As a brand looking to thrive in a highly competitive, digital-first landscape, having a solid content marketing strategy is an absolute must. But what is content marketing, exactly, and what kind of benefits do you stand to gain from it? Keep reading to find out.
In digital marketing, content marketing is a strategic method that focuses on creating and sharing engaging, relevant, and helpful content with a target audience of people. Importantly, and unlike pure advertising or other more traditional types of marketing, content marketing doesn’t explicitly promote a product or service.
Its emphasis is on delivering great value, driving meaningful actions from customers, and boosting industry authoritativeness and leadership. Because it’s tailored to several different types of customer segments, content marketing can take a range of forms, in order to better address the needs and expectations of each audience segment.
Typically, the most popular types of content that businesses leverage in their content marketing strategies include:
Now that we have clarified what content marketing is and listed the main types of content that businesses create these days, let’s turn to six of the top benefits that you can gain through a well-thought-out content marketing strategy.
Current, original, and great-value content is one of the best ways to boost your company’s SEO efforts – which, in turn, can help you rank higher in SERPs and get more people to discover your brand. This is important for two reasons. First of all, customers love reading and sharing great-quality content, whether it be an informative blog post, an educational video, or even an entertaining visual.
But you know who loves this type of content, too? You’ve guessed it: Google. If you consistently produce content like this, search engines like Google will reward you by pushing your content to the top of its search result pages, driving more traffic to your website.
Excellent content marketing is also very useful to reinforce your brand identity. By crafting content that tells your audience who your brand is, what values it stands for, and what its mission is, you will be able to paint a full picture of your brand’s personality. In turn, this helps attract people to your offering and keep recognizing your brand among a myriad of others.
With engaging and compelling content, you can also expect to greatly increase your social media followers. This, however, can only happen if you make your content easy to share and repost on a wide range of social media channels – not necessarily just on those where your brand has an active presence.
Things like FAQs, free online guides, and other informative pieces of content – whether written, audio, or visual – have the potential to become a valid customer service tool. How? It’s simple. Put yourself in the shoes of a customer who has a question or wants to better understand how to use one of your products.
If you provide them with educational and informative resources that they can easily access from your website or social channels, they’ll be able to find the answers they are looking for literally at the touch of a button. This saves them from having to contact your customer service teams, while also enabling your customer service agents to focus on more complex and urgent queries that can only be solved with their intervention.
As we mentioned earlier, content marketing is different from traditional advertising or other types of marketing. By using content marketing, you can effectively promote your products or services without sounding too salesy, or without pushing your offering on your audience – both of which run the risk of frustrating people’s expectations and annoying them.
A solid, well-rounded, and value-packed piece of content that genuinely meets the needs of your target audience without putting your products or services front and center will be much more effective at enticing your customers to check out what your brand offers – and, likely, buy from you.
Last but certainly not least, and as a follow-up to our previous point, it’s important to mention that a robust content marketing strategy that includes a diverse range of content types, always stays on-brand, and aligns with your overall business goals can also enable you to boost your sales.
A great piece of content has the power to drive more traffic to your web and social pages and, in so doing, it can reach more people and make them aware of your brand and its offering. This, ultimately, can lead them to take a closer and more interested look at your products or services, realize that they are exactly what they need, and guide them towards a purchase.
We live in a digital world, where brands compete fiercely for their customers’ attention (and purchases). Instead of allocating all your resources to traditional paid advertising, though, it’s wise to differentiate your approach and incorporate content marketing into your broader strategy.
As we have explained in this article, a great content marketing plan can generate many benefits for your business – from higher SERP rankings to boosted profits, from better brand awareness to an explosion in your social media followers.
However, creating the right content marketing strategy is no easy feat, and the same applies to crafting exceptional content on a regular basis. If you need the expert support of a partner who cares and is committed to your success, get in touch with the content marketing pros at Basecamp Studios today!
