What is meant by ‘Content Marketing’?
Traditional in-your-face marketing has become less and less effective. One of the most powerful approaches today is “content marketing”.
Today, companies must focus on creating and nurturing long-term relationships with prospective and current customers. This can be done by regularly producing content for your audience that is of genuine value and that they will enjoy returning to.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a long-term, strategically planned, and implemented marketing approach. Instead of just pitching your products or services, you provide appropriate, relevant information to your prospective and current customers… information that helps them answer questions, solve problems and gain security, fun, significance, and contribution.
This kind of marketing uses the written word, pictures, videos, and infographics to convey a message. Content marketing effectively reaches your audience because it promotes interest in what you have to say, rather than only using more traditional forms of advertising such as banners and pop-ups.
If you want to stand out in the crowd and have people come back to your website, blog, or social media posts, you need to make sure what you are saying will be engaging, practical, and educational.
Content marketing is one of many weapons in a marketer's arsenal, but is one of the most important today.
Website Content Marketing
Every product page, landing page, blog post, and sales copy is content to help convert visitors into customers. But content marketing is more than just writing some content for the obvious basic webpages; it involves your overarching strategy that guides content creation, so it drives results.
Website content marketing is creating and publishing content designed to attract and retain visitors. The goal is to create content that's valuable enough to get people past their initial landing page, and to keep people coming back. Content can take many different forms, such as blog posts, videos, social media content, and more.
You can write content that shares your expertise in the industry. Content that tells a story about people who've used your products or services to solve their problems is GREAT. As long as there is value for visitors and they have a way of contacting you when they are ready to buy (through a lead capture form or phone number), you're doing content marketing right.
When it comes to content marketing, quality always trumps quantity. You don't need a blog with thousands of posts to be successful. In fact, that might do more harm than good. Instead, focus on creating truly valuable content to your target audience.
For example, we’ve often heard business owners say they can’t write, aren’t comfortable writing, or just don’t know what to write. So these blog articles are not intended for people who are already expert writers, nor those who are marketing and sales professionals. What we are hoping to do here is give small business owners foundational and useful ideas that they can easily implement without it consuming a lot of time.
Here are some content marketing tips:
Focus on your content strategy and content creation. Content must be relevant to what you do, not just generic content that can be found anywhere else on the web. It should also provide valuable information about a topic related to your business or industry. This will help build trust with visitors who might otherwise not be familiar with your brand.
Make sure content is easy to find and share. People are more likely to share engaging, relevant, and valuable content. So make it easy for them by including social media sharing buttons on your content and optimizing content for search engines.
Always test and measure results. Test different types of content and measure their performance over time. You can create content for any purpose, but if it doesn't perform well or convert visitors into customers, you need to go back to the drawing board.
What kind of content should be on your website? It depends on what type of business you're in and your goals. But in general, you should include content that is SPECIFICALLY helpful and relevant to your target audience. This might consist of blog posts, articles, videos, social media content, or any other type of content that provides value.
If you're unsure where to start, try creating content around your company's expertise or the problems your products and services solve. And always make sure your content is easy to find and share. By following these tips, you'll be well on your way to creating a successful content marketing strategy.
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