What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on producing and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to draw attention and retain targeted audiences that ultimately drive desirable customer behavior or action. The key word “valuable” describes almost all forms of advertising and marketing, it applies to any piece of content marketing you create, depending on whether the audience received value from it or not. The main goal of content marketing is to create greater value to your target audiences and establish relationships with your prospective and existing customers no matter if you are a small business in Miri or large company in Penang. When audiences regard you as a valuable source of advice and guidance that can lead to success, they are more likely to purchase your product when it is time to purchase.
Why Invest In Content Marketing?
Content marketing is proven as functional as it provides competitive advantage. According to content marketers, content marketing helps businesses achieve 30% higher growth rates than not using it. Besides, 47% of buyers look over 3 to 5 content blogs or reviews before engaging with a business’s product. These statistics show that content marketing can help to grow startup or small business in small town Miri to major city Kuala Lumpur. And this perhaps will change your perspective toward investing in content marketing – businesses with blogs get 67% more leads than their competitors. Now, breakdown into three simples to understand content marketing role in buying cycle:
Awareness: First stage, your content should address audiences’ concerns. The content should elaborate on their pain points, challenges and questions to increase the chance of the audience engaging with you. In short, a customer has a need, but they are not aware there is a solution.
Consideration: Second stage, Once the customers are aware there is a solution and start to research other similar products that are in the market. From here, your content should offer a hybrid of helpful information and marketing and make sure the content is on par with the quality you offer in product or services.
Purchasing: Last stage. The customer develops purchasing behavior with your product or services. At this stage, you can focus on sales content, as long as you continue to highlight why choosing your business over competitors are the best choice rather than just boosting on how great your services or products are.
Value In Content Marketing
Believe or not, the return of investment for content marketing can be phenomenal if used correctly. Potential clients search for information and find our contents useful and relatable, by the time they contact us they’re convinced they will initiate collaboration with us. Content marketing tactics reduce the marketing strategies execution effort with a high rate of success in turning their audience into customers. Furthermore, it provides additional benefits where it supports other digital marketing channels. Social media marketing content and SEO contents are organized and able to generate natural inbound links and build up good content on your platform that gets found when the audience searches for keywords.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes it easy to find your business. Content marketing is often pair with SEO to make sure to include the right keyword in content and attract more traffic into your business platform. Keywords are the foundation of SEO effort where your content describes audiences’ pain points and needs. Also, relevant keywords that match the expertise, products or service that businesses provide. SEO content plays an important part in search success. The traffic rate depends on how well is SEO written content as such whether it delivers on what the headline promises and relevance. The more successful you write content that is relevant to what the audience needs, the more likely the audience will use your platform for valuable content. Thus, content marketing agencies make sure to focus on one central topic in SEO that can highlight your businesses trustworthiness and product or services’ quality. The more focused your content is, the more likely for a search engine to display your page at the top of the first page.
Social Media
The average time spent on social media is more than two hours a day. Social media is a widespread use and low barrier entry for beginners in content marketing. Focus on high potential channels – Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Social media is a sharable platform that motivates people to share interesting, fun or fact content with their audience to get more engagement. So, when you create content to share on social media, you need to make it shareable. As such, catchy headlines, user-friendly visuals, grammar-free copywriting and so on. You need to imagine how the reader feels about your content and how you connect them through emotional writing or visual graphics otherwise the content simply won’t be shared. Our human nature compels us to share what triggers one of our emotions – happiness, anger, amazement, and hilarity. Keep on updating your content and stick to a specific style to train your audience on when to expect from you. The goal of consistency is to build a brand and community that improves your engagement.
In reality, there are many contents that you can try out on your business platform but it might be a hassle to manage it in-house. Horizn Digital is a digital marketing agency based in Miri, which offered content marketing services that not only paired with SEO or Social Media Marketing but with other forms of marketing such as videography, photography and so on. However, you can try to make your own content marketing. The easiest way is to start blogging on your platforms. At first it will be hard to understand the formula of content marketing but the more you do the better the results you get. Following tips from Horizn Digital, you’ll quickly learn how to craft the content for social media that will make your audience engage and turn them into your customers.