Content marketing is not a new
concept. Anyone with a marketing background will tell you it’s been around for
decades in some form. Yet, in 2020, it’s still one of the most important marketing
strategies for any business out there.
Consumers today are tech- and digitally-savvy shoppers. The focus has shifted from selling products and services to selling your brand and personalized experiences because this is what consumers today are demanding. They’re also much more aware of how a brand’s ethos aligns with their own, and spend more time researching products and brands to find ones that embody the same beliefs and principles that they do. For example, a consumer that considers themself an environmentalist would look for companies that use sustainable packaging and shipping practices to ease the environmental burden.
Savvy shoppers mean the old and
tired marketing tricks and overly-promotional strategies just don’t work anymore. They’ve faded
into the background, with successful brands opting to tailor their marketing
towards what the customer wants to see, rather than what the brand wants the
customer to see. This is why content marketing works so well. If you want to
engage and inspire your audience, you create and curate relevant content.
What is content marketing?
If you aren’t familiar with content marketing, here is a brief summary to get you up to speed. Content marketing is a strategy that uses information, which could be in the form of imagery, video, text (i.e., blog posts) or actual experiences (like apps or in-person events), to help sell a brand or product without explicitly being promotional. The marketing efforts are focused on education and sharing useful and relevant information rather than sales and promoting specific products or services.
Everything in content marketing is geared towards your audience and what they care about. For example, if your brand’s product is running shoes, you might share blog posts about different fitness activities or run an influencer campaign using athletes. Sure, your product may be mentioned, but it isn’t the focus. Instead, you’re focusing on what your audience cares about and using that to help build your brand.
Why is content marketing still important?
Content marketing is a wildly
popular and successful strategy that all top brands are using to
the fullest. Here’s why it isn’t going away anytime soon:
Improves brand recognition and builds brand awareness
Content marketing is the most effective (and cost-effective!) way of building up brand awareness. You won’t be able to sell your products or services if nobody knows you exist, so building awareness helps let people know who you are and what you do. As you slowly start to build your audience, they will start to frequent your website, blog and social media pages. The newly generated traffic is likely to snowball, especially if you start to get noticed by other brands who share your content; it helps you tap into a wider audience that you may not have otherwise reached.
Builds a relationship with customers
Ensuring both new and repeat
customers feel as though they can trust your brand is important for generating
repeat business and brand reputation. Content marketing helps build that trust
among your audience, as long as it’s quality and authentic content that your
audience is interested in.
Helps your SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is another crucial strategy for any business. Good content marketing helps with SEO trends in terms of link building. Great content is the key when you’re trying to get other websites to link back to yours. If you consistently post high-quality and relevant content, other websites will start to backlink to yours, increasing your traffic and driving up your Domain Authority and Page Authority scores.
Generates effective leads
Infusemedia’s lead generation is the most important aspect of any marketing strategy. What’s the point of marketing if you aren’t after driving traffic and generating leads? Not to mention how important it is for businesses, in particular start-ups, to acquire new leads in order to keep the business running. Content your brand shares will help customers make informed buying decisions after visiting your website or social media profiles, so if the content you post is enticing and informative, your visitors could become customers. You can even deploy a lead scoring setup and filter out low quality leads. This way you’ll end up with high-quality, highly-qualified leads.
Content marketing tips for your business
Now that you understand how and
why content marketing is so crucial for businesses today, it’s time to start
your own strategy. Here are a few helpful tips you should know before fully
jumping in so you can ensure your content marketing efforts are set up to
succeed.
Stay organized
It can be tricky to stay on top of all your digital assets, especially when you have a lot of them, you’re working with a larger team who passes assets back and forth, or you have to receive and send feedback to a number of different stakeholders. If you have ever worked for or with a company that creates digital assets, you know how easy it can be to lose a file in a disorganized system.
Avoid all of that headache and wasted time by keeping your digital assets organized with a digital asset management, or DAM for short. A DAM organizes everything for you and makes it simple to find and distribute digital content.
Outsource
Unless your team has the skills and the bandwidth to take on a content marketing strategy from top to bottom, it’s a good idea to outsource to a content marketing expert. Many small business owners think they can do it themselves because it can’t be that hard, right? Wrong. Like any marketing strategy, it requires a lot of knowledge in research, planning, creating and executing. You want to make sure your efforts are done properly and to do so is a full-time job in itself. It isn’t a strategy you can plan as an afterthought — your customers will take notice if your content is authentic and well-thought-out, and they will definitely notice if it isn’t.
Know your audience inside and out
It would be incredibly
difficult to market to your audience if you aren’t sure who they are, what they
care about, and what they’re looking for from you. If content marketing is
really about building brand awareness, trust, authenticity, and customer relationships,
then you need to know your audience like the back of your hand. Do as much
research as you can, listen to feedback, and take a look at what your
competitors are doing to attract their audience. This will help ensure what
you’re posting is useful and relevant and will help your audience engage, drive
traffic and hopefully convert into customers.
