Content Marketing – A Digital Marketing Strategy

Content marketing then enters the market where instead of pitching for products or services, we provide relevant content for customers to help them resolve their issues. It falls under the digital marketing strategy. There are different strategies of digital marketing other than SEO, and marketing content is one.

Definition –

According to Wikipedia,

“Content Marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used by businesses to achieve the following goals: attract attention and generate leads, expand their customer base, generate or increase online sales, increase brand awareness or credibility, and engage an online community of users.”

In short, content marketing is a strategic marketing process focused on creating valuable content online for the target audience to bridge the gap between the customers and the products or services.

History

Conventional marketers have always used content to share information about a brand. With the advent of transportation and communication, business owners started to apply content marketing techniques in the late 19th century. Advertising took over the media between the 1940s and 1950s.

In the 1990s, everything changed for marketers. The arrival of computers and the Internet made websites and blogs thrive, and corporations found the marketing of content opportunities through email.

The internet made content marketing become a mainstream form of marketing. As time passed traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV started to lose their power in the marketplace and companies started to promote and sell their products digitally.

The phrase “content marketing” was first used at a roundtable led by John F. Oppedahl in 1996. The roundtable was held for the journalists of Newspaper Editors at the American Society.

• Jerrell Jimerson – held the title of “director of online and content marketing” at Netscape in 1998.

• Author Jeff Cannon wrote in 1999, “In content marketing, content is created to provide consumers with the information they seek.”

The evolution of social media networks by the late 2000’s such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube made the online marketing of content accessible and on-demand globally.

Forbes Magazine’s website had written about the seven best ways companies use content marketing by 2014. On the website, the columnist who wrote about content marketing points out that, the marketing had jumped across organizations from 60% a year or so before, to 93% by 2013 as part of their all-inclusive marketing strategy. Even though 70% of organizations are creating more content, only 21% of marketers think they are successful at tracking return of investment.

Today, marketing content has become an impactful model for marketers and had been used as a digital marketing strategy. Storytelling is an important part of content marketing. By storytelling, the marketers must convey the companies’ aim or messages to their desired audience.

Why is Content Marketing important?

Content marketing, a digital marketing strategy is proven to work, in addition, it provides a competitive advantage. Let’s have a look at what the data says about it:

• Businesses with blogs surpass other companies by 67%.
• Forty-seven percent of customers view 3 to 5 pieces of content before involving with a sales agent.
• Companies using content marketing online see approximately 30% higher growth rates than businesses not using it.
• 72% of business marketers mention that marketing content increases their engagement with the audience. Surplus marketing content increases the number of leads the marketers generate.

Benefits of Marketing Content

We have seen what the data has to say about the digital marketing strategy, Now it’s time to jot down the benefits of content marketing. Among the other benefits that marketing content provides, there are certain possible benefits too, some of them are mentioned below-

1. The organic search traffic increases.
2. The brand awareness program expands.
3. The brand’s personality is clearly defined.
4. There is a chance of higher expertise, authority, and trust.
5. There is possible enhanced accessibility for a broader audience.
6. There is an increased social media engagement and PR results.
7. The conversion rate is better than other brands not implementing it.
8. There is an increase in quality leads which results in stronger brand affinity.

Content Marketing Tools

• HubSpot – HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer relationship management (CRM) suite. It provides the much-required tools for creating actionable content, optimizing it, and helping it reach the targeted audience. It is also termed one of the most powerful marketing automation platforms in the industry. The in-built features of HubSpot are almost free to try.

• WordPress – WordPress stands at the forefront of the market when it extends to content management systems. It provides the seller with most of the tools that are required to create a blog or a website in addition to an easy-to-use publishing platform. It is mostly used for publishing content, blogging, and creating websites. Apart from these it also offers visitor tracking and several plugins to optimize the marketing procedure.

• Trello – Trello is a website to make planning and collaboration fun. It uses boards to represent projects and cards to describe the tasks. It also helps keep track and organize all the tasks and projects in a single place. It supports integration used for content marketing.

