Insight

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What Is Content Marketing?

Considered one of the most essential strategies for attracting and engaging an audience, content marketing is an approach that can establish your brand, provide valuable insight as well as boost your website rankings through search engine optimisation (SEO).

Content marketing is becoming an increasingly popular method of marketing thanks to its benefits of providing customers with what they want; useful and relevant information that can help them and, therefore, drive positive customer action. Instead of irritating customers with glaring and imposing marketing, content is something that provides real value and that customers appreciate.

Why is content marketing a growing strategy?

Content marketing has been adopted by many businesses (around 90% of organisations) for many reasons but most notably for its success in delivering vital leads at a cheaper cost than many outbound marketing methods. In fact, content marketing has been found to create three times more leads than outbound marketing methods at a much cheaper price. On average, brands pay 62% less for content marketing compared to outbound methods.

The growth of content marketing is showing with around 60% of marketers creating a piece of content every single day. One of the important aspects of content marketing is the need for consistent delivery. For SEO and audience engagement, regular content provides consistency for your customers as well as staying fresh and exciting.

Why do you need content marketing?

As one of the most effective marketing techniques, content is a powerful way to really speak to your customers. Sharing your brand values attitude in an honest, engaging and trustworthy approach is a great way to build rapport, and not only generate leads but transform customers into brand ambassadors.

From small businesses to global corporations, content marketing is an ideal strategy as it is cost effective and can be driven with limited budget and resources. The primary focus of content marketing should be building trust. By building trust with customers, you can encourage repeat sales as well as people willing to share their positive experiences with you to their friends and family.

Why you need a content strategy?

Once you have established that content marketing is essential for your business, then it is crucial to devise a content strategy. Your strategy does not have to be complex, but it should clearly define how you will create content, deliver it and govern it. For example, you need to determine what forms of content you will create such as videos, blogs, newsletters and infographics.

By having an approach or strategy for your marketing campaign, it not only makes it easier for your business to manage but it can also help to give you the tools to measure the return on investment. By defining your content commitment, you can measure the success rate to drill down into what your customers want from your content and which methods have the most success and effectiveness.

With the web, mobile and social aspects for content marketing, it is important that your strategy is comprehensive and well thought out, with many benefits to gain from content marketing, it is well worth investing time at the start to see your marketing methods flourish.