If you find yourself online during most of your day, you’ve probably come across articles, videos, images, and podcasts about the value of content, content marketing, so forth. With businesses and personal brands coming up in huge numbers, content is an integral part of sustaining your business and taking it through the stratosphere.
What is Content Marketing?
All the hoopla that this term seems to have generated over the years has many people wondering what content marketing is in the first place. In a nutshell, content marketing describes the process of planning, putting together, publishing, and distributing content to get your brand out to your target audience.
What is the importance of Content Marketing?
Why is content marketing important seems to be the million-dollar question. Here are a few reasons that illustrate the importance of content marketing:
Helps you create and maintain brand awareness
Content marketing is, undoubtedly, the best way to build brand awareness and reach out to new audiences in the digital age. Keeping budgets aside for advertisements and PR can burn a hole in your wallet in no time. Word of mouth and traditional marketing does not seem to be doing the trick these days. Content marketing, however, works perfectly well for businesses of all sizes and across all sectors.
If done correctly, content marketing can win you prospects who probably had no idea your brand existed. Images with text, blog posts, podcasts, and other forms of content work well, but videos are the most engaging form content at the moment, which is why you should focus on making videos and market them correctly.
Content Marketing allows you to educate your audience
With the significant amount of choice people have these days, it should not surprise you that they have become more discriminant about the brands they go for. An excellent way to stand out among the sea of brands who only want to sell their products is to create content to educate your audience. Content marketing allows you to create, share, and distribute content on numerous platforms that the audience wants.
Writing an informative blog post and replying to the comments on that post is more effective than running several marketing campaigns to get and convert leads.
Content Marketing builds trust
This point ties into the previous point about educating your audience. Providing valuable content that benefits your audience does well to build trust. Content marketing allows you to post educational content, take your audience’s feedback, and address their concerns. Replying to the comments you get on your Instagram, Facebook, blog posts or anything else can help you fine-tune your content and show the customer or visitor that you care about them.
Content Marketing is Cost-Effective
Content marketing costs about 62% less than traditional marketing but generates three times as many leads, as per DemandMetric. If you are a budding business, you rely heavily on lead generation to grow your brand and boost sales. Content marketing is a cost-effective and high Return-on-Investment (ROI) way of growing your brand. So if you do not have the funds to launch extravagant marketing campaigns, considering producing more content on all your platforms to generate leads continually.
How do you enhance your Content Marketing Strategy?
If you want to optimize your content marketing strategy and boost your results, you can do a few things:
While you might be tempted to promote your business or personal brand incessantly, a smarter thing to do is creating content for your audience. Coming up with valuable blog posts, videos, images, podcasts, etc. will help you provide value. Giving the customer something they value will boost their chances of returning to your brand, purchasing your product, and referring other potential customers. Be sure to produce most of your content to help your audience and put up promotional material when need be.
Repurpose your content for numerous platforms
A big part of valuable content is the way you present it. Different platforms require you to present your content in various ways to get the engagement you want. This is where repurposing your content comes into play. If you use Instagram for business, you would have to present your content differently on Instagram than on a blog post. Consider the platform you’re using, the demographic you want to target and use insights to monitor your traffic.
Find out what your competitors are doing
While you want to primarily focus on your content marketing strategy, it would not hurt you to check out your competition and find out what your competitors are doing that you aren’t to get stellar results. Doing so will give a better insight into what your customer wants from you. Be sure to subscribe to their email list and follow their social media handles.
What are the most commonly used forms of Content Marketing?
Here are the integral parts of a killer content marketing strategy that you should look into:
Video Content Marketing
It should not surprise you that videos engage the customer better than any other form of content. Ensure you post content on your YouTube channel, Facebook, and Instagram profiles regularly to amass viewers and followers.
Blog Content Marketing
Blogs are fantastic to post educational, detailed, long-form pieces of content. You can write blog posts to promote a product, describe its features and characteristics, answer questions, and so forth. If you are struggling to think of blog post topics, sift through the comments, and write posts to address your viewers’ comments in detail.
Infographics
Sometimes, blogs can only get you so far with certain topics. This is especially true with case studies and subjects that are hard to digest. The solution? Infographics! Images can get you more mileage than blog posts sometimes. This is particularly true when you want to tackle analyses, theses, and use statistics to make your point. In a nutshell, infographics are an excellent way to simplify complex data for the average joe.
