How Effective is Content Marketing in 2016?

Few Common Reasons Why Content Marketing Isn’t Working for You

“Content is king” is one of the most widely used phrases in the field of online marketing. Though there are endless debates taken place over the application of this phrase, the point in that there is a bit difference on the content part as compared to other marketing verticals such as social media and SEO.

Just take a thorough look on it.

In one aspect, because of the absence of content, SEO would have make no sense in optimizing anything for search engines. For example, the content included in posts in a bid to help robots such as Google and Facebook cape their digital heads around the intricacies of the content they’re indexing. Every single procured by marketer refers to a piece of content, and the keywords that people search for on search engines also refer to – content.

Think of anything you do on particular day such as email, tweets, Whats App, web page, product description, review – they’re all examples of content, and one of the most promising ways of elaborating.

According to Ian Lurie,

“Content isn’t ‘stuff we write to rank higher’ or ‘infographics’ or ‘long-form articles.’

Content is anything that communicates a message to the audience. Anything.”

Content is at the heart of what people do as marketers; from talking to customers, clients, and readers, content is the common thread with respect to the form they wish to encapsulate.

So, what is content marketing? Really, it’s pretty much simple. Content marketing simply refers to the use of content for the purpose of marketing something both directly as well as indirectly. This could refer to acquisition of potential clients, retaining existing ones, spreading awareness about your products, or really anything else. Let’s have a look some of the most popular and effective methods of doing all the things related to content marketing below.

How can content marketing benefit my business?

One of the most prominent reasons companies have restrained from allocating resources towards content marketing is the absence of proper know how about the benefits of content marketing. It always seems lucrative to make people aware of your business, its products, but the outcomes are quite imprecise. In such case, it helps to commence thinking about just the number of benefits content marketing can bring. Let’s start with the ones that are more intangible:

The intangibles

Strong brand awareness

Whenever you create content around your business, it provides a means to give your audience something to talk about. When they talk about you, they’re informing each other about your business, giving reviews, and links around in the process. In many aspects, the awareness of your brand is marketing gold.

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Respect and approbation in the industry

It is quite easy to understand that it takes time and trust to earn the respect and admiration of your audience. This could only be done by verifying your knowledge and even your integrity and you can turn yourself into the guiding light that encourage people when everything else seems to infuse confusion. Sites that don’t consider this tend to lack quality, often referred as content factories are meant to give bad or misleading advice, enabling readers scratch their heads and find who they can trust. That could be you. The authority you get then passed on to your products or services, making customers that much more likely to choose you over the competition.

Indirect customer conversions

If you choose to build content that is aimed at potential customers, you tend to bridge the distance between such people and your products. This eventually leads to make people arrive at final decision to make a purchase right at that time or later. This is absolutely true irrespective of the whether or not you mention about the products you sell in.

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Team coordination

Content marketing is also a kind of foundation that can be sought to pave ways for various marketing campaigns. In the form of content, you get a friendly content marketers and a great opportunity to collaborate with teams you may not conversant with. You can even do more with design/UX to create insightful illustrations. You can work with engineers to make sure your content shows up the way it should online. You can collaborate with social and community teams to make sure that right content is rightly promoted, and that’s just the initial way forward.

The tangibles

Site traffic

This is one of the most apparent benefits of content marketing and also most relevant. By creating great content, you can reach out to more people who would love coming to your site for great information which many times leads to the sale of your products and services.

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Focused SEO

There could be numerous ways in which content benefits your SEO efforts. In other words, purposeful content catches editorial links, which convey Google that you’re important and authoritative. Google also crawls your content, attaining a fair idea on what your business is all about, permitting it to return to your site for more focused queries. Just image what will be there for search engines if there is no content.

Direct customer conversions

Properly written product reviews that convince people give unique value to them and increase your credibility of your site in many ways. This ultimately leads to getting more customers to your business.

Can I be really effective in content marketing if I don’t have a huge budget or a large team?

Yes, why not!

If you don’t have the resources that can focus solely on producing content, you could try concentrating on what’s known as “evergreen” content, which needs lesser time and little supervision but can provide to be really effective in the purpose.

But for that you need to be specific to your industry, target audience, your offerings, and the ongoing trend. By keeping a close check on all the associated elements you can choose to create wonders that would be sustainable.

So about that real question… is content marketing right for my business?

Yes, there is no doubt on that part. And you may be already doing it to a limited extent. Could fortifying your efforts with more effective resources help you realize your marketing & business objectives? Yes, without any doubt. Best of luck from my end!