Why Is Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing is a strategic approach to marketing that involves delivering valuable content to a targeted audience in order to drive business development. Now considered a key component of a comprehensive marketing strategy, content marketing solutions allow organizations to deepen engagement with their customer base, grow brand awareness and move prospects down the sales funnel. Content can take on many forms and includes, but is not limited to:
Not only is content a way for your brand to be discovered through search engines and social channels, leveraging high-quality, useful content can also help build trust and loyalty with your existing customers. How does it do this? A few different ways:
By developing a brand voice
As you continue to produce content, you will fall into a rhythm in regard to style and messaging which helps with building a relationship with readers who are looking to support brands they resonate with.
By building your audience
By actively producing content that your target audience is interested in you can expect readers to continue coming back as they begin to trust your business as a credible source of information for the topics they’re interested in.
Simply put, content marketing is an extremely valuable component to the sales cycle and is critical to the success of a business in the digital age.
5 Content Marketing Tactics to Grow Your Business and Brand
Maybe you know that quality content marketing is important, but are stuck on where or how to start. Or, maybe you have a content marketing strategy in place, but it’s not leading to the KPIs and successes you were hoping to see for your business. While content marketing goals should support business objectives, tracking success may look different, since many of these KPIs will focus on long-term outcomes such as brand affinity or awareness. Here we will break down content marketing in a step-by-step guide so that you can start using content for its intended purpose – growing your business and brand.
1. Establish Credibility and Trust With Thought Leadership:
One of the primary ways many brands utilize content marketing today is through thought leadership. Thought leadership content marketing involves amplifying the voices of your internal experts and developing content that helps customers navigate your area of business or provides unique insights. Thought leadership can take the form of an article, a video, a Q&A or even a podcast. By developing this type of content, you can build the credibility of your team and by extension, your brand as a whole. Thought leadership can also drive trust. Based on some thought leadership stats and findings from a study conducted by Linkedin and Edelman, 86% of business decision-makers said that high-quality thought leadership content builds trust in an organization.
You can also leverage external content to establish credibility. By licensing content from reputable publishers such as The New York Times, The Economist or Harvard Business Review, and sharing those insights with your audience, you can build trust with your customers and deliver value. When using licensed content, you can include custom introductions that provide context and original insights to further amplify the expertise of your internal thought leaders.
2. Guide the Buyer Down the Sales Funnel:
From generating new leads to converting a sale, content is a catalyst for driving customers down the sales funnel. For those unfamiliar with your brand, content like educational pieces will explain your products and services. And sharing general interest pieces and news content from your industry (whether that be general business news, or something more niche, like entertainment industry news) on social channels is a great way to draw new leads to your website. For prospects in the middle of the funnel, consider developing regular email newsletters that curate original and third-party content around a particular theme of interest. Delivering value consistently through emails can build loyalty by deepening the connection with your audience. Finally, for leads at the bottom of the funnel, sharing persuasive content pieces such as case studies, client testimonials or product tutorials can provide proof of concept and build people’s confidence in your brand.
3. Build the Customer Relationship:
Bringing in a new customer is much more costly than retaining an existing one. This makes building loyalty and cultivating customer relationships especially important to the success of a business. Content marketing provides businesses a way to connect with their audience beyond a one-off sales transaction and build a long-term relationship with customers.
Start by developing useful content that speaks to the problems your customers are facing. Some ideas are providing tutorials on new product features or licensing industry news to provide people with timely and relevant information that betters their understanding of an issue. Also, think about creating serialized content that promotes consistent engagement and drives loyalty, such as a weekly newsletter, quarterly webinars or a new video series.
4. Save on Traditional Marketing Costs:
Traditional marketing and content marketing work differently and often have different goals. Content marketing seeks to educate and drive awareness, while traditional marketing tends to focus on promotion. When it comes to saving money, content marketing works because it is a great way to cut back on costs. Compared to more traditional marketing approaches, content marketing is 62% cheaper on average. It also generates three times as many leads dollar for dollar when compared to other methods of marketing such as advertising. You can cut down on costs even further by leveraging licensed content from world-class experts on a variety of topics that pertain to your business. Licensed content can be a great complement to your original pieces and allow you to post more frequently without having to invest resources into producing additional content.
5. Stand Out From the Noise With High-Quality Content:
In this new digital age, almost everyone is a content producer. We are bombarded with content in nearly every interaction we have from our Facebook feed to our mailbox. Consumers are increasingly ignoring messages that brands put out. In fact, 86% of people say they skip over television advertisements, 44% said they don’t pay attention to direct mails and 91% said they have unsubscribed from a company email list. This inundation of messaging is making it difficult for brands to stand out from all the noise.
How can you help your brand grab attention in this progressively crowded marketplace? Leverage high-quality pieces that are well-researched and credible. When it comes to content, quality trumps quantity and taking the time to deliver useful, thoroughly researched insights is an effective way to distinguish your work from the hastily produced pieces that are flooding the internet. Another way to differentiate your brand is by thinking creatively about format. Explore new ways of telling a story such as through an infographic or a podcast that can grab your audience’s attention.
Content Marketing Is a Versatile Tool For Your Business
Content marketing is a versatile tool that can have a real impact on your business’ goals. By developing high-quality thought leadership pieces that build credibility and loyalty with your audience, you can move your prospects down the sales funnel and keep your customers interested in learning more. And if you’re not sure your team has the bandwidth to develop the kind of content that stands out? Licensed content can be a great option that saves you time and resources while giving your audience access to world-class reporting and reputable information.
