If you are curious about how relevant, helpful, original media makes a difference for business' marketing efforts, you are in the right place. Read on my friends...
Content marketing is one of the oldest marketing methods, going back to at least the 18th century. Businesses used to release pamphlets containing beneficial information about their products.
The words in pamphlets were very similar to what you see on blogs and landing pages.
While the medium may have changed, the concept remains the same. You use content to build trust and develop a stronger relationship with potential customers.
Deliver Relevant & Useful
Marketers define content marketing as a value-based approach focused on the creation of helpful and relevant media to help connect with and form a relationship with a specific demographic.
With content marketing, you are providing helpful information to your website visitors in the hopes that they will come back to discover additional useful information. You nurture your sales leads through the delivery of content. This relevant information is also logged by search engines. If it is original enough, then your domain gets credit for it.
Why Should You Use Content for Marketing?
Content marketing provides one of the most effective ways to target your audience, promote a brand, or reach new markets.
Most people searching for things on the Internet are not ready to make a purchase. They want to find information or compare their options. Generating original content helps you provide the information that they seek.
The typical buying process does not occur instantly. Visitors arrive on your site, view your information, and then leave without making a purchase. Without helpful content, these visitors have no reason to come back to your site.
Creating content also boosts online visibility. When you add content to your domain, you provide search engines with more pages to crawl and index. As these pages start to appear in organic search results, you attract more visitors to your site.
Over time, adding content boosts your search engine optimization (SEO), bringing you more traffic and more potential visitors. But in order for this to happen, you have to understand how search engines use keywords as a part of its algorithm for determining the placement of your page in the search results. We have a handy article that explains this foundational part of your digital marketing efforts here:
How To Pick The Right Keywords For Your Content Marketing.
Your content also provides visitors with something to share with their friends, family, and coworkers. When people start sharing links to your content on social media and other platforms, you increase your online exposure.
Content drives SEO, website traffic, and customer acquisition, making it an essential component of any marketing strategy.
Understanding the Formula for Quality Content
Content marketing is not the same as advertising. You are not writing sales copy that focuses on trying to make an immediate sale of a product or service, however, that could happen with an appropriately placed call to action button. The content that you create needs to provide real value to your visitors.
Many marketing experts stick to a time-tested formula for generating effective content:
● Introduce a pain point that your product or service addresses.
● Let the readers know that you understand their pain.
● Present a solution to the problem without an overt sales pitch.
Most content starts out by addressing a common problem that a specific target audience faces. For example, if you sell vacuum cleaners, you may address the issue of vacuums losing suction power.
Most Common Content Delivery Methods
Besides creating quality information, you need to choose the right platform to deliver it. The most common option is to post your amazing media on your own website.
Adding blog posts to your site helps create a catalog of helpful content for visitors to discover. As mentioned, these articles also boost SEO and organic search traffic.
Solutions for delivering your content include:
● Blogging
● YouTube
● Podcasts
● Social media posts
● Downloadable PDFs
● White papers
● Email newsletters
It helps to choose a method that appeals to your target audience. For example, white papers help you reach corporate clients that may require detailed information about a product or service. When targeting young shoppers, you may rely on social media posts or YouTube.
Using Content Mapping for Sales Funnels
Content marketing helps bring people to your website but it may not always bring them back.
Fewer than 2% of the people that visit your site are ready to complete an action such as making a purchase or contacting your business. The other 98% of your visitors leave without performing any action. Sales funnels provide a way to retain these potential customers.
The top of the funnel includes your general website visitors. You attract these visitors with no-risk or low-risk offers.
No-risk offers require no registration. Examples include blog articles or YouTube videos. Low-risk offers require visitors to register with their emails, giving you a way to continue delivering content.
After the initial discovery phase, you provide visitors with helpful content. Using email newsletters, testimonials, and free trials or demos, you build trust and keep people coming back to your site.
Each time that potential customers read your content, you move them further along your sales funnel. The bottom of the funnel includes visitors that are ready to make a purchase.
Sales funnels become more effective when you use content mapping to tailor the content to their journey. Focus on three basic stages of the funnel:
● Awareness stage
● Consideration stage
● Decision stage
Initial visitors may not want detailed information about your products or services. They often simply want basic info to start exploring their options. This is the awareness stage. You target these visitors with blog posts and other types of web content.
During the consideration stage, you increase the depth of the content. You may use email newsletters, downloadable guides, or webinars to help with the consideration stage. However, you also require email registration to capture their contact info.
For the decision stage, you rely on phone consultations, contact form inquiries, or emails to help complete the process and acquire a new customer.
Conclusion: Content Marketing Grows Your Domain Authority & Helps You Attract Customers
Consumers are smarter than most businesses give them credit for. People want to research products or services before making a purchase. However, the main purpose, in my humble opinion, is that content marketing builds up one of the only online assets that a business owns: their domain. You don’t own your Facebook page or even your YouTube channel, but you do own your domain.
With content marketing, you help the visitors on your website to make informed decisions. You can also utilize effective techniques such as sales funnels to nurture your leads and keep people coming back to your site.
If you struggle to convert website visitors through other marketing or advertising techniques, focus on the creation of informative content.
Here are some other great resources on understanding this subject:
