Content marketing is the big thing in marketing at the moment, companies are now spending an average of a third of their marketing budget on content marketing. This has primarily been caused by the explosion in the new online ways of reaching a target audience.
So why is content marketing so important and effective?
It shows you are an expert
Content marketing is all about creating valuable and relevant content for your audience in the hope that this audience will take action that will be beneficial for yourself, i.e. by using your services. If you show that you are knowledgeable about something, it’s a sign that you are an expert in it and people are more likely to use your services.
You can create a positive impression
The content you create should allow you to present a positive view of your company and want people to deal with you. It shows what you are like as a company and what your values are.
It makes an emotional impact
Whereas advertising is about persuasion, content marketing is about inspiring and making an emotional impact on your readers – affecting them in some way – and this should have a deeper impact.
You get to know your customers
When your promote your content on your website or social media you will hopefully get feedback on it and get to know your customers and their needs.
Community building
Creating content and visitors to your site or social media accounts builds up a community of people who read things written by you and become loyal to you.
A long-term impact
Great content on a website will get people reading it whenever people search for information on that subject on the search engines in the future. This is very different from other forms of advertising which are quickly over with.
Spreading the word
When people share the content that you produce online via social media, more people are likely to hear about you and come to your site to check you out.
It’s more under the radar than advertising
People are used to blanking out advertising, and if they notice adverts they may well not believe what the advert has to say to them, after all it’s blatantly biased. However if they read an article which has useful and truthful information in it, with a link to something that is being advertised, they are far more likely to read and believe in it.
It’s good value
Content marketing is generally good value for the results it can achieve. Anybody can write and post content online, using images that are often free or not expensive. Admittedly it can be time consuming and you need to get the content right, but the benefits can be huge.
Large reach
Because of the web it’s now possible to have a huge reach all over the world from content marketing.
Email address collection
If people like the content that you are producing they may leave their details with you to get more content or because they are interested in your product. You can later email them with offers or more information, and keep yourself at the front of their thoughts.
Thought leadership
By releasing high quality material, companies can show that they are the leaders in a particular area.
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It’s important to create the content correctly though, here’s some of the things you should be doing
1. Create great content that is useful to your target audience, well written and free from any grammatical mistakes.
2. Try to write as much as you can, Google usually places more in-depth articles at the top of its search engine rankings.
3. Have a great headline to make your audience want to read the article.
4. Make sure it is SEO friendly with the right keywords for your business place throughout, and the most important keywords in the headline
5. Have an overall plan in mind – what type of customer are you trying to target? For example, if you want to attract high-end customers, you shouldn’t write content about any cheap services that you offer, emphasize quality instead.
