What is content marketing?
Before we understand how content marketing works, we have to first understand what content marketing is in the first place. According to the oxford definition, content marketing involves creating and sharing online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.
In short, anything that you have posted online as text, picture or even video format and was not sales copy or an advertisement, is content marketing. What defines content marketing is the fact that it involves no explicit brand promotion or even sales.
The purpose of creating content to market your brand is to ensure that people develop a better relationship with your brand and consider you as a leader in your niche and even as someone they can trust. In a marketing world where everyone is out to sell you ideas all the time, content marketing is more of a gift to your followers to connect with them more and offer value. This type of marketing is powerful because ultimately it even helps with the optimization of your page or website. The more trusted content you put out, the more shares and engagements it will have and thus improve your search engine optimization over time.
Why use content marketing?
Other than the obvious “it works”, there are many reasons why to use content marketing over traditional methods of marketing. The first one is that it is cheap. Creating content is much cheaper than traditional advertising methods where one would need to pay ridiculous amounts just to get a 30 seconds slot on radio or TV without direct proof of whether that worked in favour of the brand or not. This brings us to the next use of content marketing…
It provides accurate data that can tell an actual story of how each piece of content is doing in terms of engaging more people in sales if any. While the primary goal of content marketing is not to sell, it is still a good place to track consumer behaviour and over time one can measure which content brings more traffic and which content ultimately leads to sales. The ability to analyze data so accurately gives brands so much information on how they can improve and thus ultimately convert more people into customers.
Content marketing is also very useful because it allows users to engage with the brand directly, thus providing useful insights for businesses to understand their customers. Unlike a TV advertisement that is aired for a few seconds and then disappears, content posted online allows people to engage with it and therefore create an environment where the business and its customers can interact and therefore form a stronger bond than one that can be formed over a brand promotion on other forms of media.
Another use of this type of marketing is that it can establish your brand as an industry leader due to the consistent promotion of high-quality content. Unlike more expensive routes to marketing, using content to promote your brand can allow you to do a lot of research, become a trusted source in your niche and once you are a recognized brand, you can become a thought leader in your industry. This may take a very long time but the rewards are very great.
So how does content marketing work?
There are four main levels someone goes through to reach the sales point from the time they are presented with content.
They are; Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action.
Awareness:
Firstly, your potential customer must be aware of your brand in the first place to have any chance of ending up as a buyer. This is why content is important. You can increase brand awareness by creating content that addresses issues or topics your potential customer is most concerned with. This is the first part of your marketing funnel. The more audiences are hooked to your promotional material, the better.
Make sure your content is relevant, does not seem too much like sales material and is what your potential customers are looking for. Remember, this is about what is going on in the consumer’s world, not yours. You are promoting for your customers, not for you.
Interest
This is a step after awareness. This is the part where our content will we gain their interest. People can only be hooked by high quality content when it comes to marketing. There are no gimmicks to try and go quickly over this important step. Your promotional material has to be engaging and interesting enough for people to be drawn to your brand. Use a powerful content strategy that is set up to take the potential buyer to the next level of the AIDA method.
Things like call to actions that include “follow us for more content” or subscribe to our email for more, keep people within the funnel until they are ready to become your customers.
Desire
After a certain time of consuming your promotional material, your buyers are not only interested in what you have to offer, but also, they now want yours specifically. At first you may have attracted them to buying that product/service, but with enough exposure to your content, they reach a point of desire, where they want YOUR product/services.
This is a very crucial point in the funnel as it is very close to the sale point but is not a sale yet.
When someone is here, a little push is all they need to get to the next level. You have to remind them why they should choose you instead of other brand to fulfil their needs.
Typical content material that would work for people who are here is offers that are hard to resist like “50% off if you buy within the next 7 days”.
Action
According to Mail Chimp content marketing plays an important role when a prospect is close to buying. At the action stage, one can now focus on sales, which is for the most part, not to be used on content marketing.
The main focus is still credentials of your brand and how choosing you is a better option for the consumer than selecting a different business.
From there all one needs to do is to retain existing customers and keep them in the funnel for an extended period.
Conclusion: DO CONTENT MARKETING
The conclusion can be summed up in three words: do content marketing.
LOTS OF IT.
Today everyone is clued to their smartphones and that means the more content you create, the higher the chances of people coming across your brand, therefore it is very important to create content that can easily be shared for your marketing in order to improve brand awareness for your business(or even personal brand).
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