In this blog post we cover
What is Content Marketing?
You might have heard the phrase “Content is king”. In today’s world, this could not be any truer. People only pay attention to campaigns that have substance in them. This is why we see significant corporations continuously generate content.
The point is to engage a specific targeted audience that will ultimately lead to a sale and lead generation. This particular act is called content marketing. The Content Marketing Institute defines it as “a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action”
How long has it been around for?
Content marketing has actually been around for a lot longer than people think. People now claim that it was Benjamin Franklin who started it all! In 1732, he published his Poor Richard’s Almanac.
It was primarily a way to promote the printing business that he created. This is no different from what companies do today.
For example, in the 2010s, Lego, the toy manufacturer started venturing into digital media by making movies such as The Lego Movie and The Batman Lego Movie and various video games. In 2017, Lego surpassed Mattel as the largest toy manufacturer in the world. Content marketing has been evolving for a long time, and with such a large-scale integration with the internet, it is now the new norm.
Essential Content Marketing Stats:
42% of B2B marketers say they’re effective at content marketing. (Source: CMI)
60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day. (Source: eMarketer)Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs 2.5%). (Source: Aberdeen)
92% of marketers reported that their company views content as a business asset. (Source: CMI)
The biggest challenges for content marketing are reportedly lack of data (27%) and lack of strategy (28%). (Source: DMA)
70% prioritize content quality over quantity. (Source: Point Visible)
How Content Marketing Plan Works.
These are the four steps of the process of successful content marketing:
Awareness: A client may have a need prior to understanding, but they are not aware there is a solution.
Research: When a client is aware that a solution exists, they may conduct research to educate themselves.
Consideration: At this point, the client starts comparing various goods from different suppliers to ensure that they get a high-quality product at a reasonable price.
Buy: Finally, the consumer makes their decision and the transaction goes on.
The goal is the convert the customer from the first stage to the fourth. And thus the most essential aspect of content marketing is the conversion process. There need to be different types of content for each phase. For example, for awareness, a business could use infographics to provide value to as many people as possible without getting them to pay.
For research, companies offer things like guides, but to their customer’s email to establish a rapport. The sales process is further continued by getting the customer to follow the company in some capacity. It could be social media or a webinar, either way it indicates some degree of initiative from the prospective consumer’s side. Once the customer has enough trust in the company, he or she can become a customer and eventually buy something from the business.
How to provide valuable content?
To make a sale at the end of the day, creating your content should provide value to the customer at every step of the conversion process. To ensure that, you must ensure that the optimal content marketing campaigns is being used to gain customers. The four elements of a good content marketing strategy are as follows:
Brand Positioning: A clearly defined positioning of the brand and product will allow you to provide your audience with a consistent experience and to create the correct image of your brand across all your channels of content marketing. It is important to do a brand audit to understand the brand positioning.
Value Proposition: You need to identify your own media value proposition in order to set up your brand as a reputable content publisher. This media could involve anything ranging from YouTube videos, and user experiences to blogs. It should be consistent with brand messaging.
Business Case: Identify the business goals that your business wants to reach and find out how to get your business closer to those goals through content marketing. You can use case studies.
Strategic Plan: A strategic plan should concentrate on the priorities and how you can accomplish them specifically. It will allow you to think about every step of your strategy for the material for your product or services.
How Do I Get Started?
There are several companies, mostly combined with SEO or PR, that provide great content marketing services. If you are actually too busy to do it yourself and are not prepared to do it in-house, it might be your best choice to employ a company. But the best way for you to jump in and do your own content marketing is to start blogging. It's definitely going to be challenging at first, but the more you do it, the better you'll get at it. Post that develop clients or buyers personas.
How to analyze my content?
Your content is seen by people, and so they know who you are. But if they don't enter or opt for anything on your email list, then you don't know who they are. That further implies that while they heard about your company from the content you made, you have no way of monitoring how many people actually purchased your product.
The efficiency of content marketing efforts can be a little unclear for that reason. However, there are still ways to keep track of your progress. Keeping a track of these values can help tell you how efficient your business is in content marketing.
User behaviour: unique visitors, pages per session, bounce rate.
Engagement: likes, shares, comments, mentions
SEO results: organic traffic, dwell time, backlinks.
Company revenue: number of leads, existing leads affected, conversion rate.
Conclusion
Conventional forms of marketing have all integrated the emergence of “content”. It is an absolute must in today’s world which can help your business get many new customers. If done smartly, content marketing is a very cost-effective strategy that can convert a lot of prospective buyers to customers.
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