The Importance of Content Marketing
In recent years the advancement of technology has seen a tremendous increase in the use of the internet to spread all sorts of information around the globe including Content Marketing. This quick spread of information has opened up new and excellent opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs in all parts of the world as they capitalize on a feature of the internet called Content Marketing. This is an innovation and strategy that involves the formulation of creative online content such as blogs, social media updates, newsfeeds or podcasts, e-books, case studies, how to guides, question and answer articles, videos and photos all intended to capture, entertain, inform and influence a clearly defined audience from around the globe.
This audience, it is hoped becomes the target market of the product lines or services whose relevance is indirectly stimulated in the minds of the audience overtime.
This modern age no longer depends on salesmen and expert business employees who could serve as advisors and marketers nor does it depend on huge sums of money being spent on advertising, rather it is an age where the buyers themselves happen to be the experts on and of the products and services they wish to acquire. It is often the case as research as shown that most buyers will have gone through at least 60% – 90% of the sales process prior to coming into contact with the first sales person.
The research attributes this occurrence to the fact that 81% of the buyers do their research online before they can do any buying. While an estimated 79 days period is spent online by consumers researching on products before they can buy, thanks to online marketing the consumer is now more informed than ever before. This leaves the rest of the homework to marketer or seller to embrace content marketing and meet this ever increasing demand for information and knowledge on specific services and products offered by online or local stores.
Just how does content marketing promote your business critically speaking? Well, content marketing increases your brand, product or service awareness among the target consumers. As these consumers scheme through the internet searching for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems, your brand’s name will keep popping up and sticking in the minds of this group. And once they read up on your product or brand at a click they become more aware and informed, which increases the chances of them being influenced to purchase your product.
Building an increased brand preference is highly achievable with content marketing since it awards the marketer an opportunity to know the buyers mind that is, what it is exactly they are looking for in a brand. Presented with information a business is able to create and tailor a brand that meets the consumers’ needs and preferences.
Once the business realizes that content marketing or digital marketing is about anticipating and meeting existing consumer needs as opposed to creating new needs, it is able to set apart its brand from the rest in the industry and tighten customer relationships.
The cost effectiveness of content marketing is incomparable to any other form of advertising in relation to the diversity and audience reach. With content marketing a sizeable amount of creative content created and posted online establishes a database that becomes a rich store of information over a short period of time and yet the information remains valuable and accessible to an ever increasing audience from among the 3 billion internet users for a long period of time.
The advantage provided by the internet in terms of data storage in this specific instance benefits both the buyers and the sellers in that the buyer will be able to access the information even after years since it was added and be able to contact the seller. While the buyer does not worry about spending continuously in order to sustain the content driving consumer action toward his products or services. Simply put content marketing becomes a long term strategy capturing a greater consumer base over a long period of time with a rich library of information regarding a brand all for a lower cost.
This is most certainly a great deal for any marketer as opposed to traditional advertising using banner ads and TV/radio media which consumes lots of money but for a limited audience and a limited time period.
The other advantage of content marketing is that of having the liberty of setting up one’s own website and having complete control over it. This entails that a marketer can post and control the content on the site in order to capture the intended target audience. The advantages of this is that the marketer can customize the content to appeal to the emotional or qualitative aspect of the audience and potential buyers of a brand. This further provides a platform for establishing a re-engagement or feedback enhanced relationship simply by setting up provisions that make it possible to get in touch with the visitors to site or social media platform such as newsletters and requests to obtain visitors’ email addresses.
Alternatively a marketer can post content on other peoples sites as a guest post, maximizing on a little cost yet for great content reach as links or contacts directing the customer back to the marketer’s online store can be added. The only disadvantage of guest posting is the lack of control or power of customizing the content and site to adjust to the consumers’ needs.
Content marketing allows for the marketer to optimize the numbers of visitors to the store through SEO or SEM campaigns with the possibility to keep track of the growth of the market base through stats obtained by monitoring the number of sign-ups on a page, the time spent on a site and the number of checkouts and click-through-rates. This is good data that enables marketing managers plan effectively on how to grow their audience reach and by extension their market base.
The Digital marketing trend of content marketing overall provides a great Buyer to Brand interaction that an ambitious entrepreneur relishes as a great opportunity to grow their business.