It is no secret that traditional forms of marketing, which disrupt audience members, are less effective than they once were for reaching prospects and converting leads into consumers. That is the reason why content marketing has become a popular method for businesses to reach and engage their target customer. Here, we are discussing everything about content marketing including the benefits of content marketing, purpose, and various types of content marketing.
By providing target customers with useful content to educate them about your products and services and show them how those products and services solve their pain points and difficulties effectively- you can increase conversions, enhance brand awareness, improve revenue, and much more. Does this sound interesting? Keep reading to find out the ways you can use content marketing strategies and tactics to connect with your customers.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the procedure of planning, developing, distributing, sharing, and publishing content to reach your target customers. As a business, this method can help you to enhance brand awareness, improve sales, connect with your target customers, and engage customers and prospects.
Importance of Content Marketing
Today, outbound marketing strategies are not as effective for reaching target customers, and concerting leads as they earlier were. It is vital to use storytelling to make your marketing efforts tailored to and engaging for your target customers.
Content marketing has become one of the popular ways for businesses to tackle this problem. In addition to growing your reach, content marketing helps your business:
- Educate your customers about your products and services
- Improve conversions
- Build a relationship between your business and customers
- Connect with your customer to show them how your products and services can solve their challenges
- Create a sense of community around your company
Now, that you have understood why your business must invest in content marketing, let us find out the different types of content marketing so that you can use the right one as per your business requirement.
Types of Content Marketing
There are various types of content marketing your business may decide to leverage. Below are some of the popular choices.
Social Media Content Marketing- With more than 3.7 billion global users, it is easy to understand why so many businesses nowadays invest in social media content marketing. There are large numbers of social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Pinterest to work with and various ways you can develop and share social media content on each of them. All these platforms and ways to share your content offers you a lot of opportunities to connect with your target customer.
Infographic Content Marketing- Infographics show content, information, and data in a simple-to-understand, graphic layout. With a combination of simple words, short statements, and clear pictures, infographics are one of the best ways to communicate your content effectively. They work great if you are trying to extract and educational or complex topic down so that your audience can understand it.
Blog Content Marketing- If you want to understand the impact of content marketing, then you must understand how a blog works. Blogs are a powerful form of content for inbound marketing and sharing information with your target audience and customers. This form of content is used to convert readers into consumers, improve brand awareness, and build a relationship with your target audience.
Podcast Content Marketing- Are you aware of the fact that in the United States more than 6 million people currently listen to podcasts? Podcasts have become one of the popular content mediums due to their accessibility- you can enjoy them while relaxing or on-the-go. This is the reason why so many businesses have started creating podcasts. They help to improve brand awareness, build a relationship with other audiences, and promote their products, services, and partners. Based on the objective of your specific blog, you may choose to promote other blogs by linking to different posts, sharing links to your social media pages, linking to your companions’ sites and products, or writing regarding your product line.
Paid Ad content marketing- As discussed before, organic traffic generated by the content and inbound marketing is growing in popularity among all kinds of businesses. However, that does not mean that paid content or ads are ineffective or useless for reaching your target audience. Paid content ads can help you to reach a wide audience and let you position yourself in all the areas you want to be found. There are different ways using which you can generate and publish your paid content ads. You may share paid ads on social media or publish digital ads on sites in the form of sponsored content or banners.
Below, we will discuss the benefits of content marketing and define how this powerful inbound marketing strategy can transform the way your company reaches and engages your target audiences.
Benefits of Content Marketing
Content marketing drives conversions- One of the biggest benefits of content marketing is it helps your company drive more conversions with time. Several studies show that companies who create consistent marketing content experience conversion rates that are about 6 times higher than their competitors who do not focus on content writing. This shows that tough content marketing often needs a significant investment of money, resources, and time, but ultimately pays off by leading to more conversions.
Effective content will bring more and more traffic to your site- Publishing consistent blog posts that are engaging can help you to bring more and more traffic to your website over time. In fact, according to HubSpot, companies that published over 16 blog posts every month got nearly 3.5 times more traffic than those that published 4 or fewer posts. If you want to enhance site traffic, publish quality blog content more often on a fixed schedule.
Build brand awareness with useful content that engages target audiences- One of the biggest advantages of content marketing is it creates brand awareness. There are certain customers who are a perfect fit for your products and services, but they have not got the opportunity to know your brand. By developing useful content that offers value for your target audiences, you can work to engage these leads and help develop brand awareness. Brand awareness is one of the major benefits of content marketing.
Your company can use high-quality content to educate your consumers- Your consumers and leads have an issue that your company can solve. What can be a better way to educate them about their problems and your solutions to them by providing them with informative content? Make sure you develop content topics around your customer’s biggest problems to help them understand what steps they need to follow for solving their issues.
With the right content marketing, you can build trust with your target customers- The more that you inform and provide value for your target customer, the more trust you can build with time. By educating your target audiences about their challenges through blog posts and other content types, you start to develop a relationship with customers and work to build trust depending on the value that your content offers.
Good content helps you to build and foster a stronger relationship with the customer- If you want to support repeat business and turn customers into brand advocates, it is important that you develop your existing customer relationships. One of the best methods to do this is to continue providing value for your customers through informative and engaging content. No matter whether you keep them updated through email marketing content or educate them on significant topics through your blog, you can build and foster these relations through content.
Blogs and other forms of content continue to create traffic long after they are published- It is one of the major benefits of content marketing. As per HubSpot, 1 in every 10 blogs are compounding, which means that these blogs help to increase website traffic through organic search. What is interesting is that though compounding blogs make 10% of all blogs, they still generate nearly 38% of the whole traffic.
The key to developing blog posts that continue to attract organic traffic to your website long after they are published is to focus on topics that will remain relevant to your target audience forever. This is what is known as evergreen content, and it can help you get the most out of your blogging attempts.