Category: content marketing

Any smart entrepreneur would have long understood that the traditional means of marketing is a thing of the past. What is required in this age and technology is online marketing backed with the most reliable and up-to-date techniques. Though there are different modes of making your presence felt in the online world, one marketing strategy most marketers bet on is content marketing.

A colourful, well designed website and a couple of social media accounts is just not sufficient to make your presence felt in the Internet. Content is one of the most powerful tools to make a dominating presence online. As a marketer, if you have still not forayed into content marketing and set across a strong team for that, then just read on to know why you should do it right away.

What is Content Marketing?

As a marketer if you plan to promote your business online, you would have certainly heard about content marketing. And if you are wondering how content marketing can make a difference to my business, then here’s a simple explanation to it. Content marketing is nothing but a means to create and share valuable details about your business in such a way that it will not only attract customers, but will convert potential customers into customers and customers into repeat customers. The right content will be your key to get customers to buy your products and change their views regarding your company. So, if you interested in doing your business online, content marketing is a reliable strategy to make customers to know, like and trust your brand.

Power of Content Marketing

Content has proven to be a successful strategy no matter what the business or vertical. Marketers are beginning to realize the value of a planned and well-executed marketing strategy. In fact, in a recent study conducted, content marketing well surpassed several marketing activities like social media marketing, SEO and paid advertising.The reason why content marketing is considered a valuable tool is due its versatility and its ability to reach. By delivering custom-made content to your customers, you not only make the customer feel better about the company and build stronger relationships, but also increase the inbound traffic to your site. It is also a great way to increase brand awareness and pull in unexpected customers. And best of all, it is the most cost-effective form of marketing, when compared to other alternative forms of marketing.

The Future

It is hard to deny the fact that content marketing is the next big thing in digital marketing. It is expected to overtake different marketing avenues like social media marketing. Content that is tailored to meet the marketing needs and is designed to lure the target customers is slated to rule the roost in future. In this generation of smartphones and unlimited Internet, where we are bombarded with information, the challenge lies in making you stand out. And this task can be trusted to content marketing. Companies with a proper content marketing strategy in place are expected to generate more leads in comparison to others.

Tips & Tricks

Long blog posts with high-quality and detailed content will be the future. With the Internet world overloaded with poor quality content, such kind of quality blogs and articles will certainly work wonders. Don’t limit your blog posts with just content. Pep them up with videos. Yes! Videos in blog posts will improve the learning experience and will create a dedicated group that will come back for more. Content marketing with the use of infographics and instructographics is a sure shot way to hit the bull’s eye. Publishing inforgraphics that stand out on a regular basis will be a successful content marketing strategy. The basic idea should be to focus on making an impact rather than just making noise.

To sum it up, content marketing is a powerful approach to promote your business online. Quality content can be in any form. Be it in blogs, videos, infographics or articles, it is an efficient and cost-effective way to make your presence felt on the Internet.

People ignore all sorts of traditional marketing techniques these days. Interest in television advertising and print ads are on the decline. The moment people realized that traditional marketing has started to lose its awesomeness and Internet is where you can find your audience, they have turned to digital marketing.

“Good communication means good business”

If you are planning to market your business online, you cannot do it without content marketing since that’s the way you get to communicate with your clients and convey the idea about your business to them. It is popularly said that “Content is King” and good content, can undoubtedly boost your business.

Content marketing: the definition

The standard definition of content marketing goes like this:

Content marketing is the creation and sharing of valuable content in order to gain customers and to turn the existing customers to repeated buyers. The content will always be related to what exactly you are planning to sell.

What makes Content Marketing unique?

One might think all the buzz about content marketing is nothing but a fad. But, the fact is that content has always been the soul of marketing. Just give it a thought. Unless you know something is valuable, you are not going to buy it. How do you know something is valuable? Through informational content! But the importance of content has come to the forefront only in the past few years.

Despite content being the soul of marketing, there is a one major difference between traditional marketing and content marketing. All other forms of marketing techniques advocate the hard sell. i.e. They try to sell you the product while, content marketing tries to empower the customer by making him more knowledgeable about products and their benefits.

The now intelligent customer stays loyal to his source of knowledge more often than not.

Why do you need content marketing?

Because content is all you get to hear right from the moment you take your first step towards digital marketing. Rest of the marketing techniques just follow it.

• An advertisement alone doesn’t compel customers to buy a product, valuable information regarding the product does
• A Social media network is a great medium to make your business reach majority audience, but only with great content
• It’s always the content based on which Google ranks your website so that people get to access your business
• A great content leaves a great impact on people, letting them to know , like and trust your products

Different forms of content marketing

You create good content, but how do you make sure that it reaches out to the potential customers? That’s why there are different forms of content marketing, which include:

Blogs

When you hear the word content, the first thing that comes to your mind is obviously a blog. Blog contents contain relevant information about a particular business or product. Blog posts instil a sense of trust in the customers by giving them all necessary information about your product and helping you strengthen your brand.

Newsletters

You send newsletters to potential customers, each of the publication speaking about a particular topic of interest each day. It is considered as a great marketing strategy to attract customers and encourage them to visit your business websites.

E-mails

E-mail marketing tops the list of the most successful techniques used in content marketing. In e-mail marketing, you collect e-mail Ids of potential customers and mail them some informative content or offers. It is a means of indirect marketing where you don’t try to sell the product to the customers but you give them information that may be of great help to them, thus making them eager to learn further about you and your business.

Social media

Social media networks are very much popular amongst Internet users and that is where you have majority of your potential customers. Through social media, you can post, tweet, share and dialogue anything and therefore, it is a great medium to share your content, links to your blogs and website posts etc.

White papers

White papers are documents that contain long content, meant to promote a particular product. They introduce a problem and with the help of case studies, research findings and content of the sort to argue that your product or business is superior to other businesses in solving the issue.  It is somewhat like boasting about your product, but if you are sure about your business, what’s wrong in showing it off?

Videos

Video marketing is gaining popularity these days. Videos are effective marketing tools since they help you convey to the customers an insight about your business, how they can help you solve an issue etc. through effective content. Be it interviews, testimonials or guides, you get to show off all information about your business through videos. But make sure that the videos are short enough since people have a very short attention span and they tend to get easily bored.

E-books

E-books are of great advantage for your customers who are keen to learn more about your business and products. You can convert your best content into digital format and sell them or give away to your customers so that they can attain deep knowledge about your business.

Images

Images speak better than words at times. Therefore, a powerful image with great design can be the best marketing strategy to help you spread the word and gain more customers

Infographics

Inforgraphics is the trend these days. It is a design led graphic that speaks to customers with powerful images and relevant words that can explain even complex things in a simple manner.

How can content marketing help your business?

Content serves two different entities – customers and search engines. It builds customers’ trust and helps you rank better in search engine result pages (SERP). Adopting content marketing can benefit your business in the following ways:

• Generate in-bound traffic to your website
• Increase engagement with potential audience
• Generate more leads
• Increase sales
• Helps in brand-building
• Cheaper than traditional marketing

Here are some interesting stats about content marketing:

1. Content marketing is employed by 93% of B2B marketers (Content Marketing Institute)
2. About 60% people are inspired to look for a product after reading about it online!(com)
3. Out of all the marketers who blog, a massive 82% report positive ROI for their inbound marketing (hubspot)