Everyone’s heard of content marketing. Nearly every e-commerce business uses it, but not all individuals know what exactly it is and how to employ it strategically. Let’s change that. Content marketing statistics are impressive. In 2016, 90% of B2C companies used it, and the numbers have only continued to climb since then. It’s understandable, as content marketing offers 3x more leads than traditional marketing efforts, while costing around 62% less.
Source: highervisibility.com
Why is it so popular and how is it so effective? In order to answer those questions, we must first explore what content marketing is.
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?
Content marketing is all about creating high-quality content that provides value to your brand’s target audience. Overall, the main goal of content marketing is to simply grow your business. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? However, as you might notice, this process involves some significant factors.
HIGH-QUALITY CONTENT
Not any kind of content will do. If you want to build audience loyalty and get more shares, you need to offer them content that benefits them in some way. This isn’t always about creating content that’s strictly informative; in fact, one survey showed that 48% of people that share content on Facebook do so because they want to entertain their friends. As such, content marketing can take both a formal and informal approach. However, this content should still satisfy the needs of your audience and be relevant to your business as well.
FOCUS ON THE TARGET AUDIENCE
The more honed-in the focus of your content marketing approach is, the more effective it turns out to be. When you tailor your content to a specific audience, you have far better chances of catching and sustaining their attention. This is done by researching the issues your target audience experiences related to your niche, and crafting top-quality content that aims to succinctly answer their queries. The more in-depth and credible the content, the better. It’s also important to talk to your customers in their own language, both literally and figuratively.
For businesses looking to go global, it’s essential to translate and localise your content to suit the individual countries and cultures you’re targeting. Whereas translation is about rendering a source text into a different language while maintaining its original meaning, localisation goes deeper, recreating content in a way that takes many cultural and linguistic factors into account.
AIMED AT GROWING YOUR BUSINESS
Content marketing can help grow your business in many ways. This is true for enterprises both big and small—B2B and B2C. But how does it work? When you create useful content and share it online via multiple platforms, you become more visible to a larger audience. Furthermore, when the content is useful, it helps to build your brand’s authority, making you look trustworthy. After all, consumers are more likely to buy from brands who have already offered them something useful, such as information or expertise.
Source: neilpatel.com
WHY CONTENT MARKETING IS IMPORTANT TO CONSUMERS
Though advertising does change with time and has become more diverse over the past decade, consumers still got tired of it. These days, they have a strong appetite for good information, and most importantly, the opportunity to satisfy this appetite with the help of online content. Modern consumers don’t want to buy something just because they were told to do so. In fact, most consumers don’t want to be told to do anything.
What they do want is to get familiar with brands and companies, building relationships and gathering information about their products and services before making a purchase. This pivotal stage is called the zero moment of truth (ZMOT). Therefore, brands can use content marketing to meet this demand for information and transparency, incentivising customers to purchase products and services in an indirect way.
WHY CONTENT MARKETING IS IMPORTANT FOR SEO
SEO is important for business. Sometimes, the best way to attract new clients is to show up on the top of search results. In order to achieve that, you need to meet Google’s demands, which isn’t always easy. Google algorithms have changed a lot over the past few years. Now it’s all about the quality of the content. It needs to be up-to-date and shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords or overly optimised in other ways. As long as you continue to update your website, blog, and social media with high-quality, unique content, you can improve your Google rankings.
EXAMPLES OF CONTENT MARKETING
Inexperienced marketers might think that content marketing is all about articles and social media posts. However, content marketing comes in many forms, as we can see below.
Source: cloudfront.com
Moreover, you shouldn’t settle for creating just one or two types of content if you want to maximise the impact of your content marketing strategy. The more diverse your content is, the better it could be for your business, and therefore, your bottom line.
Source: graphicmama.com
Of course, coming up with all kinds of different content can be hard, especially if you’re the owner of a small business or simply don’t have much experience in content creation. In that regard, you can always turn to Yuqo for help. Online content is our expertise, and we are here to provide you with the services and advice you need to boost your content marketing strategy. Therefore, if you want faster results with greater impact, reach out to us today.
