Understanding Content Marketing and Why Your Company Needs It
You may have heard the term content marketing and wondered exactly what that term means. In the digital marketing landscape of websites, blogs, social media, videos, ebooks, and search optimization, the digital content you publish on an ongoing basis plays an important role in sharing your message, strengthening your brand, helping potential customers find you on the web, and most importantly turn prospect leads into customers. The following post offers five key points about content marketing and why your company needs it.
Establishes Industry Expertise and Brand Authority
Your company’s website is an important tool to share information about your business, your services and your industry. It’s an opportunity to be a lead generator, a sales tool, a customer service engagement, and an educational vehicle all at once. It’s a tricky balancing act, however, to offer the correct amount of information on your site. Too little information and the visitor is apt to navigate off and continue their search elsewhere. Too much information and your visitor may be overwhelmed with trying to navigate the dense pages to find what they are looking for. The perfect amount of content will allow you to present your firm as an expert in your field and offer your visitors exactly what they need.
Content such as web pages, videos, white papers, ebooks, and blog posts allow you to educate on specific topics and keep your website up to date and relevant. These types of content help to establish you as an industry expert which ultimately strengthens your brand. Whether you have an in-house team to create and publish dynamic content and continually update it on your page, post it on your social media or communicate to your lead base, or you have chosen to contract with an outsourced marketing agency specifically knowledgeable about content marketing, you will quickly learn that content is a key comment to your marketing strategy.Entices Return Visitors
When you create, curate and publish meaningful and relevant content on an ongoing basis, you continue to engage with your audience past a one-stop visit. By inviting your visitors to subscribe to your blog, like your social media page, or sign up for your opt-in email newsletter, you are creating the opportunity to continue the conversation and fortify that lead-to-sale conversion process. It is important to keep in mind that in order to retain their attention, you must be offering quality content to your subscribers and loyal audience. Content should intentionally serve the purpose to educate, inspire, persuade, promote and engage.Optimizes Organic Search
When someone opens a browser and types words or phrases into a Google search bar to find your business or services, immediately a list of results pop up. What many people don’t stop to think about is how Google knows that you belong in those results and in which place to show your business name and website in the results. There is a complex, complicated, intuitive and mind-boggling series of criteria and algorithms that Google search uses to determine such things. When you are publishing and providing useful and meaningful content to your target audience, and not simply junking up the web with repetitive, salesy and spam-like self-promoting material, Google recognizes and rewards your intentional focus on dynamic quality content with higher-raking search results. These algorithms and search criteria are constantly changing, and so should your content to some degree. What and when and how you publish your content matters. Keeping information current, informative and relevant is key. SEO refers to search engine optimization and is a marketing service offered by digital marketing experts to help you get the best ranking search placement which will ultimately result in more views, leads and conversions.Offers Something to Share
Our digital platforms provide more than ever before the ability for information to be quickly easily and affordably shared, making digital marketing one of the most impactful components to your marketing strategy. When you provide desirable content, it is more likely to be shared, creating even a wider audience. Social Media marketing is a prime example of how things (memes, videos, inspirational stories, news and current event coverage, etc) can be spread virally in a very short time. Improving brand recognition and associating your brand with quality content are the favorable results of publishing content that can be easily shared.
In addition, if you create expert content, other websites (looking to curate and offer good content themselves) may wish to link to it. This idea of back-linking further spreads the visibility of your content and your brand and plays an important role in the criteria used by search engines for your ranking in the results. Again, your outsourced digital marketing agency can help to facilitate and promote these backlink opportunities,Converts Prospects to Leads
In addition to educating and sharing and building your brand authority, the bottom line of marketing is ultimately to increase your business through the conversion of visitors to leads, leads into customers, and hopefully finding yourself with a growing number of loyal, repeat customers. One of the best reasons to focus on content marketing is because of the proven success record and high ROI in the digital space. In short, if you know what you are doing and do it well, It works!
