What is Content Marketing? How does it help businesses?

Introduction

Content marketing can be defined as a marketing strategy that includes planning, curating, and distributing valuable and easy-to-understand content for the target audience.

The different types of content marketing include blog content marketing, video content marketing, podcast content marketing, social media content marketing, infographics content marketing, and paid ad content marketing.

When incorporated the right way in marketing strategies, content marketing can help businesses reach their target audience and increase sales, which in turn can improve brand reputation, help influence conversion rates, strengthen trust and relationships with consumers, set you apart from your competitors, and help showcase the expertise in your niche to the target audience. Content marketing strategies work for businesses of all sizes and niches. 

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What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing focuses on planning, creating, and distributing relevant and valuable content to reach the target audience. The right approach to content marketing can help boost your brand awareness, sales, reach, and customer loyalty. Ensuring the content is valuable to the target audience is what sets content marketing apart from other forms of marketing strategies. 

Types of Content Marketing

There are different types of content marketing that you can use in your marketing strategies. The common types include:

• Blog content marketing
• Video content marketing
• Social media content marketing
• Podcast content marketing
• Infographic content marketing
• Paid Ad content marketing

What is Blog Content Marketing?

As per the research conducted by The State of Content Marketing, blog content accounts for approximately 86 percent of content marketing strategies. Brands that incorporate blog content in their content marketing strategy receive 97 percent more traffic to their website. This, in turn, allows the brand 434 percent more indexed pages for the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). 

Blog content can also be an effective type of content marketing for small businesses since it is very cost-effective.

An engaging way of using blog content in the content marketing strategy is by writing content about your products and services and how these can prove beneficial for the consumers. You must remember to make the content valuable and relatable for the target audience to have a bigger impact. For the promotion of your blog, you can create internal and external links to your website to generate more traffic.

Strategy for effective blog marketing –

1. Define goals 
2. Research on the target market
3. Research on keyword ideas
4. Create blog
5. Create a calendar for the blog 
6. Make relevant content for your target audience

What is Video Content Marketing?

Although time-consuming and expensive to produce, video content has emerged as one of the most popular forms of content marketing over the last few years. Well-planned and curated video content can show a different side of your brand to the audience and increase engagement and sales. 

Research conducted by Wyzowl showed that 69 percent of content consumers preferred to learn about a brand and its products or services via videos over blog content. 

Many people would prefer video content over blog content for things that need to be demonstrated. For instance, how to fix a sink. Videos that show every step of fixing a sink will provide more information than written content. Videos are also a better way of teaching people something. For instance, teaching a mathematical sum. Videos of a professor solving the sum on the board may prove to be more helpful than written content.

Strategy for effective video content marketing – 

1. Identify and understand the target audience
2. Set the campaign goals 
3. Put a realistic budget for the video 
4. Optimisation of videos 
5. Test the content 

Tips to keep in mind while carrying out video content marketing –

1. Awareness of the brand
2. Create something explore worthy which helps the audience to educate about your brand
3. Bring the audience to the consideration stage, which helps the audience to strengthen their preference for the product. 
4. Take the process further which helps the audience to make a decision regarding the product which your brand has to offer. 

What is Social Media Content Marketing?

The fact that more than 3.6 billion users at a global level use social media every day is enough reason for brands to invest in social media content marketing. Several social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest have risen to be an effective way of increasing consumer engagement and driving sales.

 Social media platforms allow you to create a variety of content for your brand that includes photos, videos, story content, live videos, and IGTV (Instagram), among others. Even better, if you are already producing content for your website, you can easily repurpose and modify the content for your social media pages as well. 

Social media platforms allow you to analyze the performance of your content too. This will help you decide which type of content is performing well among the audience. 

Social media marketer’s goal –

1. Helps to increase brand awareness
2.  Leads and sales generation 
3. Increase brand audience
4. Grows community engagement
5. Increases web traffic

Strategy for social media content marketing –

1. Goals identification
2. Identification of audience 
3. Create a calendar for content
4. Work on the distribution and promotion of the content 
5. Report and analyse the growth 

The best tip is to identify and work on establishing what is content marketing, what is content creation and especially what is content marketing in digital marketing before you go about working on strategizing for social media content marketing. This exercise will help you to broaden your channels of marketing.

What is Podcast Content Marketing?

Lisa Buyer quoted, “Podcast content can be the epicentre of evergreen content, ready to be sliced, diced, and repurposed.” A recent US survey of 2020 revealed that about 49 percent of people between 12 to 32 years listened to podcasts in 30 days. The average was six hours of listening to podcasts in a week. This got media outlets and businesses investing in podcasts to increase engagement.

