The ‘Q’s of Content Marketing

Having read so many articles on ‘HOW’ marketers can revamp their content marketing strategy, I have hardly come across articles which emphasize on the ‘WHY’ factor. Did you ever ponder upon the fact that ‘WHY’ do you need a content marketing strategy?’ Is it because everyone in the industry is going for it or because you seriously want to create a better user experience?

So, what is Content Marketing?

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action”

The definition clearly explains ‘WHAT’ to expect from a Content Marketing campaign.

Here’s WHY we need Content Marketing:

1. Setting up Brand Guidelines:

Brand guideline is a rule book that explains how your brand works; i.e. it comprises of brands history, key values, color codes and their focus areas,  On setting up a proper Brand Guideline, an organization can navigate easily through its rule book that explains how your brand works. It also helps the creative team focus on the bits that they can add value on.

Many organizations struggle with their content as they are unable to speak about their brand’s persona. Others are in a dilemma because they are unable to voice out or convince their audience that the content is simply theirs just by the way it sounds. Using these guidelines, a marketer can create content in the form of images, videos, blogs and articles exclusively for their targeted audiences.

2. Prospecting and generating high quality leads:

Instead of pitching your products and services directly to the target market or prospects, content marketing helps you to promote your services ethically using authentic content created by you. Here, the content created is shared among the valuable audiences to generate leads and list of prospects. This process is termed as lead generation; content marketing is an crucial element is converting leads into customers.

3. To save cost, increase sales and build brand loyalty:

Content Marketing is a cost-effective marketing tactic; businesses save huge amount of dollars just by following a well-defined company based content strategy. By sharing premium quality content, brands often build brand value which results in building brand loyalty among its customers.

Businesses underestimate the power of content – By sharing original and genuine content any business can build up a strong customer base. This means that a business is building up an audience before they actually need them. Setting up an effective content marketing strategy not only results in increase in sales but also boosts customer loyalty resulting in marketing cost reducing by 35%, which results in cost saving.

4. Marketing Strategy:

Content builds credibility, trust and followers over time. The quality of the content determines the impact your campaign will have on your audience. Hence content strategy forms a crucial part of business marketing plan.

Traditional marketing mediums like ATL/ BTL activities, radio, newspapers, OOH, television etc don’t offer much market penetration as they did few years ago. With the increase in Gen-X and millennials, online marketing have seemed to have caught pace. Nowadays an organization does not want to sell a product directly, they sell the product indirectly i.e. by pursuing customers to buy the product using emotional quotient and by addressing their exact pain points. The main focus of the marketers now is not why a customer needs a product, but instead how badly a customer needs that product, this is where content marketing falls.

5. Search Engine Optimization:

As search engines are becoming smarter than ever, we need content marketing to attract the right targeted audience. As keywords help in generating greater amount of traffic, it is crucial for a marketer to include all those keywords in their content as Google highly depends on the content which is relevant to its users.

Content Marketing when combined with SEO delivers exceptional results for B2B and B2C organizations, SME, multinationals and even professionals. Low cost, increase in traffic, best ROI on marketing, better rankings, site usability, brand awareness and cost saving are few of the advantages of SEO.

6. Social Media Marketing:

Social Media forms a crucial part in developing a content strategy. Without great polished content, any social media platform cannot have a viral campaign. Your social media is worthless if the targeted audience does not follow or engage with your brand. This is the reason why content marketing should be produced keeping in mind the need for social sharing and engagement. Every brand should keep a tab on its user behavior as any positive comments leads in word-of-mouth publicity.

As marketers use content to get across their message to their audiences, only an appropriate content marketing strategy leads into demand generation, lead generation and sales.

Social Media in any form is invaluable unless used with well thought after content. As online marketing keeps on evolving, pioneering this new strategy of advanced content marketing and development seems crucial as ever. Thus in content marketing, a brand must produce higher quality content by engaging more with their brand. It can rightly be said that content is therefore the crux of both online and traditional marketing.