A lot of people are confused about Content Marketing – they believe that it focuses solely on text-based marketing. In reality, content marketing refers to the creation and sharing of online assets such as blogs, videos, and social media posts. It is not focused on explicitly promoting a brand but helps stimulate interest in an organization’s services or products.
Content Marketing offers an effective way to grow both B2C and B2B businesses. Let’s look at why you should opt for this mode of marketing.
Content marketing:
- Generates more than 3x the leads as outbound marketing. What’s more, it costs 62% less! (Content Marketing Institute)
- Offers conversion rates that are 6x higher than other modes of marketing (Neil Patel)
- Is considered highly important by 40% of marketers surveyed (HubSpot)
- Drives organic search (Kuno Creative)
Content marketing is often pursued to achieve the following business needs:
- To drive online users to a website
- To engage with the target audience by offering value
- To generate leads
- To help people through an organization’s customer journey
- To drive sales
- To provide post-sale support
Let’s look at the different types of content marketing channels available for marketers:
- Email: A lot of businesses engage with their audience via emails, especially through exciting and relevant newsletters. Email marketing automation offers many other possibilities for marketers, especially drip campaigns, which involve sending marketing info to prospects over a period of time to convert them into leads.
Emails also allow you to warm up to cold leads and provide them with messaging filled with insights.
- Blogging: Opt for blogging if you wish to project yourself or your business as thought leaders in the industry. Quality blog posts have the potential to go viral and provide your business with amazing visibility. You can either host blogs on your primary website or through Contributor posts for other businesses. Medium and LinkedIn can also offer impressive visibility for your blog.
- Social Media: Nothing beats social media when it comes to the depth of content that can be shared or the widespread audience you can reach. Share insightful facts or anything your target audience is keen on. Make your business’ presence felt on networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat.
- Videos: Videos are increasingly being used to build brand awareness and grab worthy attention for brands. This is because the conversion rates offered by videos are hard to match. You will find them on social media feeds and websites, helping to draw prospects to what a brand has to offer. Create and share videos on social media, emails, your website, and YouTube.
You could also host contests, quizzes, and games – give away promotional products as prizes. Your target audience loves receiving them! Since 2022 is approaching, you can also invest in promo calendars as prizes.
- Ebooks/Guides/Reports: Ebooks, guides, and reports are lead magnets – in order to access them, prospects are encouraged to exchange their contact details.
- Infographics: Visual content with excellent imagery and text can help to make your target audience sit up and take notice of your brand. A visually creative infographic can get a lot of traction on social media and is definitely more likely to be read than a wholly text-based article.
- Webinars: Webinars are perfect to position your brand as an expert in the industry. They can be counted upon to convert attendees into reliable leads.
- Podcasting: Podcasts provide your target audience the opportunity to tune in and listen to you wherever they are. Great podcasts have a unique story to tell and you will need to brainstorm to come up with fresh ideas for your podcast.
Have you tried any of these content marketing channels before? If not, we encourage you to choose one or more to give your business a huge marketing boost. To begin with, we recommend that you create a strategy that helps to shortlist key content focus areas to drive business objectives. Ensure that SEO is given high priority in the content strategy process so that you can identify what your audience searches for. This will help to create the right content for them.
Apart from great marketing personnel, you will need creative writers and designers to make your content marketing efforts a success. With the shadow of COVID-19 still among us, smart content marketing is probably the right anecdote to drive your business forward in 2022.