Content is King: three reasons to supercharge content marketing
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As a business, we at Astoundant are the first to admit that we don’t use the Internet to its full capability. We don’t use content marketing enough. Well, that trend stops right now, and what better way to turn a new leaf than to blog about content marketing.
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as
“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. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues..”
In other words, we are providing helpful information to prospective customers so they ultimately buy from us. This applies to a brick and mortar business as well as an online business.
Content marketing is part of an overall digital marketing strategy. A content marketing campaign can also lay the foundation for SEO marketing.
.Why give away free information and not monetize it? Here are three reasons why.
Expertise Establishment
Most of us run businesses around something we do well or something we know well. What we do or what we know is better than most, so that makes us experts. The challenge is that just because we actually are experts doesn’t mean that we have a reputation as experts. Providing useful, accurate content about our field of knowledge helps establish our expertise.
Customers feel comfortable around experts, and customers are more apt to buy from experts. In today’s economy, products with high review scores on Amazon sell better, Ebay sellers with high scores sell better, and companies with high Yelp reviews sell better. Customers in some industries don’t hand out reviews, so many businesses with years of experience only have local, word of mouth reputation.
Publishing verifiable, helpful content, and a lot of it, solves this problem in time.
Climb to the Top of Search Engines
How do we find things on the Internet? That’s right, with a search engine: by speaking or typing queries into our smartphones, tablets, computers, or other devices. We usually go to the first result, and rarely do we venture past the first page of results. Wouldn’t it make sense for a business to appear at the top of search results?
The first thing that Google’s Webmaster Guidelines says is “create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.” This helps Google to better find and index your website. Ultimately, this helps people interested in your product or service find you.
Producing Content is Free
There’s no better price than free. Since you know your product or service best, all the content comes from you, and you don’t have to get it from anyone else. This isn’t a case of “you get what you pay for,” though.
A sustained campaign of consistent content publishing will yield results. Miles Beckler went from 0 subscribers to 42,000 in a little over 90 days. That may not seem like much to some, but this is an interested audience who looks at his content every time he publishes. And, it’s only going to get bigger.
The best part about a free marketing strategy is that it can easily be incorporated into any marketing strategy. An effective content strategy will produce organic traffic; visitors will come from search engines and other websites.
Conclusion: Produce Content!
To some who already produce content, none of this is new. To the rest of us, hopefully this serves as a wake up call to take advantage of a valuable resource for more than just streaming dog videos or browsing through Facebook. The Internet can turn your business into a money tree if used correctly.
Stay tuned for part two: five tips to supercharge content marketing.