Understanding Content Marketing

You might have heard, “content is king.” This is the buzz phrase among content marketers right now. While its accuracy is up for debate, it nonetheless is an indication of the importance of content in online marketing. It is indicative of the importance of content in amongst the other forms of marketing, including SEO and social media marketing; all forms of marketing are reliant on content.

Think about it…

Without content, SEOs would have nothing to optimise. Everything SEO does is directed towards helping the robots behind search engines, and social media sites understand the content they are indexing. Link building at its foundation need content; links point towards content. The keywords that people search on Google are in an attempt to find content. Every aspect of SEO revolves around content.

The same case applies to other forms of marketing. For instance, every tweet, every email, every landing page, and every product description created is meant to provide content for the masses. Content is central to everything marketer do. Whether we are dealing with our readers, customers, or clients, we use content to communicate.

So, what is content marketing? In simple terms, content marketing is a form of marketing where the marketers use content as the main medium of attaining the marketing goals an organisation has. The goals could be as varied as acquiring new customers and or clients, customer/client retention, increased brand visibility, or any other goals you might want to conduct marketing for.

The Need For High-Quality Useful Content

Given that the traditional forms of marketing are becoming less and less effective with each passing day, all forward-thinking marketers need to adjust and adapt to the changes by taking up more effective forms of marketing.

Opting for content marketing is one of the ways of adopting. Effective content marketing, however, should focus on creating and distributing valuable content that is relevant to your audience and consistent with your brand. The goal is for your content to resonate with a clearly defined audience, thereby attracting profitable customer actions.

As such, rather than pitching your services or products, you provide relevant and useful content to prospective clients and customers, helping them understand and solve the issues they face.

Content Marketing As A Marketing Tool For Big Brands

Our annual research indicates that the vast majority of marketers and organisations are using content marketing. This is especially the case when it comes to big brands such as Microsoft, P&G, Cisco Systems, John Deere and other firms. Additionally, even small business are making use of content marketing to shore up their sales. Content marketing has proved to be effective in a wide variety of applications.

There are 3 main benefits that organisations that use content marketing benefit from. The benefits are:

• Increased sales
• Cost savings
• Attracting the right customers and increasing customer loyalty

Content Marketing As The Present And The Future Of Marketing

Content marketing involves companies providing starkly different content than they have traditionally provided their audience with. For a long time, businesses tended to create and disseminate informational garbage that is designed to sell you stuff. As such, the vast majority of such content is irrelevant and of little to no value. Such content is defined as spam, and slightly so. Content marketing involves creating relevant and valuable content that has utility among users.

Great Content Is Critical To Marketing

Regardless of the type of marketing you choose to use, you should incorporate content marketing into your marketing strategy. It should not be separate. Quality content is an integral part of any form or type of marketing.

SEO: Search engines tend to rank high-quality content consistently well.
Social media marketing: You need great content to power your social media marketing efforts.
PR: To be successful in any PR efforts, you must create in-depth content issues readers care about.
PPC: You need great content to be successful in your PPC marketing efforts.
Inbound marketing: If you want to drive inbound traffic/leads, you need great content.
Content strategy: Content marketing, at its core a part of content marketing strategies.

Why Content Marketing?

While it is important to understand what content marketing is, it is important to attain an intricate understanding of why content is important for your business. To this end, you need to understand the 4 steps of a typical buying cycle.

Awareness Stage – This is the stage a customer realises that he or she has a need and there are plenty of solutions available to meet the need.

Research Stage – After the customer or clients become aware of the solutions available, they will research the solutions and educate themselves as much as possible. For instance, for a car buyer, they will research about cars and the various models available trying to find a car that suits their needs.

Consideration Stage – During this stage, the customer or client will compare different products available, different vendors available, and the pricing in an effort to get the best solution at the best price point.

Buying Stage – At the end of the buying cycle, the customer will make the decisions to purchase products or services.

While traditional advertising modes are great for the second stage of the buying cycle, content marketing taps into potential customers right from the first stage. You can use content marketing to raise awareness of the problem and present a product or services that is an adequate solution.

My company has used content marketing to accrue tremendous growth of over 1,000% over the past 1 year. Through content, potential clients get to learn what we have to offer, and the value of our services. By the time they contact us, they are ready to work with us. Importantly, we do not have to use any of the loathed high-pressure sales tactics as is the case with traditional marketing. All we have to do is thrash out the details of the contract and sign the agreement. Our content built the trust needed during the buying cycle.

Consequently, the return on investment for this kind of marketing can be very high, especially when content marketing is done right. Creating content is not an expensive affair. In our case, the handful of articles that I have written amounting to 20 hours of work, are responsible for over 95% of our success.

An added benefit of focusing on content marketing is that it supports other online marketing efforts. It provides the foundation for social media content. It bolsters your SEO efforts by generating high-quality and natural inbound links. In fact, many companies’ SEO efforts should revolve around content marketing.

How Can We Help You?

We will use the best content marketing strategies, creating high-quality content to bolster your online marketing efforts. If you want to view some of the projects that we have helped clients with, just contact us.

As for pricing, we work on a day-basis; we charge a day rate. And the number of days are dependent on the state of your website and the objective you need achieve. For instance, if you do not have a content strategy in place, we will develop one from the ground up and implement it to full completion. This will take longer. However, if you have a strategy in place, we will refine it and implement it.