keep your brand in front of buyers while continuing to inform.
Offsite articles: Articles written for publications and blogs outside your own website.
Case studies: Build case studies with real numbers and complete stories. This will help keep the content focused on the value and results, not the brand.
Paid ads: These can help you reach a broad audience and allow you to position yourself in all of the places you want to be seen — paid ads are especially beneficial when paired with inbound marketing.
PROBLEMS THAT CONTENT MARKETING CAN SOLVE:
Need to increase the volume of organic search: Your audience can’t buy from you if they can’t find you, and today up to 93% of buying cycles start from a search engine. Additionally, according to Kuno Creative, 51% of content consumption derives from organic search, so content marketing is a great way to build organic awareness. When your valuable content ranks highly on search engines, or is shared widely on social networks, you’re building brand awareness at no cost, and since your content will only be shared when it’s relevant, your audience will be less inclined to tune it out.
Need to create brand preference: Engaging content marketing creates preference through thought leadership by making you a trusted source of information and education. You can also create preference through relationships, which are strengthened whenever your content entertains or helps your buyers. People are more likely to buy from companies with whom they have relationships.
Not engaged with customers: Content marketing should help your customers, not sell to them. When you freely give your audience something so valuable that they’d be willing to pay for it, you build trust, which, ultimately, is your most powerful selling tool.
Need to reach more customers: According to Forrester research, today’s customers distrust and resent marketing that interrupts or intercepts them. Engaging content marketing should be part of a natural conversation with current and potential customers, be relevant to their interests and behaviours, and build a continuous story over time. Content marketing pays dividends for a very long time, and this effect multiplies as you build out your content library.
Not sure how to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI): In general, content marketing can help to increase web traffic, support lead qualification (especially when content is produced by stage), and, ultimately, lead conversions into sales.
ADVANTAGES & DISADVANTAGES OF CONTENT MARKETING:
BEST CONTENT MARKETING EXAMPLES:
ZOMATO
Zomato is a restaurant finder mobile app available for 24 countries. The company uses humor liberally in its marketing strategy. In particular, it creates and shares images referencing popular culture, as this recent example spoofing an Oscar-nominated film shows.
SHUTTERSTOCK
Shutterstock’s in the business of images, and it’s used its expertise to make a resource that everyone can use: a creative trends report. This capitalizes on the fact that people love reliable data, and this type of resource gets widely shared.
Last year’s infographic attracted thousands of social shares, and attracted more than 6 billion site visits, according to the Content Marketing Institute.
If you want to know how to use LinkedIn effectively, nobody’s going to be more expert than LinkedIn itself. That’s why the company’s ebook on its own approach to marketing with LinkedIn is such a winner.
The landing page whets customers’ appetites with a series of tips and stats, and most LinkedIn users will want to opt-in immediately.
COCA-COLA
Coke used personalization to get everybody talking about their brand. They kicked off their Share a Coke campaign in Australia by putting the 150 most common names on bottles. Then they encouraged people to share a Coke with people with those names.
BURBERRY
Burberry’s most outstanding content marketing campaign was Burberry Kisses, blending mobile technology with the human wish to connect with others. Via an app, users could press their lips to the screen and send a digital kiss to anyone. The campaign also allowed people to use Google Street View and Google Maps to see the journey those digital kisses took.
ORACLE
30-part video series, with new videos launched throughout 2019 and 2020; promoted via social, YouTube and the Oracle blog
“On the Fly” is Oracle’s video series with small bites (two mins or less) of marketing and customer experience advice from experts. The original idea for “On the Fly” was marketing tips while traveling. In April 2020, that shifted to “marketing during disruption.”
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