Even though podcasts are far from being the go-to content marketing strategy for many businesses, they have shown impactful results for some brands. Podcasts are simple to create if you have the right equipment, and if distributed among the consumers through the right medium and with the right message, the impact can be massive. However, it is important to give enough time to plan the content and approach of podcasts rather than doing it on the spot, which can prove to be destructive.

Podcasts can be incorporated into business websites and social media pages to create a better reach among audiences. 

Strategy for podcast content marketing –

1. Research what your audience wants to listen 
2. Search and review discussions on social media and blogs to discover the interest of your audience
3. Talk about things that catch the audience’s interest 
4. Create engaging content
5. Ask questions to your listeners
6. Stick to the topic of the podcast 
7. Invite experts to your podcast

What is Infographic Content Marketing?

Infographics contain images, information, content, and data in an easily understandable graphic format. When planned and curated properly, infographics can prove to be an effective way to communicate with the target audience in the form of inbound links and shares. 

To create successful infographics, you need to keep them meaningful and impactful, and at the same time, simple and understandable by a layperson. The baseline is to take meaningful and relevant information from different sources and break it down into simpler points for the audience.

Infographics are more effective in the educational or learning niche, as they allow the consumers to understand the message more conveniently and simply. 

 What is Paid Ad Content Marketing?

Paid ads have proven to help reach a broader audience and create brand awareness. These work well when paired with inbound marketing such as creating backlinks to your website through ads. You can incorporate paid ads on your social media pages, banners, YouTube, landing pages, review sites, or SERPs. 

Strategy for paid ad content marketing

1. Identify and set clear goals 
2. Set ad spend goal 
3. Analyse past success
4. Set benchmark by previous performance
5. Repurpose the organic content
6. Align the advertising strategy with the buying cycle

How Content Marketing Helps Business?

Many marketers are not aware of how content marketing helps business. The following are some of the benefits of content marketing:

• Improves brand reputation
• Helps influence conversions
• Builds relationships with consumers
• Sets your brand apart from your competitors
• Helps showcase your subject matter expertise 

Improves Brand Reputation

Improvement in brand reputation is one of the ways of understanding how content marketing helps business. Good quality content will lead to an increase in customer loyalty and trust which is essential to establish a brand reputation.

As you create good quality content, the target audience will start to relate and develop a positive opinion about your brand. When the target audience finds your content to be helpful, relevant, and valuable, they will think the same way about your brand as well. The more value you provide through your content, the more it will help the target audience create a positive reputation for your brand.

Helps Influence Conversions

Content marketing impacts conversion rates to a great extent. The following statistics will help you understand how content marketing helps business:

• Compared to other digital marketing strategies, content marketing has proven to provide about six times higher conversion rates.
• In the US, 61 percent of consumers made a purchase after reading about a product or service in a blog.
• According to the survey done by Curata, 74 percent of the businesses had seen an increase in their marketing leads when used content marketing.

 Builds Relationships with Consumers

Building relationships with loyal and potential consumers explains how content marketing helps business. Good quality content is an important part of establishing a positive brand reputation and building trust with the consumers. Loyal customers are an advantage to all businesses. BIA Kelsey showed that 61 percent of the small and medium businesses (SMBs) generate half of their revenue from loyal customers.

Creating good quality content should not stop after a lead has become a consumer. Consistency is the key. Consistent and valuable content will help you build relationships with the consumers and increase customer loyalty. It can also help increase repeat sales.

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Sets your Brand Apart from your Competitors

In the competitive market, you must set your brand apart from its competitors. The value and relevance of the content you create for your consumers can help them choose your brand over your competitors. Determining how you want to portray your brand image and voice can also help set you apart from your competitors.

Helps Showcase your Subject Matter Expertise

This is one of the most important aspects of understanding how content marketing helps business. One of the greatest benefits of content marketing is how it helps showcase what your brand stands for. When consumers interact with your brand, they want to know that they are dealing with subject matter experts for a particular niche.

Content marketing helps you demonstrate how well you know your niche. Every time you publish content, be it in any form, you show your consumers and target audience that you are well versed with the niche and the challenges it imposes.

While making a purchase, consumers will remember the brand that provided them with relevant and useful information about their queries and questions. For instance, consider two businesses. One of them is consistent with producing relevant and valuable content, whereas the other is not. Consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a business that produces relevant and valuable content. 

Conclusion

Content marketing is one of the most important and effective forms of marketing strategies. When done correctly, content marketing can help boost your brand’s visibility and increase customer loyalty. It helps businesses of all sizes in reaching their target audience and creating brand awareness.

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