Content has never been as important as it is nowadays. No matter if you’re researching promotion opportunities for your business or just deciding to broaden your knowledge in marketing, you must have heard about content marketing. In this article, we’ll answer the most popular questions in content marketing.
What Is Content Marketing?
This is the most frequently asked question, and we’re not exaggerating.
At the Content Marketing Institute, they defined content marketing as “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”. In simple words, content marketing is about the creation, publication, and distribution of content to a target audience in order to bring new traffic and consequently, new customers to your business.
What Roots Does It Have and Where Is It Going?
Did content marketing evolve from usual marketing? How did this idea come to life? Believe it or not, consumer-driven content has been around since the 1880s-1890s. Since that time, it has been constantly developing and transforming in an attempt to adapt to customers’ needs.
In the modern world, customers now have access to any information they want. They have the choice of what info to read and what source to use. Essentially, content marketing has come about as a response to more sophisticated consumer expectations.
WHY and HOW Does It Work?
As you already know, content marketing is about the creation, publication, and distribution of content to a target audience. It works because it’s more than empty content; it’s a kind of dialogue between a vendor and a buyer. By demonstrating value and worth, marketers are convincing consumers that a particular brand should be a part of their lives. So providing users with valuable information is half the key to success.
It also raises trust in your business by proving you are an expert in your field and helps to maintain customer engagement. As well, content marketing helps keep your site at the top of search results through the use of specific keywords.
What Are the Benefits of Content Marketing?
Valid Relationships
Meaningful and successful content marketing will help you build solid and long-lasting relationships with customers likely to buy from you.
Engaged Audience
Keeping customers around and becoming a valuable part of their lives. With a proper content marketing strategy, your brand’s name will be the first to come to customers’ minds when they need to buy something.
Customers’ Trust
Earn a devoted target audience which is crucial when deciding from whom they’ll buy.
Popularity
Enlarge the scale. Earn more customers, promote your brand to reach a wider audience and increase brand awareness among new potential buyers.
Uniqueness
Develop a unique style. Content marketing allows you to make up your own story, differentiate yourself from a range of other brands. Show that you’re able to give customers much more than rivalry companies.
How Do You Measure Success?
When implementing any marketing strategy, you need to know how to measure success and see if your efforts are not spent in vain. An insightful analysis will also help you find weak points and find the methods for improvement.
As you can see from CMI’s The Complete Guide to Influencer Marketing, the metrics you need to measure are different and depend on what you’re trying to achieve. Chasing the wrong metrics is the biggest mistake that marketers make when it comes to measuring the efficiency of a content marketing strategy. After you’ve identified the right metrics, your next task is the attribution.
You need to be able to identify which pieces of content benefit your marketing and which platforms your customers are using as they step on the path of purchases
To achieve this, you need to gather data from all of your channels (Google, Facebook, email, etc.) and attribute the interactions between all of them to understand how people interact with your content as they move towards purchase.
Why Does My Business Need Content Marketing?
“Without a content strategy, you’re shooting in the dark – you have no way of measuring performance or spotting opportunities to improve results.” – vertical leap.uk. This statement pretty accurately describes the entire purpose of content marketing in business. An effective online business needs an effective content marketing strategy and let us briefly explain why.
Content marketing analyzes the needs of target audiences, searches the proper ways of accessing them, and how they move between various channels of information. Great content helps influence conversions. According to Lyfe Marketing, website conversion rate is nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters.
Is Content Marketing Better Than Traditional Advertising?
Content marketing and advertising can both help your website prosper. However, if advertising is a form of attracting attention, content marketing is a method of keeping customers involved. Advertising stops fulfilling its mission right when you stop paying the bill while content marketing is a long-term advertisement.
What’s the Difference Between Content Marketing and SEO?
The difference between the two may seem negligible for those out of the digital marketing world. Forbes experts have closely connected the two notions with an interesting comparison “SEO without content marketing is like a body without a soul”.
For a better understanding of the difference between the two, let’s refer to the definitions. We already know what content marketing is, so let’s talk about SEO. According to MOZ, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. So SEO is about making your content as accessible as possible for search engine users and helping it perform effectively. Anyway, content marketing and SEO go hand in hand. A combination of good SEO and successful content marketing is explosive.
What to Expect When Hiring a Content Marketing Expert?
