Content Marketing – An ‘Innovation’ In Marketing?
The creation of the Internet was accompanied by the development of innovative marketing and advertising strategies.
Scholars have attributed this new trend in marketing and advertisement to the need for businesses to improve consumer awareness, business image, and pass the corporate message.
One marketing and advertisement strategy that developed, in the recent past, is content marketing.
According to Rebecca Lieb, a marketing expert, content marketing is the creation and distribution of organization-related content in a bid to retain existing market share, attract new customers, and improve an organization’s image.
For this reason, content developed in should be target-oriented and attractive enough to pull customers to a company.
Content marketing is currently an important part of many businesses. This is because it has far-reaching effects on business operations.
This article seeks to discuss why content marketing matters in the contemporary economy.
As such, it explains how content marketing impacts brand building, traffic, and SEO.
Consider the opportunity with a 10x of the content.
1. Brand Building And Positioning
Well-written content enables businesses to develop a strong brand.
Most economists believe that building an authoritative brand is one of the most difficult tasks in today’s markets.
NEED SOME HELP? Contact Us Here and schedule your time.However, proper application of content marketing businesses can be used to build an authoritative brand. This is because content marketing creates a unique perspective of a product or service in the consumer’s mind.
When businesses write content about a product or service, they often include the best attributes in the description.
Customers often gain necessary information, such as product specifications, how to use the product, and the merits of the products, from business content.
Therefore, consistent provision (create a content marketing calendar) of important details in your business content will improve the level of brand recognition, credibility, and loyalty.
In addition, if a product or service description aligns with a customer’s tastes and preferences, customers would trust that specific brand.
Therefore, it is imperative that businesses maintain high levels of honesty, consistency, and integrity, in their content marketing strategies, to ensure the development of an authoritative brand.
Ross Crooks, a contributor to the Forbes magazine, was of the opinion that brand building in content marketing entails more than cute descriptions.
Instead, the author believes that content for the brand building should incorporate camaraderie as well as accountability that would inspire companies to develop a product to match their content.
2. Web Traffic Increase And Visitor Consistency
Besides assisting in the development of strong brands, content marketing also contributes towards increased website traffic.
People usually prefer to learn about company profile, product, or service through content.
This is because content provides in-depth information about different aspects of a company.
NEED SOME HELP? Contact Us Here and schedule your time.This notion was proven in a Roper Public Affair poll, which found out that 80% of business stakeholders prefer to gain knowledge of a company from content rather than advertising.
Therefore, when companies write content and post them on their websites and other platforms on the internet, many people would visit these sites to read their content.
This, in turn, generates traffic and increases consumer awareness about a company or its products.
Marketers believe that increased website traffic is a business advantage because it ensures that companies can meet their marketing goals and objectives.
This implies that companies might sell more products, increase their revenues as well as the profits.
Therefore, investment in quality content marketing strategies and distribution (promotion) should be a priority if you seek to increase the traffic in your online platform.
3. SEO Boost And Link Building
Even though website traffic is an important aspect of online marketing, various other factors play a role in ensuring that companies can generate significant traffic.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is currently one of the methods of generating free traffic to your website. SEO has been, and always built around content / keywords and links.
Backlinks and the process of back linking and analysis is considered foundation work for Google ranking and traffic success. Implementing a detailed SEO audit process is an essential part of this work.
Search engines, such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo (now becoming defunct), usually provide results for users based on what it considers as relevant information to the user.
NEED SOME HELP? Contact Us Here and schedule your time.This is usually achieved without incurring any expenses or costs – other than the work done for ongoing organic SEO campaigns.
However, for search engines to have your website as part of the primary search results, you should have high-quality content that is deemed relevant by the majority of the internet users. They provide a favor to you by “voting” for your website and pages with a link back to you.
Generating quality content and linking it back to your business or brand is often accompanied by positive repercussions.
The positive results often come in the form of increased traffic, increase in sales (assuming a good conversion funnel) or an improvement in revenues.
However, you should note that the content must be of high quality and possess the right keywords or phrases. High quality is considered to be expert in nature, authoritative and trustworthy (See the E-A-T model)
Today, low-quality content, which is rich in keywords no longer attracts customers and is often bypassed by customers and search engines.
Outreach Marketing
Connecting with a target audience should be part of any link building effort for search. Outreachmama has a great list of 700+ guest posting sites you should check out.
And, no – guest posting is not dead!
There was a BIG uproar when announcements came from Google in the past, and filters and penalties were applied to some big blog networks. High visibility press announcements and comments from the Big G scares a lot of folks in the community. The truth is — when done right — outreach marketing and guest posting is a winning combination.
4. Customer Loyalty Improvement And Trust
Content marketing also plays an important role in building customer loyalty.
Consumers are often seeking important information on different topics.
Therefore, providing free information to consumers can ensure that you build a closely connected group of consumers, who are loyal to your products and services.
Customer loyalty usually develops gradually as customers read the content you provide and find a valid reason to invest their time and resources in your products or services.
In addition to building loyalty, good content marketing ensures that you get to know your customers. This is especially true for businesses that deliver their content through social media platforms.
Loyal customers would often communicate with their suppliers on social media platforms and provide useful feedback that can be used to improve products as per the customers’ specification.
Content marketing at its best may also inspire discussion between customers and business, thus allowing the business to gain knowledge of their consumers.
Conclusion
The rapid development of technology and the internet has led to the development of new marketing and advertising strategies such as content marketing.
Today, many businesses utilize content marketing to improve customer awareness, increase sales, generate traffic, and build authoritative brands.
However, marketers believe that these benefits of content marketing can only be achieved if businesses create original and quality content that can attract consumers.
Attributes of quality content include camaraderie and accountability.
This type of content attracts consumers who seek information and may encourage them to make purchases.
In addition, it fosters discussion, which allows businesses to gain knowledge of their customers.
NEED SOME HELP? Contact Us Here and schedule your time.References
Crooks, R. (2015). Retrieved May 1, 2017, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosscrooks/2015/08/12/content-marketing-and-the-future-of-humanity/#44b5c346263d
Lieb, Rebecca. Retrieved May 1, 2017, from Google Books