As companies grow, their audience also grows. This means you need to develop a creative technique to communicate with your audience and induce CTA indirectly. As part of building a strong profitable audience base, it is important to consider following a content marketing strategy.
What is Content Marketing?
According to Marketing Institute, 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.”
Content marketing is based on three main elements; value, relevance, and consistency. Those elements are the key success factors for any content strategy if implemented right. Delivering value is about offering your audience content they are willing to consume. Relevance is about offering your audience content relevant to their needs and expectations. Consistency is about maintaining consistent content with uniform style, tone, and voice.
As suggested in the definition above, content marketing is about attracting, maintaining, and retaining potential customers through engaging them with blogs, news, articles, podcast, and videos. The more you engage people with your news and what you do, the more you will understand how they think about your offerings.
What Makes Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing is crucial in building a loyal audience with a strong base. However, when people interact with your content, they express their thoughts and believes towards certain issues regarding your product/service. Which gives room for possible improvements on your product/service and can save you time.
The most important thing to consider about content marketing is that it is a way to convince people indirectly to get what you offer. This can be done by illustrating the competitive advantage of your offerings via blogs and articles for example. Moreover, it increases the exposure of your brand and promotes brand awareness.
Companies adopt a content marketing approach to get more leads. Statistics show that companies with blogs get 67% more leads than those who don’t have blogs.
How Does Content Marketing Work?
Content marketing is an efficient approach to attract leads if it was implemented correctly at each stage of buying cycle. Here is how the process goes:
The first stage of the buying process is the awareness stage, where a customer might be aware that there is a suggested solution to satisfy his needs. At this stage, the content should focus on the needs and concerns of your customers. The content should also be informative, educational and can also suggest advice or poses a solution.
- Research and Consideration
The second stage comes to the research and consideration stage, where the customer now is aware that there of the suggested solution and starts to compare offered products/services from different vendors according to what fits their needs. At this stage, the content should contain marketing messages to show the uniqueness of what you offer. In addition to offering to include sufficient information about your offerings, functions, and features that would satisfy their needs and wants.
The third and last stage is the purchasing stage, where the customer finally makes the buying decision and proceeds to close the deal. At this stage, the content should focus on driving sales and promoting your competitive advantage among your competitors.
Summing Up
You need to be clever and smart with your strategy and its implementation. As the audience is more concentrated on learning about different products offered by companies through their shared content.