A content marketing specialist is a flock of creativity for the site. A well-written article, an involving post, or any other bit of interesting content is fully created by a content marketing expert. Just have a look at this “best betting websites” blog. It’s bright, attractive, and it has everything to satisfy the curiosity of a reader. How do you think it would look if there was no content marketing expert to work on it? So what are the 3 major benefits of hiring an expert?
High-Quality Content Creation
High-quality content is not one article duplicated in multiple pages. It appeals to the customers, has in mind a target audience, and can solve the problem of a reader.
Search Engine Optimization
QuickSprout stated that 97 percent of online searches are done using a Google property. If you want a target audience to react to your content, you need to help then find it. You need to make sure search engines will rank your site higher than others, so a potential customer can check your blog posts and web pages.
Strategic Content Creation
Business2community.com defines strategic content creation as a combination of art and science.
Art
Every piece of content that accurately reaches a target audience needs a creative approach which is a form of art. A specialist knows to convey a message to a customer in an inspiring and unobtrusive way.
Science
Every creativity needs a scientific background. A content marketing specialist analyses the statistics and looks for types of content (articles, surveys, infographics) that appeal to customers the most. Having received the data, they wrap the information into the content.
Where Do Content Marketers Get Their Inspiration?
Just because you’re a content marketing specialist it doesn’t mean you have a constant source of inspiration. Ideas don’t bombard your head right when you have a need for them. To charge, content marketing experts have a few effective strategies:
- Check out what the colleagues think
- Draw inspiration from favorite blogs
- Regular brainstorm sessions about the latest marketing trends
- Turn to customer support service to check if any topics concern customers
- The simplest but not less effective: to unwind from routine
How To Know What Content to Create?
Or simply “How Do I Know What Content Users Would Appreciate?” Instead of beating around the bush looking for signs and making predictions, the best way would be simple dialogue. Send them an email or message in social networks asking to fill out a feedback form. Point out that it only takes a little time from their day but it’s essential for you to have their opinion. This will raise customers’ awareness that their opinion is appreciated and valued. Retaining an interest in old customers is always harder than attracting new ones.
How Much Does It Cost?
This question can be viewed from two perspectives. First, companies ask how much they’re supposed to spend on a professional content marketing expert. Second, content marketing experts wonder how much they should charge for their services.
There’s no precise sum that is spent on content marketing (the cost may vary from $5,000 to $50,000 per month depending on the dimension of your business, goals, budget, and resources). Nevertheless, we have found something more interesting. According to DemandMetric, although content marketing costs whopping 62% less than traditional marketing tactics, it generates about 3 times as many leads. The affordability of content marketing makes it a necessary tactic for small businesses that want to maximize their budget.
Why Does Content Marketing Fails?
Can it ever fail? Yes. Content marketing is not a magic wand that ALWAYS provides results for your business. Content marketing can fail, and frankly speaking, the reasons are diverse. Apart from a lack of proper strategy, in Mediaplanet.com, they defined 4 other mistakes that lead to failure.
- You missed the sweet pot – a line where the interests of your customers coincide with the interests of your business.
- The distribution investment is ignored
- Unrealistic expectations
- You don’t measure anything
How Does Content Marketing Generate Leads?
Generating leads is one of the basic purposes of content marketing. It helps to attract more potential customers to your business. At WebFX, they give 3 major ways in which content marketing generate leads:
Attracts Qualified Traffic
Traffic is not the most important metric to measure the success of your site, qualified traffic is a completely different story. By “qualified traffic” we mean site visitors that are more likely to become customers than others.
Demonstrates Your Company’s Expertise
Content marketing gives your users a sense that you care enough to help them answer their questions. It demonstrates that your service can be helpful. It shows that your company can respond to their demands.
Emphasizes Past Success
A strong content marketing strategy should give proof of past successes which is confirmed by case studies and client testimonials.
What Brands Use Content Marketing?
Despite the common spread opinion, content marketing is not only for small businesses. According to Content Marketing Institute’s annual research, the vast majority of marketers are using content marketing, including many leading organizations in the world like P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and John Deere. We must admit that not only these companies implement content marketing but they do it right.
Final Thoughts
Traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective by the minute. Content marketing is key, especially being 62% more affordable. We hope that having read this article, you now have a better understanding of what its majesty content marketing is, how it works, and why more and more companies chose it rather than traditional advertising.
Daniel Witman is a passionate journalist who has contributed to major media publications. He enjoys writing about eSports and other topics that bother modern men. Currently, he’s serving as an editor for dota2-bets.net and csgo-bettingsites.com.