• Airtable – Airtable is mostly used by content marketers for storing huge amounts of data in one place and also sorting them with modified filters. It is used as a tool for project management but also it serves numerous content marketing purposes like editorial calendars, marketing campaign tracking, influencer management, etc.

• Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a free and crucial marketing content tool used by most platforms online extensively. Not only one can track product purchases, but also set up behavioral events. It is also easy to use. Understanding targeted audience and tracking site metrics is a feature of google analytics.

• Ahrefs – Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool that provides in-depth performance reports. Not only does it helps to track the rankings of keywords but it also analyzes competitors’ keywords and traffic. It is mostly used for keyword research so that your blog ranks.

• Google Optimize – Google Optimize finds out which part of your website visitors engage with the most and points out the areas that need improvement. It is a free statistical modeling tool mostly used for A/B testing on changes made to the website’s pages

How Can Marketing Content help a Business?

From the previous points, we have come to know about the benefits of marketing content, now we will see how it helps a business to grow. With over 4.48 billion active social media users the business must market its brand with content. In today’s digital economy, marketing content is possibly the effective method a business can implement to reach out to both established customers and targeted prospects.

Yet, if you are not convinced about whether to adopt a content strategy or not, here are some reasons why a business needs content marketing.

1. It Helps in Building Trust

One of the important benefits you can derive from creating and publishing quality content in your business is the resulting trust it instils in your audience. The greater the amount of homogeneity content you feed the public, the more you emerge as an expert in the regard. They would trust your brand if the targeted audience sees some quality content on your website as well as on your social media handles.

2. It Establishes the Brand Identity

It is nearly impossible to overemphasize the power of an established brand in influencing the business decisions of the buying public. But suppose you are just starting, and are yet to establish a strong presence. Your strategy could use viral content like videos, pop trends, blog posts, or audio. A unique voice for your business resonates with the members of the public it aims to serve.

3. It Allows You to Take Advantage of Organic Search

Search engines have changed the business landscape forever. As per research, 97% of consumers use popular search engines to perform a local rummage around for goods and services before purchasing a product. Also, over 80% of consumers perform product research via search engines before deciding to purchase. If your marketing strategy does not weigh heavily towards your business showing up during those searches then you are doing your business a disservice. It is best not to be among the 44% of small businesses which don’t even have websites and doesn’t promote marketing their brands.

4. Its Performance is Easy to Analyze

Content marketing is never a happening-only-once process. It requires constant tweaking and adjustment due to all the easy-to-acquire metrics, it’s possible to quickly zero in on the fact about what is working and what is not. By constantly adjusting your strategy over time, your business online marketing strategy could easily become a smooth and effective operation, highly efficient at gathering leads and converting them to customers.

5. It Generates Leads and Attracts Ideal Buyers-

Generating leads is the solitary reason for any sort of marketing, attracting new people to your business is the final stage. And marketing content allows attracting an audience who may not have even thought to buy your products. They discover your business through the useful content you market and they get interested. Once you make them arrive at your website you offer them more information about your product.

However, it can get even better! Beyond focusing merely on attracting leads, a good content marketing strategy will make your business available to those who are actively searching for your product. They are the ideal leads because they have already made up their minds that they need you. Content marketing allows the consumers to find you in an ocean of other websites.

Some Content Marketers to follow

1. Ann Handley
2. Jeff Bullas
3. Kari DePhillips
4. Joe Pulizzi
5. Hitesh Bhasin

Conclusion

Marketing content is best encouraged on social networks because there are over 3 billion social media users. Content marketing empowers the reader. If your content can educate the readers and make them feel empowered the chance of purchasing your brand rises. 86% of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers have proven content marketing as a key strategy. It has also turned into an opportunity to showcase a business’ talent and its team’s skill set.

By the end of the blog, we assume that we have cleared most of your queries regarding the topic of Content Marketing- A Digital Marketing Strategy. Most readers know about SEO, a digital marketing strategy. If you are unaware of SEO, don’t worry we have got you! There are a bunch of other blogs dedicated just to SEO on Gryffindor.