Marketing is the process of promoting and selling a product/service and was born along with the inception of the business itself. Through the centuries, marketing has evolved in many ways, and people have tried all sorts of things. The examples of marketing strategies range from screaming about a product's features in a market to hiring celebrities to convince people to buy, but these are not always the most powerful. Interestingly, the past few years have witnessed an interesting milestone in the story of marketing. There is a flood of competition in all fields in terms of advertisements. Since ads are of no value to the common man, conventional marketing seems to have lost some of its power.
Enter 'Content Marketing.'
The basic principle of content marketing is to give people information (content) that has value while at the same time leading them to your business through it.
[bctt tweet="To survive and thrive in this new and fast-moving world, businesses need to embrace this change and adapt content marketing." username="relevance"]
Although factors like customer service and pertaining features such as live chat software for a website also play an important role in business growth. Content marketing holds quite an imperative position.
Following are some powerful strategies for content marketing that you can implement for your business.
Let us understand this with an example. Suppose your company makes protein bars. What kind of content do you use to pull customers? You have (most probably) already spent considerably on advertisements. It is not a good idea to create content that exclusively speaks about your product, as it would just become another ad. Now, take marathon runners. They buy protein bars and also like to read tips about long distance running. There you go.
Create content based on their interests and include your product as a tiny part of it.
The content can be anything- a blog, video, magazine content, etc. What is important is that your content must be relevant to the customer's likes/needs. It is highly recommended that you research your customer type carefully.
Know what people are saying about your product; find out what they are interested in knowing, etc. Investing time in research can save the time and money that would otherwise be spent on less-effective content. You can also use live chat software for website to interact with and know more about your customers. Additionally, it is also useful to categorize customers and create custom content for each category (e.g., kids, adults, females, working or retired, etc.)
Blogs and articles are often the only available content marketing strategy. However, the range of CM extends much farther.
Content Marketing is not a very new thing, contrary to popular belief, given its current buzz.
The use of magazines is one of the ways it has been done for a long time. However, now, the world is far more connected through different media, and it would be a mistake not to use all of those.
Following are the channels that can be and should be used:
Sharing tips, strategies, tutorials, DIY ideas, and an uncountable number of things that are relevant to the customer's interest and your business at the same time.
According to Forrester research, a 1-minute video's impact is equivalent to 1.8 billion words! The millions of likes on existing videos are proof that it works.
Often overlooked, presentations are a great way to use CM. Slideshare, for example, has 80 million users and is among the top 100 most visited websites. This is a ready-made pool of available customers.
Almost 3 billion users of social media mean another ready-served pool of customers to target and a powerful content marketing strategy with high results.
Apart from the above channels, virtually anything and everything customers pay attention to can be used for content marketing. Entertainment media (think of The Lego Movie), webinars, books, guest lectures, and a huge number of other things can be used. Make sure you find out what works for your business and your customers and use all those channels. Live chat software for a website can be a good tool to push some of your content while having human interaction.
With a plethora of content being created and shared every day, there is no guarantee a customer will dedicate precious minutes or hours to your content. It is discovered that humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
If you have a choice of presenting something like an infographic or an image, always go for it.
Try to include visual content as the maximum portion of your content.
By creating the content of value, you are opening up the possibility of a customer coming in looking for the content, unlike advertisements. As such, you have to make sure that your content is more likely to be 'found.' This demands knowledge of 'keywords,’ or terms that the customer is more familiar with and will use to reach you.
Content should always make optimum and calculated use of keywords in titles, topic headings, and throughout the text.
Often, a good and powerful content marketing strategy begins with the mining of keywords. The chat histories of live chat software for a website can also help identify important keywords.
A common mistake many organizations make is to discuss and adopt a vaguely agreed upon content marketing strategy without forming a proper structure for it. They then create a few pieces and keep looking the other way, until one day they ponder on whether it works.
No type of marketing can work in this manner. Systematically create your content marketing plan, including the what and the how when it comes to creating content per day or week. Use analytics to see how many visitors are seeing your content, monitor your progress, and make dynamic changes to your plan. This is about taking CM as a serious marketing area.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing has six times higher conversion rates than other methods. Day by day, the average customer becomes smarter and either ignore the ads showered on him every hour or blocks them. If you do not provide something that is of value to your customers, he will not pay attention to you. If he is not paying attention to you, your marketing investment is inefficient or wasted.
Pick any list of best examples of marketing strategies, and content marketing will certainly feature in it. This is undoubtedly the age of content marketing, and implementing the above-discussed powerful strategies is an assured recipe for a business boost!
