What Exactly Is Content Marketing and Why Do You Need It?
Why do you need content marketing?
The most effective way of marketing in today’s dynamic business environment is where consumers are found online. Thus, content marketing is the most modern tools to reach your audience. It works quite well for small businesses too. Content Marketing Institute’s study tells us that 85% of brands engage in Content Marketing but, not even half of them believe that they make the most of it.
But, why has content marketing become an important part of marketing campaigns? And how do you do it?
Before answering these questions lets delve into ‘What is Content Marketing?’
Content marketing is a tool by which business owners inform and educate their customers and potential customers about their products and services. The goal is to offer help to the customers or give tips that could help them. There are number of ways to do this like a blog, video, social post, webinar or share some whitepapers on your site. There are many possibilities and opportunities.
Why Content Marketing is a great option for small businesses?
Small businesses should do more of Content Marketing than larger companies. Small companies don’t have a huge budget but, they are often shrouded with ineffective advertising. Nonetheless they drive brand awareness and pull leads with lesser resources. These both things can be achieved through content marketing.
The crux of content marketing is that it creates awareness and customer engagement that result in leads. Beyond these there are some great results that can be seen through it. Content marketing builds trust among customers. Trust is at the heart of business because if customers trust you, they will buy your products or services and they are most likely to spread a word about it to their or family and friends.
Content Marketing for small businesses:
You have to begin by defining your business goals. After which you decide your target customer and what value you create for your business and the customer. You can reach out to your potential customers and know what are the blog topics they would like to read? Do they face any challenges or problems? How can you help them to solve their issues?
Develop a holistic plan; Write your strategy as you tie all your business goals into your content marketing strategy.
Small businesses commit these mistakes:
There are three basic tools that design into content marketing, they are:
Integrating marketing strategy into SEO, social media and content marketing. These all work together so that your campaign and business become successful and most marketers miss this point.
You can’t have a content marketing plan excluding the social media. You need to have a SEO strategy along with content and social media platforms to see the success of your advertising and marketing goals. Lot of blog posts get published online but, no one sees them.
Make a place for yourself in the clutter:
There are three mantras through which you can break the crowded place of internet: Volume, variety and value. If you publish just a couple of times a month you cannot hope to attract readers. You have to be connected and always be ‘on’ in this virtual world.
Your content has to be valuable for the audience. Decide what you want to talk about, the various topics that your conversation needs to be surrounded with. Then make an effort to write as much as content targeted to your audience.
Audience needs variety; they reward brands that present content in different varieties. Think about SlideShare presentations, may be articles or videos. You can share content to cover all the digital, social and mobile space.
How will know if you are successful?
You put some great content on Twitter, YouTube or your blog but, how do you know that the content is successful?
There are three steps to find out:
- Track views,
- Use Google Analytics (it is a free measurement tool): it will show how much of traffic is being driven to your site.
- Check how much search traffic you are getting. Visitors will link their sites to it and you will see that it will rank in Google. This way you start to see more search traffic.
But, don’t expect quick results, it would take even more than six months. But, you will see slow development. In a time period of three months you will see traffic to your site. In a year’s time you should see good results and there will be opportunity to monetize on the traffic to your site.
Patience is required when you set into the world of content marketing, if you expect quick results it will leave you disappointed and frustrated. It is hard work but, gives sure results.