Content Marketing: Bridging the Gap Between The Customer and You

In today’s digitised world, content can make or break a marketing effort, especially when you are trying to reach potential customers. This means you need to produce quality content and put it where it will make the most impact. The following article will teach you how to determine the right type of content for your business and how to start developing a winning content marketing strategy.

Jump to Section

• Guide to Content Marketing
• Creating a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
• Video Marketing Trends to Follow

Content marketing has been defined as the strategic approach towards marketing that aims to create and distribute content that is relevant, consistent and valuable to the intended audience. The end goal of all content marketing is to attract customers and drive profits. The focus of content marketing should be to pitch your products and services to the customer. Therefore, the content has to be developed to provide real value to the reader.

Content marketing drives digital success

Businesses, both large and small, employ content marketing. When done right, it resonates with the customers and translates into greater user engagement online.
If you’re still on the fence about content marketing, consider the benefits that it will:

• Boost sales
• Save costs
• Foster customer loyalty
• Boosts profits

Guide to Content Marketing

It should be noted here that far too many people mistake ‘content marketing’ to be the same thing as ‘inbound marketing.’ Although they share some similarities, they are different types of marketing strategies. As part of inbound marketing, readers find your content after searching for solutions to some issue they might be having. They find your content by themselves instead of your content making its own way to readers. On the other hand, content marketing involves the content that you post on your website and on your social media accounts, with the goal of informing your readers or providing some kind of value to anyone who reads it.
Content Marketing works by providing customers and target audience with valuable information related to your area of expertise. The best content is one that gets to the readers in an organic and natural way and does not feel like an intrusion upon their awareness.
The art of attracting readers and engaging with them in a positive way is what makes for good content marketing. With effective content on your website and social media accounts, you get more conversions and increased brand awareness in your target market.

Creating a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

At its core, a content marketing strategy is just as much about helping the reader as it is about drawing engagement. The following are the things you need to produce in order to set up a successful content marketing strategy:

A business case for content marketing:

By defining what you plan to communicate to your audience with your content, you get a starting point from which you can work to develop your short and long term content strategy.

A business plan for content marketing:

The business plan will go over the goals you have set out for creating content. It spells out the unique value you are hoping to provide to your audience through your content. This plan should also consider the opportunities and obstacles you are likely to come across as you are implementing your content marketing plan.

An audience profile:

This involves describing the particular types of audience for whom you will be creating content, what needs they might have and what their engagement with your content will look like. You should also map out the content you plan to roll out over the course of the buyer’s journey in a way that will meet their needs and solve their problems.

A story for your brand:

In this section, you are defining your content marketing with the messages and ideas that you want to communicate to your audience and point out the ways in which they are different from the competition.

A plan for your channels:

This includes the different social media platforms you will be using to tell your story. Each platform will have its own unique criteria, processes and objectives for your brand. The way the different channels will connect to each other should be clearly defined in order to create a consistent and cohesive brand identity.

Before learning the ways to produce good content, it will help to understand the different types of Content Marketing. You can decide to incorporate some of the types, or all of them, in your marketing strategy. The most common types of content marketing are:

Social Media Content Marketing

The best social media strategy is one in which you maintain a presence on all major social media platforms

Social media platforms have a combined total of over 3.6 billion users from all around the world. This is almost half of the entire population of Earth, which makes social media marketing a goldmine for all kinds of businesses. The best social media strategy is one in which you maintain a presence on all major social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc. Your content should be tailored to fit the platforms you have made a part of your social media marketing.

Blog Content Marketing

Blogs are one of the most effective tools you can have in your arsenal of marketing tools. They are a form of inbound content marketing that allows you to be creative with the topics and why someone might want to read them. The purpose of a blog post could be to provide detailed product information or to inform readers about aspects of your industry. You can use blogs to promote your content that appears elsewhere on the internet and you can also incorporate social sharing options for your readers to recommend the blog to other people.

Infographic Content Marketing

Infographics are pieces of visual content that display information or data in a format that readers can easily understand. Good infographics use words sparingly and concisely, with the main focus being on the information being conveyed through a graph or other visual form. Infographics are best employed for educating your readers about the basics of a complex topic in a way that most readers will understand easily.

Paid Advertising Content Marketing

Paid advertising is a great way to help your marketing reach a broad audience and make your brand a familiar sight in all the places you want to reach. The most effective way to utilise paid advertising is to combine it with inbound marketing. Good locations for paid ads are on your social media profiles, landing pages and sponsored content.

Video Content Marketing

Video Content Marketing tends to be more engaging and effective than any other form of content marketing.

Video Content Marketing tends to be more engaging and effective than any other form of content marketing. According to one study, over 69% of consumers prefer to learn about new products or services through video content. Videos have the benefit of not requiring a lot of concentration on the part of the viewer, and they are an effective way of boosting your ROI (return on investment) and increasing conversion rates.
When video content is properly marketed, it can serve as a powerful method for your brand to spread its message to a large audience and in a way that is easily digestible and accessible. A recent survey revealed that 97% of marketers feel that videos help their customers understand the products and services they are marketing. The good thing about video content marketing is that it has become easier than ever before to create effective and well-produced videos. You have a large array of free and paid software tools to help your video content creation process.
According to one source, people spend over 3.5 hours per day on their mobile devices, with a large chunk of that time being spent consuming video content. Similarly, statistics show that 51% of shoppers have completed an online purchase with a smartphone. Therefore, it is important to use the power of video content to leverage the time people spend on their phones.

Video Marketing Trends to Follow

With digital media on the rise and ever more people being online, video content marketing is primed to make a difference.

With digital media on the rise and ever more people being online, video content marketing is primed to make a difference. The following are some of the video marketing trends that are already popular among users and will continue to grow in the coming years:

Live Video:

Live videos saw a large increase in popularity in the year 2020 and 2021, as it gave people a way to interact with other people while being unable to go to in-person events. Live videos have the benefit of getting more engagement from the audience than pre-recorded videos do. It’s a medium that gives brands an invaluable opportunity to get more engagement and gain a competitive edge.

Short Form Videos:

Alongside the boom in live videos, short-form videos have also become increasingly popular in the recent past. This trend has been boosted further with the introduction of Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts, and the explosive growth of the TikTok user base.

User-Generated Video Content:

The effectiveness of user-generated videos cannot be overstated. On youtube, user-generated videos get ten times as many views as branded content and is a very effective method of driving more traffic to your website. The users that come to your website via user-generated content are more likely to make a purchase, which makes it a particularly effective tool for businesses that are in an industry that is influenced by user opinions, such as the travel, health and fashion industries.
Training and Educational Videos: In the past two years, students were forced to work from home on multiple occasions. With more than a billion students around the world learning from home, e-learning has skyrocketed and is one of the fastest-growing trends today that can be used for a secondary purpose of marketing as well.

Vlogs:

Vlogs are an excellent way to tell the story of your brand and connect with consumers. Effective vlogs position the brand or members of the company as the main characters in a story, which increases audience engagement and conversions.

To sum it all up, the content you put out for your target audience will determine how much you will benefit in terms of sales and popularity. With a clear strategy in mind from the very outset of your business venture, you should be able to successfully navigate today’s online landscape to become an established online firm with a good reputation. The time to act is now!