Anyone who works in digital marketing knows that trends change quite rapidly, and staying current with the latest trends is part of having an overarching and successful strategy. However, if all you do is try and jump on the latest marketing trends and hacks, you will forever be playing keep up. Rather, you should put your efforts into a combination of successful long-term marketing strategies, like content marketing, and employing the latest tips, tricks, and marketing hacks.
Traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective, with digital marketing strategies taking over. Marketers need to be forward-thinking and proactive as opposed to reactive because the digital marketing space moves quickly. Strategies that worked six months ago may not work today, and the new strategies emerging today may not work in six months. To solve this, it’s important to have a tried-and-true marketing strategy that has stood the test of time and acts as the backbone of the online marketing industry.
That strategy is content marketing.
What is content marketing?
Are you familiar with the phrase, ‘content is king’? That’s all the internet is; content being constantly published and consumed by people from all around the world at all times of the day. Everything is content, from videos to images to infographics to articles and blog posts. Anything that is you publish that your audience reads or engages with is content.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that revolves around creating, curating, and sharing relevant, valuable, high-quality content to attract an audience and build a community to drive conversions and profitable actions. It removes the sales pitch aspect of marketing and instead relies on methods like storytelling and sharing relevant and useful information to help your target customer base realize a need that requires solving and then actively helping them solve it.
Why is content marketing important?
To put it bluntly, everyone is doing it.
Content marketing is a strategy employed by prominent organizations and leading brands, as well as emerging brands and entrepreneurs who are growing their audience and trying to build authority. If you aren’t doing it too, you’re losing your audience to a brand or organization that is doing it, and doing it well.
In a more detailed explanation, people are wise to overly promotional sounding advertisements. It doesn’t stick anymore, and more people are automatically tuning out obvious marketing messages because, well, it’s played out. Everyone is bombarded with advertising and commercials and sponsored messaging every single day – so much so that it all eventually becomes background noise.
How can you utilize content marketing?
Combining content marketing with other strong digital strategies like search engine optimization (SEO) helps your content go farther and reach a wider audience that could already be looking for what you’re offering. If you aren’t completely familiar or confident with SEO practices, it’s worth taking the time to learn the basics.
Content marketing turns advertising on its head and takes a completely different approach. It’s essentially digital marketing reinvented. It gets people’s attention because instead of brazenly marketing a product using a catchy tagline or well-practiced elevator pitch, you offer audiences useful and valuable information to help them understand how to meet people’s needs, and your brand is there to help them meet that need. You could combine this with SEO and invest in working with an SEO agency like SEO Company Manchester who can apply their vast knowledge of SEO practices to help build on your digital marketing efforts. It’s important to put your efforts into a combination of successful marketing strategies in order to stay ahead of the curve.
As for content marketing itself, the best ways to engage in this practice are with a blog and with quality social media content. Creating a blog on your company’s website will help drive organic traffic and increase conversions and improve your brand awareness and credibility. The key to having a successful blog is to constantly and consistently offer valuable and relevant information, not just information. That’s the difference between content marketing and good content marketing – everyone is offering “information”, but good content marketing offers audiences some pieces of information that are helpful, practical, or beneficial in some way.
Blogging is also where SEO strategies can come into play because writing interesting and engaging content using high-volume keywords your audience uses to search for information will get you in front of their eyeballs. These strategies are basically working in tandem, building off each other to create an overall highly successful marketing endeavor.
Don’t overlook your social media content or consider it an afterthought either. Content marketing on social media is just as crucial as blogging because an organization’s social pages act as social proof and authority. Potential customers want to know they can trust a brand before spending money with them or even listening to what they have to say, and that trust comes in the form of social proof gained by a quality community built by the brand themselves. Spend time developing a strong social media strategy filled with high-quality content both created and curated by your brand and other relevant brands or brand ambassadors that can help tell your brand’s story and relate to your target audience.
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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.
