Most of the marketing tactics have become all too familiar for everyone. People are increasingly looking to shield themselves from these marketing tactics as it’s too frequent, often intruding approach or for the lack of time. With all these, the regular marketing becomes less effective to deliver the sales goals. Of course, as always, the search for better marketing strategies is more relevant than ever in the digital age, where information dictates the terms for everything around us. Content marketing is one such an outcome of looking for more meaningful engagement to create value than to market directly.
Content marketing sounds too simple. Perhaps, most of you might have heard it many times before. But, still bit confused about what exactly does it mean, right?
Here we explain it for you.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is creating marketing opportunities for a product, service or business through sharing the educational and insightful information. It is a dynamic marketing strategy aimed to create value to the business by creating content that helps the customer to be better informed and to take informed decisions.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, an online content marketing resource, Content Marketing can be defined as the following:
“Content marketing is 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.”
The best thing about content marketing is, its ability to drive the people towards a sale while making people informed and empowered lot. So, it definitely works wonders in an indirect way, unlike the sales pitches, which usually gets ignored when not looking for a product.
Studies indicate that the biggest conglomerates are using content marketing to a great effect including making the public aware of the latest solutions to various problems and earning the loyalty of the customers.
What else any organization can seek, except sales and winning the loyalty? That’s how content marketing is fulfilling the missing link in the entire marketing solutions- creating value by empowering.
Most commonly used forms for content marketing include but not limited to the following:
- E-Books
- Blogs
- Webinars
- Infographics
- Case studies
- Emails
- Advertorials
- Videos
- Podcasts
How does it Work?
To understand how does content marketing works, we need to know about the sales process. Most often, a customer encounters a problem or needs a solution for a particular issue.
The customer then tries to understand the problem by searching about it. At this stage, he hardly has any idea about the problem except a few words to search about.
If your content includes explaining these problems instead of focusing only what you do, the searcher likely to land up at your website, or blog. At this stage, customer familiarizes with the problem. Now look for the solutions.
If you can write good content explaining how your product and services offer best solutions in detail to the problem with E-books, blogs, case studies, webinars, etc. customer feels confident about making a purchase.
In the process, he also trusts you. When the customer made up his mind to make a purchase, you can guide him to your product or to other content where it is explained how your products stand out compared to the rest.
All of these automatically lead to sales. Here, all through, it is content which is driving the lead towards a purpose.
Why Content Marketing is Important?
It is important to understand how content marketing works to realize its importance. On the face of it, it may seem a spreading knowledge or awareness for free, but in the end, it fulfills the marketing goals, in an innovative way though.
Usually, regular marketing activities help to tap people who are already looking for a product or service. Since all marketing measures aimed at these people only, it’s difficult to gain their attention wholly. Whereas, content marketing spreads awareness about the needs and drives them towards the solutions. In the expanding markets, this segment is larger. Thus broadening your horizons to a far wider scale.
As you create awareness, there are chances of customer relying on you for solutions. Also, it provides a wonderful opportunity to tell them how you stand out from the rest or the value addition you would bring creating a good impression over the customer.
ROI will also be high when it comes to this innovative marketing strategy. If implemented well, it will have returns which you wouldn’t even anticipate. Also, high retention rate is guaranteed.
More so, content requires understanding customer and giving the details, it doesn’t require huge investment as well.
Writing informative content has an advantage when it comes to SEO perspective. You can build inbound links with high domain authority sites. If the content is informative, everyone will be ready to host your content. You will also have huge content storage for any social media campaigns.
Content Marketing helps to create trust, which is important during the long sales cycle.
