In light of the paradigm shift generated by inbound marketing in the ways of advertising and marketing, using social networks and blogs to generate sales has taken on a new meaning. The importance that these digital tools now have has focused the attention of companies on creating attractive content for the masses, whose format is adequately adapted to these platforms according to their characteristics and functions.
Content marketing is complicit in this need and is consolidating itself as a specialty of digital marketing ,whose objective – quoting some words from Joe Pulizzi – is to create and distribute relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and draw the attention of a particular target audience.This purpose is shared by content marketing with the inbound marketing methodology , which in the attraction stage, promotes the creation of content with a high educational component, which gives consumers the opportunity to understand and solve their problems.
We know that now, as a project entrepreneur, you recognize the importance of having a corporate blog that provides valuable information to your buyers (76% of B2B marketers decided to produce more content in 2016). In this sense, we invite you to learn about other benefits of content marketing so that you can carry out this strategy in your company.
Benefits of content marketing:
1. Increase your brand visibility
90 % of B2C businesses (i.e. those that target their sales to the end consumer) use content marketing to build and promote their brand image. It doesn't matter if your company sells consulting, products or services,The idea of creating content that boosts your company's value proposition is vital to gaining greater visibility on the Internet.If your content connects emotionally and professionally with your potential clients using websites, social networks, email or any digital channel – to give an example – you will have more opportunities to make your brand visible.Using multiple channels will allow you to attract the right audience from different sources and achieve higher web positioning.
Search engines are responsible for ranking content that achieves wide visibility both on blogs and on social networks. The search engine crawlers or web spiders that are responsible for indexing and ranking web pages in search results establish the quality of the content as an important variable within the ranking process. In this sense, adapting the content you want to distribute to each of the social media to achieve positioning and visibility is a goal that content marketing can help you achieve.
2. Build trust and empathy
When you educate rather than sell, people feel more listened to and less persecuted.Content helps to get more leads than paid ads, which is why content marketing has played a strong role in sales processes.Nowadays, most u philippines telegram sers do research on the Internet before making a purchase and value companies that offer them useful content more. Those companies that manage to truly connect with their interests earn their trust and empathy. To achieve this, content marketing is dedicated to knowing in depth how the mentality of ideal buyers (buyer personas) works for your company, so it plans exclusive content for them. Sometimes it is not just about the content, but about who the reader will be behind it. Another element that content marketing has in common with the inbound marketing methodology is that both establish the needs of buyers as a priority. Thus, generating trust becomes something more tangible since it becomes the center of attention of this discipline.
3. Build customer loyalty
The relationship you can maintain with your customers should not end after the purchase process. On the contrary, it is when it should be emphasized the most. Not in vain, retaining a customer costs less than finding one. To prove it, Emmett Murphy & Mark Murphy developed a study that showed that a 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as a 10% decrease in costs. In this sense, customer loyalty becomes an important task of content marketing , since a successful way to do it is by providing valuable content.
In this way, creating content also for buyers who are at this stage is essential to achieve this loyalty.Content marketing , through blogs and social networks, facilitates this process because after knowing how your ideal audience thinks, it is much easier to continue providing them with content that interests them (and not just content that motivates them to make a purchase).
4. Increase your IOR
What is not measured cannot be improved. In this sense,Measuring becomes an important task to know if your content marketing strategy is working. The IOR is an indicator that allows you to know the impact of your brand on your customer relationships and how profitable your strategy is. In this sense, creating valuable content for your communities will increase this impact.Having a good content plan will help you get more interaction (likes, comments, shares). Remember that there are different types of content and textual content is not the only one that matters.That's why content marketing recognizes that web articles and social media posts are more effective if they have visual support that allows users to relate more to the content disseminated. This can be images, infographics, videos, GIFs, among others. The way you promote your content will have a greater or lesser impact on your communities. It is recommended that you make the most of all the tools that social media provides today to make visual content the most attractive of all. Increase your IOR by doing without a graphic designer who generates various types of content and gives it that characteristic touch of your brand.
5. It is economical
To have a successful content marketing strategy, it is not necessary to allocate a large part of the budget to paid ads and outbound advertising channels. The content to be disseminated is created through platforms that only require a simple annual payment (hosting and domains) and others that are simply free, such as social networks.When you do content marketing , the information you publish lasts over time and will always be available on your blog for any stage of the buyer's journey your buyers personas are in.
When you pay for an ad and acquire a certain amount of traffic to your web portals, these are temporary increases that, when the advertising is suspended, consequently, decrease the number of visits. It can become a vicious cycle to pay for positioning when, in fact, creating content that positions itself is much simpler and cheaper, as long as content marketing strategies appropriate to the audience to be captivated are carried out. SEO is precisely about that, acquiring web positioning without using anything other than the aforementioned resources (valuable content in attractive formats and with educational purposes).
In this way, content marketing is extremely economical and, above all, effective and not very difficult to carry out in your company. As we have seen throughout this article, it is all about studying in detail what type of person that content is aimed at.
Content has been highlighted as an important point in marketing strategies. With special importance, in social media such as blogs and social networks, to the point of becoming a solution for many companies. Content marketing uses all kinds of channels and formats to attract customers in a non-intrusive way and providing value. It should be noted that not all content is valid, it must be adapted to the needs of the target audience and the characteristics of the channels to be used: means and end must strategically complement each other to achieve great results.