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. It is important to consider following a content marketing strategy to build a strong, profitable audience base.
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. If implemented correctly, those elements are the key success factors for any content strategy. Delivering value is about offering your audience content they are willing to consume. Relevance is about providing your audience with content relevant to their needs and expectations. Consistency is 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 beliefs towards specific 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 attracting leads if implemented correctly at each buying cycle stage. Here is how the process goes:
The first stage of the buying process is the awareness stage, where a customer might be aware of 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 and educational and can suggest advice or pose a solution.
- Research and Consideration
The second stage comes to the research and consideration stage, where the customer is aware of the suggested solution and compares offered products/services from different vendors according to their needs. At this stage, the content should contain marketing messages to show the uniqueness of what you offer. In addition to offering, include sufficient information about your offerings, functions, and features that would satisfy their needs and want.
The third and last stage is the purchasing stage, where the customer finally decides and proceeds to close the deal. At this stage, the content should drive sales and promote your competitive advantage.
You need to be clever and intelligent with your strategy and its implementation as the audience is more concentrated on learning about different products companies offer through their shared content.