What is content marketing and why does it matter?

Content Marketing – is a marketing method, which relies on the regular publishing of quality content. The main goal of this strategy is to attract the attention of potential client and increase sales in the long run.

Instead of advertising your service or product through the typical methods, you are instead creating useful content that helps clients to solve problems and find answers about a certain topic themselves.

Below you’ll find a list of content marketing benefits for businesses.

The benefits of content marketing application

• Increased sales – if you create content, the public will see immediate benefits, so they are more likely to choose you, instead of your competitors. They will see you as a more likely candidate to give them a quality product – the essence on which business is based on.
• You save money – content marketing guarantees that you are marketing your brand in a way that has more potential to bring clients to you, instead of wasting money on advertising campaigns, which bring little results to fruition.
• More loyal clientele – If people realize that you are a reliable source for quality content whether its articles or videos, chances are, they will be more willing to become not only loyal website visitors, but customers as well. They will see, that you know what you are doing and talking about.
• A natural need – Research shows that the biggest corporations apply content as a marketing strategy. With this method your are focused on satisfying the basic need to be informed about a certain issue.

In what marketing forms does content matter?

Content marketing – its obvious, but it does not hurt to emphasize it again. Whether your communicating with your clients or want to advertise, content will be key in achieving success.

Other types of marketing that rely heavily on content include:

• Social media marketing – if you want to achieve success in the realm of social networks, you have to publish something that would be “likeable”, “shareable” or would provoke the public to discuss. It should not be something controversial for the sake of raising some eyebrows and certainly not click bait. Rather, publish a useful article, that would benefit the reader and perhaps interest them in your website.
• SEO – search engines rank a website better if they consistently publish high-quality content. To this day, it remains the main factor for classifying a site to a certain rank.
• PR – a successful PR campaign also relies on content, it should not a plain ad for your business, people should care enough to read it. If you are a restaurant, people will probably want to see everything related to food: new menu items, discounts, coupons, events happening at the restaurant. Your message has to have weight and be clear in order to garner some attention from a person who might interested in what your business can offer.
• PPC – in order for PPC (Pay-per-click) to work for your ads, you will need a quality ad for people to click on. Whether their display ads, text ads or “Youtube” commercial, interestingly presented content will atract those who are browsing the net. Its not a secret that most ads are annoying, and pop up in our browser window at the worst time possible. If you manage to make a decent presentation of your brand, and an ad that’s worth clicking, chances are, you will attract a customers attention.
• Inbound marketing – is a marketing method that is the exact opposite of strategically looking for new clients. Instead you create content that would be beneficial for a client. It can be blog posts, tips, videos. Content becomes even more vital when applying this method which generates traffic to a site, since people naturally come to a website looking for useful information.

Of course, content is beneficial for all marketing methods, however you may have some difficulties in creating a plan for what type of content to create.

In the next section, we will look at the factors which will help you develop a content creation strategy for your website.

What steps to take in order to carry out a content strategy?

• Niche – think about your niche and what you are trying to sell. Is it a product/a service? You will have to create content that is typical to your niche.  If you are a restaurant, people will most likely want to read about discount opportunities, recipes or new items on the menu. These are just a few directions that you can write in. Expertise in a certain niche is key for creating successful content.
• Challenges– Think about the challenges that you might face when developing the content that you wish. Perhaps it would be too time consuming to create “Youtube” videos on the regular? Maybe a few good blog posts would be enough to start off? During this step, you still have to keep your niche in mind, however, consider whether or not you can manage to create content for a website on the regular. If you don’t have the time or the knowledge to create content yourself, you can always hire a professional who will help you carry out your strategy.
• Relevancy research – this step focuses on finding out which type of content is better for your businesses in terms of attracting clients. It can be videos, texts, pictures or other forms of media. Why publish videos that nobody watches or write a boring text that no one will bother to read? Sometimes a simple image might be enough to provoke a certain reaction out of people. The main goal of this step is to find what type of content is most effective.
• Develop a main goal for the strategy – in order for a strategy to be successful, you have to have a specific goal for it. Do you want more traffic? Do you want to sell more? This will also assist you in terms of what content to create.
• Success measurement – after you develop a strategy and start publishing content, do not forget to measure the impact that the content has on your website. One such measurement tool is “Google Analytics”, which helps to track traffic, behavior of website visitors and sucessful sales rate.

In summary

Content creation as a form of marketing, is a method that has many niuances. This article presented the main benefits of content marketing and other advertising fields in which content plays a key role. It is obvious that in order to develop a sucessfull marketing strategy for your website, quite a few content issues have to be considered.

We hope that you found this guide useful and it made you look at website content through a different perspective. If you have additional questions or are interesting in content creation or strategy development services feel free to contact us.