Many businesses today have started relying on content marketing to attract and engage their target audience. According to the Slide Share and Column Five media reports, businesses are spending a quarter of their budgets on content marketing. And this is because of the kind of value that content marketing adds to your business. For the obvious fact that many people rely on Internet to get information, businesses can benefit from content marketing by providing information related to their specific business.
Most used content tools: Content marketing offers you many tools, which help you market your business online. Some of the common ones are blogs, articles, press releases and white papers. You can choose the right kind of tool as per your purpose of marketing to build brand awareness or to generate traffic or leads or to drive sales. You can even use a mix of these formats, depending on how each format is able to meet your goal.
Content compliments your business: The main idea behind content marketing is to share knowledge particular to your business to help purchase decision-making. It also includes sharing expert ideas, opinions and information related to your business and industry.
You can create two types of content for your business – content for website and landing pages (direct promotion), and informational content (indirect promotion).
It also involves creating content for landing pages and ads (banner, pop-ups, text ads), with the business/industry specific keywords. Good content with adequate keywords is an essential aspect of website development and helps you maximize your visibility in search engines.
For instance, if your business deals with selling of a specific software and your content marketing strategy involves creating articles related to features of the software, check list for buying the software you provide, benefits of purchasing the software, statistics on the usefulness and purchase of your software, white papers on your software industry, etc. Any potential customer is attracted and impressed by the information given by you, will be definitely interested in doing business with you.
Blogs, articles, press releases, white papers related to your business have more credibility: The USP of content marketing is that it builds credibility of your business by gaining trust of your target audiences. This is because people rely mostly on industry experts’ opinions, tips and suggestions for their information needs. According to Custom Content Council, 90% of the customers agree that custom content is useful and 73% of the people prefer collection of articles to know about the organization, rather than traditional advertisements.
Having said that, let us see how content tools help your business to build credibility.
Hence, creating content specific to your business and then marketing it will yield reliable and long-term customers.
List your content at right places: Having a right content plan is as important as having content. Unless you know where to display your content, you cannot achieve the purpose of your business – building awareness, customer acquisition, increasing ROI, etc.
You can market your content online using many marketing strategies like displaying your content in article directories, industry specific forums or Q&A sites, in your websites, etc. These are the places, which have high potential of getting the initial customer attention when your content is posted.
But before you finalize on where to market your content, here are few important things which you need to consider.
The more credible and popular sites you consider to promote your content, the more is the traffic and credibility you gain for your website.
Cost-effective: Of the all Internet marketing strategies, content marketing is a cost-effective one, which generates good value for your budget spent.
Content marketing is one of the neglected ways to promote businesses, though it is an effective way to spread awareness and drive sales.
Marvist offers small business internet marketing services across the U.S.A. Marvist specializes in professional SEO services, local search optimization and PPC Management. Since establishment in 2005, Marvist has earned the goodwill of clients by its uncompromising commitment to its values while delivering expert services.