Content marketing is a long term marketing strategy focused on providing valuable and relevant information to your target users.
This high-quality content allows a business or individual to connect with their audience.
To get a better idea of why this important for your business and aiding your customer to making a buying decision, you need to understand how content generation builds loyalty.
Why Content Marketing
Businesses should choose content marketing because it works and has worked for hundreds of years – just in different ways.
Content marketing works because people love to engage with brands and personalities, but also to do research, be entertained, or even just get reassured about a product they’re interested in.
Ultimately, content marketing is about telling stories, in a way.
Storytelling has been a fixture in every culture as soon as we developed language.
In other words, we are hard-wired to pay attention to content marketing.
Content Marketing Strategies
Once upon a time, the only way to get your message out was through books and newspapers.
Then came along radio. Then television and phones.
In our connected world, we have many more options to provide valuable content to people and grow our marketing efforts.
Webpages
While a webpage is vital to giving consumers a positive impression of your brand, when you use your website for content marketing, it builds trust in your business as an authority in your market.
The most important part of content marketing on your website is to make the content engaging.
Anyone can put out a tedious case study or mundane list, but an interesting and even entertaining bit of content with visuals, for example, will keep readers on your site, and they may share it with their friends, too.
Social Media
Social media has become a connecting point for most people on the planet who have internet access.
Families, friends, acquaintances, and businesses use social media to connect personally and spread their messages.
Using social media for content marketing allows you to create a fan following, take your message to more people through sharing, and establish your brand as an authority.
It also allows you to have a personality, and even have a little fun with your brand loyalists!
Having the right social media voice allows you to provide meaningful content to your followers and be there when they are ready to buy.
Videos
People love video content.
They engage with it more than written content and tend to remember what they watched.
Compelling video keeps people watching and makes them feel their time is well spent.
It can also convey information in both a verbal and graphic exchange.
Video can also be turned into several types of media, like podcasts, scripts, gifs and more.
Podcasts
Millennial men were the first to adopt podcasts as a preferred medium, but the platform’s popularity has spread to many other demographics. Many people consider podcasts to be the radio of the 21st century.
People have come to loathe intrusive commercials. An advertiser typically sponsors a podcast, where you get a short pitch two to three times over the entire show.
What makes them a powerful marketing tool is the host of the podcast has extended access to anyone that listens.
Did You Know: The average podcast lasts 43 minutes.
If someone is listening to your content for this long and comes back for more, you are poised to influence their buying decisions and increase your long term interaction with them.
Infographics
Newspapers and magazines have used infographics for decades – they just weren’t called that.
They convert large amounts of data into a long image which helps the audience understand the most important information visually.
These images usually include vital statistics, graphs, charts, and graphics to keep the reader’s attention while helping them process the data.
Infographics are particularly effective when paired with social media marketing and promotion to bloggers and websites relevant to the cited data.
Books
I know many people think that books sell themselves, but top marketers use books as marketing tools.
Most people consider writing and publishing a book to be a difficult process. While it is not for the faint of heart, the self-publishing platforms have made it easier than ever.
How powerful are books?
One could argue Franklin Pierce won the presidency in 1852 because his college buddy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, released “The Life of Franklin Pierce” that same year.
That is some serious content marketing.
The common perception is only reputable authorities can publish a book on the topic to which they claim to be an expert.
Publishing your own book, even if it is never read, will open doors and build your brand every time you get introduced as “the author of.“
Do You Need Content Marketing?
There are many valid reasons to employ a long-term content marketing strategy.
Even if it doesn’t directly correlate to sales, it is proven when you are able to teach something, you have mastered it yourself.
Establishing a consistent content strategy can bring your company into a higher regard throughout your industry, bring visibility to your customer base, and lead to direct sales, too.