Increasing brand awareness and achieving the other marketing goals of businesses require a variety of strategies. Currently, content marketing is proving to be the most powerful among these. But what exactly is content marketing and what makes it such a fantastic tactic to use?
According to marketing professionals, content marketing is “a tactical marketing approach focused on the creation and distribution of useful, time-relevant and consistent content to net in and retain a specifically targeted audience — and, ultimately, prompt profitable customer response.”
Content comes in various forms and most businesses nowadays use everything from original articles, blog posts, videos and images to infographics. All these types of content highlight the relevance of the business, its values, and all the benefits it offers. Likewise, it delivers a strong message to generate a favourable reaction from its target demographic without really flat-out telling them to buy. It’s more about providing information in a way that people can make a well-informed decision to become actual customers of the business.
The successful implementation of this strategy can yield the following benefits:
- It can help a business establish itself as an industry expert. Content marketing is the perfect strategy to implement for this purpose because it will allow the business to showcase its unique process and results. The different types of media will demonstrate what sets the operations apart from the rest.
- Content marketing saves businesses and organizations money. It is certainly much cheaper to implement than most traditional forms of marketing like creating and distributing TV ads, radio jingles, catalogues, etc. Most forms of digital content are quicker to make and can freely be distributed through the different online platforms.
- It can build valuable relationships with your audience because content created for the Web is more interactive. For example, you place a video on YouTube; the comments section will allow your target audience to express their opinion about your content and the business can reply to these comments easily. If they have suggestions, the business has an easy way of expressing its gratitude and sharing its plan of action. The exchange can help foster good relations and loyalty.
- Content marketing can generate extra revenue for the business. If content generates a lot of views, especially in popular social media sharing sites like YouTube, the site can actually offer partnership with the business, which will allow it to earn from continuously producing popular video content that other businesses may want to place their own ads on.
There are still so many other benefits to content marketing and businesses can expect to experience them all once they use this strategy.
Typically, the business itself produces content for marketing, but nowadays, there are experts who can take care of the job more effectively, and all enterprises have to do is outsource their content creation needs to these industry professionals leaving you to do what you do best, run your business.