What is content marketing?
A definition of content marketing presented 12 years ago by Joe Pullizi still proves itself true. It says “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Content marketing is another name for offering value free of cost to its customers.
It is a long-term investment, you cannot expect to get instant results. It yields results if you continuously offer good content. Therefore, you cannot give up after a few days of writing a good blog. To gain any benefit, one needs to be consistent throughout.
The reason why businesses are opting for content marketing
In this competitive age of marketing, businesses are putting in heavy investments in programs that are driven by content marketing. If you ask the reason then it is obvious that businesses that have content marketing as their primary marketing strategy have shown great success.
The past few years have shown a great shift in the behavior of the customers. People are more likely to respond to content marketing as compared to traditional marketing strategies.
Old marketing strategies like running an ad for your business do not work nowadays thanks to the ad-blockers and DVR.
Content marketing promotes the website without coming off as promotional. This way a business can show off its expertise and can reach a wider audience.
Why is Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing has many benefits as compared to normal and old tactics of marketing. Here we have mentioned a few benefits of content marketing.
1. Improves websites reputation
Marketing through content will make your website trustworthy. If one website is publishing content regularly then it makes the users trust the website.
Users will think after reading the content that if your website is offering this information for free, what will it offer for paying them?
So, if you are providing any paid services through the business, it will be great for those premium features.
2. It brings the cost-effective leads
The main purpose of marketing strategy is to generate good leads for the business. Content marketing serves this purpose well.
Generating good content will automatically attract leads by bringing more readers to the website. More readers mean more customers to the business.
Since, if they are reading it, they are more likely to purchase it as well. Content having call-to-action (CTAs) gets more leads.
(CTAs) can be put anywhere in the content. It can be in between the lines, at the top or the bottom, or even in the side panels. If the reader is happy with the content, it will automatically click on (CTAs).
3. Content marketing is beneficial in the long run
Content marketing is a long-term investment. It is a consistent effort of getting the business by generating continuous content.
Like any other marketing strategy, it has to be consistent otherwise it will be a case of out-of-sight out of mind.
Since people tend to forget easily. Therefore, as a business website, you need to be in the market with good content including the latest trending topics.
Only then, the content marketing strategy will be fruitful in the long term
Finding it hard to write good content consistently?
There is no need to worry anymore. Hundreds of tools are available on the internet to help you with writing.
Writing tools have made the job of writers very convenient. You can even paraphrase the whole article by using a paraphrasing tool. The tool can produce unique content with good quality that it comes off as a human-level rephrasing.
4. The website will be more accessible because of SEO
You will see the importance of content marketing when the website will have improved search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization is an important factor in enhancing the visibility of the online business. You can get an idea of how important content marketing is to SEO by reading the following research.
It says that businesses having content marketing websites tend to have 434% more pages indexed on search engines. This percentage is a lot less in number for the business that does not post any content.
More pages do not necessarily mean that the website will get traffic but it will give it a chance to rank higher with more blogs and more keywords.
5. Content marketing can save money
Content marketing has many advantages over traditional marketing. One of them is that it is cost-effective along with generating good leads.
One study shows that content marketing is 61% less expensive, also it gets 3 times more leads as compared to old marketing strategies. This survey was conducted by Demandmetric.
As content marketing is cost-effective, therefore, it is the first choice of a lot of small businesses. The benefits of it become clearer when you examine the return profit to investment.
6. A relationship can be built with the users by creating good content
Content marketing no doubt creates a loyal fan base for your business.
While it does not matter if the reader is your target audience who probably will not need your product. But good content will make him appreciate the brand regardless.
For example, Solid starts is an awesome platform that gives the parents ideas as to when and how to start weaning babies. It gives multiple meal plan suggestions for babies from all age groups.
While I may not be the target audience, the content is amazing and so interesting that I love to recommend it to other parents.
7. It brings the social media traction
Study shows that 37% of people like to purchase things that they have seen on social media. Therefore, social media is a great place to market your website.
You can start an Instagram account and share the content there. Most of the time people just want to mindlessly scroll on social media instead of reading the article on a website.
Social media marketing is a great strategy for all these people. You can market your product in a fun and nonchalant manner.
5 tips on how to start with content marketing
Now that we have established how important content marketing is for your website. Here is how you can get started marketing your website with the content.
Know what your goals are
Set the goals on what you want to achieve with the marketing. For example, having the target of 5% sale increments in the next month.
Such tactics help in achieving the target. Once you know why you want to do something only then you can work on how to achieve that target.
Use social media to reach a wider audience
Social media is a great place to promote the website. There are many top social media websites offer to run advertisements for businesses.
You can run ads on Instagram and Facebook to target a wide group of customers. It is a small price that you have to pay to get the leads on the website.
Target with keywords
Content without the trending keywords is useless. You can write as much as you want, if it does not contain the right keywords, the content will not appear on the search engine.
Keywords help the website to appear on the top of search engines when someone types a query on the Google search engine.
Write good content
One thing to make content marketing strategies successful is to write good content consistently. As a writer, it may sound like a tedious task. Since writing is not a cakewalk.
Take the help of paraphrasing tools and get the rephrased text in less than a minute. Paraphrasing tools are such time savers.
Final thoughts!!
Content marketing is a great way of promoting the business. It has been successful for small website owners as compared to traditional marketing tactics.
Since it costs way less than other marketing techniques, it is the first choice for online businesses. It sets a benchmark for the brand by bringing the business closer to the customers.