Why content marketing is the basis
You have, of course, heard of this technique, which allows you to attract, involve and please customers by providing quality content that benefits every visitor to the site. But there is a question whether the content marketing, so much clad in previous years, its relevance and effectiveness. The answer is simple: no, I haven’t lost it.
Traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective literally every day, marketers are looking for more effective methods for the long term. Content marketing is what most of them come to.
Content marketing uses the largest brands
An annual study by the Institute of Content Marketing (New York) showed that the vast majority of American marketers use this tool.
In fact, in the world it is used by many reputable organizations, such as P&G, Microsoft, Cisco System and others. It is also used by small enterprises and even by companies consisting of one person.
Content marketing is one of the most effective, practical and convenient marketing strategies that your brand can use to attract more customers and quality leaders.
Enterprises turn to content marketing for the following main reasons – to increase sales, save money and improve quality and customer loyalty.
Let’s look more specifically at the main benefits of content marketing, for which it is worth paying attention.
Content marketing provides conversion
Perhaps the biggest advantage of content marketing is the ability to provide a greater level of conversion over time. Studies have shown that the level of conversion in companies that work with content is 6 times higher than that of their competitors who do not invest in content strategy.
This suggests that content marketing is usually time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive, but returns the investment in higher conversion rates.
Quality content provides traffic
Maintaining a quality, exciting and useful blog will help you increase your traffic. According to HubSpot’s research, companies with more than 16 posts per month received almost 3.5 times more traffic than those with 4 or less updates.
So if you want to improve your traffic, post notes more often and try to stay on track with a steady schedule of updates.
Useful content distributes brand information
The network is full of consumers who could use your products and services, but so far they have not had the opportunity to learn about your brand.
By creating useful content that benefits your target audience, you learn how to work with leaders and share information about yourself. Brand awareness is one of the most important advantages of content marketing.
The company can educate customers
Your customers and leaders have some needs that your brand is ready to meet. Fascinating content is the best way to educate them about their concerns and the solutions you offer.
Try to organize your content around your audience’s most important issues and “pain points” to help them understand what steps need to be taken to address them.
Increasing audience confidence, strengthening ties
The more you educate and entertain the target audience, the more they trust you. Educating and informing your audience about their goals and concerns helps you build relationships and trust with your clients through useful content.
You should also talk about communication with the audience. If you want to run a self-sustaining process and turn your customers into active brand supporters, you just need to feed into your current relationship with your customers. One of the best ways to do this is to continue to be useful to your customers with quality and engaging content.
It doesn’t matter if you do it through an email newsletter or through your blog coverage of important topics. It is important that this supports and strengthens your connection.
Growth of authority
Working to create quality content that benefits your leaders and customers is also working to strengthen your credibility with your target audience.
For example, writing notes about the typical problems and concerns of your audience or your industry shows that you really know your subject matter.
And this makes readers trust your advice, your expert opinion, when it comes to recommending products and services.
Errors of domestic marketers
Meanwhile, many Russian marketers think the figure is optimal – one or two updates per month. This is justified by the fact that there is enough time to prepare content, and the name of the company in the information tapes does not have time to bore the audience.
Many people admit that there is no regularity and a well-thought-out schedule of updates. Ribbon may not be updated for half a month, and then the day to replenish the seven announcements or messages – under some action or in connection with the replenishment of the assortment of the store.
Many complain that, making one or two publications per month, they do not have a good conversion, that people are willing to read useful texts, but do not buy anything in the end.
This shows that there is no content marketing strategy.
Content marketing is still new
And indeed, content marketing as a direction was formed not so long ago and penetrated Russia, as usual, with a delay. Only a few Russian marketing specialists can boast that they have been developing it for more than five years.
The bulk of the population joined the direction two or three years ago. But those who have joined in, record a positive effect and intend to continue working with content marketing.
Marketers who measure the parameters of success of this strategy, note a sharp increase in incoming requests literally in the first months after the implementation of the strategy. And in the case of a decrease in the activity of the content falls accordingly and requests.
For a year, site traffic can be increased by three times. The traffic increases, the number of comments and leads increases, as well as transitions to the order page or the use of call-to-action buttons.
And the use of a special analytical system of pictures on the main indicators turns out to be even more eloquent: the blog can lead to real customers – the relationship between sales growth and content marketing management becomes obvious. The behavior of existing customers is also changing.
Content marketing against information noise
The defining criteria for content marketing are the value and usefulness of the information. If we remove the value and usefulness, there will remain the information advertising noise in which our consciousness is bathed.
When companies try to sell us products, they constantly attack us with information that is mostly not just spam. That’s why content marketing is so successful against the backdrop of the ads flowing into our brains.
Success depends on setting goals
Before taking on the implementation of content marketing, it is worth setting the right goals and objectives. Determine what you need content marketing for: without a clear goal, you can’t determine how well your content works.
Different goals involve different steps. You need to have a clear understanding of where you want to go.
The ultimate goal of content marketing is not the content itself, but the successful development of a content-based business. For example, the goal may be to increase sales. And once you’ve set a goal, you can understand what data you’re going to analyze and how you’re going to analyze it. And then you can start creating content.
Social content marketing
Content marketing should also be able to spread to social networks. Social media promotion strategies and content marketing are based on four key points. Accordingly, for success in both content marketing and SMM, you should pay attention to them. Here they are:
- Objectives.
- Buyer image.
- Product.
- Plan of publication.
In these paragraphs you can link both activities. Content marketing and SMM have similar objectives in your promotion strategy:
Help the target audience understand what you are doing;
report something new, offering a new perspective on your industry;
entertain the public interested in the topic;
inform the public about new methods or trends;
convincing the audience to buy your product.
Most marketers note, however, that social media requires more frequent updates than the official blog.
Content Marketing at Instagram
Let’s focus on the importance of the content strategy in Instagram. On the constantly changing landscape of social networks, it remains a platform for huge potential for business development.
Recent changes on Facebook have made it even more difficult for brands to appear in the news feed without significant financial costs. And Instagram, although owned by Facebook, offers an attractive alternative. Features such as Stories or new advertising options for companies make the platform ideal for marketing.
According to the Instagram administration, more than 80% of the 800 million monthly users of the site have signed up for 25 million accounts. And 200 million users look at corporate profiles every day.
Moreover, two thirds of the visitors of business accounts are not their subscribers. That is, the ability to attract new supporters and, in the end, buyers are almost limitless.
Therefore, marketers should pay attention to Instagram and include it in their overall strategy of content marketing.
What else do you have to consider
In conclusion, several other important aspects and business hacks should be mentioned.
This strategy is not just about regularly communicating to the world what you feel and think, but is much more important to provide potential customers and the general public with some valuable information that could accompany or follow the purchase process (cases, examples).
