5 Reasons You Should Be Doing Content Marketing in 2020 – 21
Once upon a time, you could lure customers on the basis of a 30 second advert or a print ad. You could go cold calling or even knock door to door to grow your sales. Not anymore.
With more information than ever at the fingertips, today’s consumers search the internet before making an online purchase or heading into a store. As a result, businesses and marketers are having to work harder to earn their customers’ trust and their business. They are constantly looking for creative and impactful ways to market their products or services.
Content marketing has emerged as one of the most effective strategies to achieve this. How? Creating and distributing your own content allows you to tap into a wide variety of consumer segments — even those groups that you may have failed to reach so far. Content that’s informative, helpful and engaging can serve to create awareness about your brand, attract leads, and turn them into loyal customers.
While content marketing is not an overnight job, there’s enough evidence that it works. No wonder, an increasing number of businesses are putting their money into content marketing. According to Content Marketing Institute’s latest survey report, businesses are investing over 30% of their marketing budget in content marketing. If you aren’t one of them, here are five reasons for you to join the content marketing brigade this year.
1. Become more visible through better search rankings
Search ranking on Google or any other search engine is the most critical factor when it comes to marketing your business online. Higher the rank, greater the chances of the visitor to click on your business website. Search engines’ algorithm ranks a website on the basis of relevance, originality and unique information that it provides to a user. This means, when you serve up high quality content that your target audience finds useful and interesting, you have better chances of climbing up the search rankings.
You may be doing SEO for this exact purpose and wondering why you need content marketing for the same. Well, your SEO needs to go hand-in-hand with content marketing. Otherwise, neither will fetch you the desired results. As Neil Patel puts it: “SEO and content marketing are like PB&J. They go together. They just fit. They work well together.”
2. Build your brand
Brand reputation management has become a dedicated exercise in today’s digital world. And, producing quality content on a consistent basis is a great way to build your brand’s authority and positive image. Over 86 percent businesses have admitted about doing focused content marketing in B2C to build their brand.
Great content helps in building a bond of trust with the customer, while entertaining and educating them about what you do and why you do it. And, we all know that people buy from brands that they trust. This is why it’s important to create content with the genuine intent to help your customers or solve their problems. Leads and sales will follow.
3. Improve customer engagement
Content marketing is not just about creation and distribution of content. It also involves encouraging customers to engage with your business through contests, offers and other promotional activities. Well though-out campaigns presented at the right time, at the right place helps businesses to establish solid engagement with customers for better brand awareness and sales.
4. Drive more sales
Wondering if content marketing can directly impact your sales? Consider this: 61% of U.S. online consumers made a purchase after reading recommendations on a blog. In fact, according to Nielsen, consumers are five times more dependent on content than they were five years ago.
5. Everyone can do it
Unlike big brands, small businesses have to work with tighter marketing budgets. And, for most of them, traditional marketing mediums such as TV and billboard ads are not an option. With little upfront cost and potential for high ROI, content marketing is something that any business — regardless of its size — can perform and benefit from. This is a reason why more and more businesses are leveraging content marketing. CMI’s latest findings show that 91% of B2B organizations and 86% of B2C companies are doing content marketing, in some form or another, to grow their business.
While there are more ways to benefit from content marketing, let these five reasons motivate you to get started today.
CONTENT MARKETING METRICS FOR BUSINESS GOALS
What are the top goals of your content marketing strategy?
• Is the focus on attracting new customers to help fuel future business growth, so your priorities may be lead generation and customer acquisition?
• Is the objective to build trust in your brand and establish your organization as an industry thought leader? In this case, your content marketing metrics may revolve around social
media engagement, market education and website traffic.
• If your strategy’s main goal is to encourage sales and drive revenue growth, the focus may be on lead nurturing or customer retention.
Most marketing teams have multiple objectives but identifying which matter the most – right now – is critical to creating a results-driven content marketing strategy.
• Website metrics – page views, unique visitors, average time on page, percentage of returning visitors, the number of pages per visit etc
• Email metrics – open rate and click-throughs
• Gated content – number of downloads and how many times a form is filled out correctly before downloading an eBook or other digital asset
• Social media – link click-throughs
• Feeds – number of clicks and views
Metrics include the number of new leads generated and the number who interact with a specific piece of content. Your conversion rate will show which pieces of your content are the most effective. If you are focus is on lead generation, it’s also useful to include time to conversion and per channel conversion rates.
Andy Alagappan, COO Epromotionz
832-677-4620 281-570-5804
Two Time Best Selling Author On: Inbound Marketing & OnLine Marketing Strategies.
Award Winning Digital Marketing Agency.
www.B2BinboundMarketing.net < web marketing / leads generation!