Being a progressive marketer you know there has to be something better as traditional marketing is turning less productive.
In today’s world of digital era think of something unique to promote your products or services like content marketing. Yes, the core of digital marketing lays in the useful content that you create. Just imagine you are delivering useful and appropriate content to your existing and potential customers to assist them in resolving issues.
This is simply more than just pitching your products and services to the customers directly. In reality, strong content becomes the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for your brand and business.
Content Marketing – Definition
The easiest content marketing definition would be – a marketing strategy to create and distribute relevant, consistent, and valuable content to retain your existing customers and lure prospective audience as well. Its primary objective is to drive sales.
You can read the definition of content marketing several times but this time let us play a game. While reading it simply remove the two terms valuable and relevant and listen to how the definition sounds.
This is the sole difference between a valuable content marketing definition and other garbage information we often receive as marketing emails or messages from different companies.
Let us do some Q&A round here as an example.
Do you receive emails or messages from companies? Yes……Even I do.
2.Do you reply to all the emails or messages from companies? No…….Even I don’t.
The main reason besides NOT replying to their emails or messages is neither the information valuable nor relevant to us.
So you have got the difference between an informative and non-informative marketing strategy for your products and services. And marketing through apt contents creates the primary difference between valuable and thousand marketing emails or messages.
Content Marketing – The Importance
From the graph above you may have understood how content marketing strategy works for your business. Now take a look here to recognize its significance with the purchase cycle of customers.
Need: The first stage when a customer decides to buy a product or service based on his/her need.
- Awareness: He/she may not be aware of the solution to their need.
- Research: No sooner a customer becomes aware of the solution he/she does some homework to gain knowledge further. Say for example when ought to buy a smartphone you may check your:
Budget
Preferred Brand
Types of smartphone
The Suitable Smartphone
- Consideration: In this stage, the customer begins a comparison of different products under variant suppliers to ensure he/she buys a supreme quality product within budget.
- Purchase: At last the customer makes a purchase decision and goes ahead with the transaction process.
Traditional promotion & marketing work well in the last 2 stages of the purchase decision. On the contrary, the content marketing platform taps shoppers in the initial stages of purchase decision via educating customers and raising solution awareness regarding a product or service they have never heard of.
Several companies have gained good recognition from the audience through an effective content marketing plan. A company has grown over 1000% over the past year using this strategy.
An effective content marketing strategy offers extra advantages against other digital promotional channels. It offers good content for marketing via social media platforms and further contributes towards SEO efforts via building great content and inbound links for your site in the major search engines.
The content marketing for b2b also brings results in terms of:
Expand Your Audience
Strengthen & Develop Brand Attraction
Drive Leads &
Generate Sales
With a content marketing platform, the ROI (Return on Investment) can be just phenomenal if implemented properly. Try it out.
Content Marketing – Great Examples
Some great content marketing examples that have ruled all over the world are:
Share A Coke from Coke
Buffer, a social media track app from Open Blog
Hootsuite, a tool to manage all your accounts in one place in the social media
Game of Social Thrones from YouTube turned out to be a great hit
Stories from Microsoft
These few powerful content marketing examples tell about how to build an effective strategy to promote your products and services. Just check them out and create something attractive for the audience.
These few powerful content marketing examples tell about how to build an effective strategy to promote your products and services. Just check them out and create something attractive for the audience.
Content Marketing – The Types You Can Create And Use
There are different content marketing types to help your business grow faster in the digital market. Some of them are laid down here.
There are different content marketing types to help your business grow faster in the digital market. Some of them are laid down here.
- Blog Posts: They are effective to promote your products and services like how they will transform lives or demonstrate your products or services. Honestly speaking you don’t need to promote your products and services when establishing your organization as a leader both locally and internationally. And this is the best way to popularize your brand name. Create a proper content marketing plan for blogging and see the results.
- Infographics: They help your products and services gain attention from audiences in terms of inbound links and shares. You don’t have to create anything tough but should be:
- Simple
- Meaningful &
- Impactful
- Podcast: Creating an attractive podcast can penetrate your products and services in the niche market and showcase the personality of your brand in the best possible manner.
- Video: It may be expensive to create video content and time-consuming. However, this type of content marketing is very much in demand nowadays. Yes, written contents do your job well but seeing the videos they will remember it for longer.
- Social Media: Agree or Not but this is one of the effective content marketing types. This is because you can recognize quickly which blogs or videos your audience prefers. Additionally, you can monitor your campaigns on social media at ease and make them even better.
To plan out the promotional activities within an organization create a content marketing calendar that helps you to organize your responsibilities in the most organized way. Also named as Editorial Calendar it displays where and when you have planned to post your forthcoming contents.
A content marketing calendar comprises forthcoming pieces, planned marketing activities, partnerships, and status updates for your current content. You can also create calendars for content marketing for b2b.
