Content marketing is the new black of digital marketing. Earlier it emerged as a strategy to set you apart from all other businesses, but today it has become a necessity. Relevant, valuable, and consistent content is the key to connect with the customers and to generate leads. People, today, are over-burdened with the advertisements that interrupt them while streaming their favorite websites and they tend to block these. Therefore, for a brand or a company to leave its mark on a user’s mind, they must develop innovative and interesting ways to publicize and promote their products and services. Content marketing is exactly about that; creating clear, crisp, and compelling content in order to convey the clients about the company and its services as well as to provide answers to their problems. It puts forth a solution to the challenge of maintaining repeat and loyal customers as well as bringing in the new ones.
Importance of Content Marketing in Business
Building Brand Reputation
In the current market scenario, it is pivotal to find new and better ways to build the brand reputation. With increase in competition and introduction of new technologies in the already busy marketplace, intriguing content can help businesses in developing trust within their customers and leads. When people connect with the content they read, they start placing trust in the brand and talk about it with their friends and acquaintances. After all, the “word of mouth” is a powerful tool, and can be very useful in spreading brand awareness.
Bringing in New Leads
Content Marketing provides an efficient as well as a cost-effective way to bring in the new leads especially for small businesses where new leads are important for growth. Providing real-time and consistent content is a highly potent way to attract leads and expand the business. The three factors for generating leads are- awareness, consideration, and decision. Say, someone has a problem and turns to Google to find a solution, where he/she finds a company’s page that provides the answer they are looking for. With this, that person becomes aware of the company. Digging deeper into the company’s website to find more solutions, the person now has sufficient information about its products and services and is considering the company to handle that problem. Finally, he/she decides to hand over the problem to the company and hence, a website visitor is converted into a lead.
It provides Compounding Returns
Similar to the concept of compounding interest, with every subsequent round of producing content, there is a gradual rise in the impact that it has. Say, one has put up ten blogs, so, his/her website now provides that amount of content. With the next round of ten blogs, the website will provide twenty blogs, as the published content acts like a permanent ink. And this cycle continues. If a business consistently provides content to its customers, this factor of compound interest will attract increased traffic every day.
Cost-Effective and Long-Term Marketing
Contrary to costly methods of traditional advertisements, creating content is less time-consuming, fairly affordable, and very effective. With newer methods of content marketing, like videos or vlogs, there are various ways to draw people’s attention and keep them involved in the provided content. Even these advancing methods are cost-effective. Along with being affordable, it is long-term. Content stays on the web unless and until the company or the person, who put it there, decides to take it down. With time, the features of content may evolve, but, that will not make the existing content unnecessary.
Steps for Efficacious Content Marketing
Consistency
Consistently putting up content on various topics relevant to the business is highly important. Content creation is the first step to search optimization. More the content, more are the keywords generated, and hence, more is the traffic on the website. One must take care that consistency in publishing content is maintained throughout.
Search Engine Optimization
All the major search engines show and rank the web pages and other contents on the web on the basis of what is most relevant to the user. Publishing a lot of content without taking SEO into consideration reduces the overall effectiveness of the website. It is very significant for successful content marketing.
Unique and Engaging Content
With all the business world adopting content marketing strategy, it is necessary that the targeted content is engaging and out-of-the-box. Along with that, it is of importance to make the content clear and informative.
Customer-Centricity
Content creators must understand what the customers want to hear and find an interesting way to convey it. Identifying what is interesting for the readers and working backward from there to create the message around it, is a very successful strategy.
From small to leading businesses and from b2c to b2b type businesses, content marketing has become a necessity practice to adopt. It brings with it numerous ways and advantages that are not possible with traditional marketing methods. With people putting more faith in the stories that the businesses have to tell, leveraging content marketing to reach out to them and promoting one’s products and services is a smart move. The phrase “Content is the King” is becoming more and more believable with every passing day.
-Aishwarya Nawandhar
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