Content Marketing and How it can shape your business
Even though there are countless benefits that content marketing can bring to your business, below, we’ve covered some of the most important ones to help you see opportunities to improve.
What is Content Marketing?
Think about the number of online ads you see on a daily basis. Now, how many of them do you click on? Probably not very many, or perhaps, maybe even none. Every day, internet users are exposed to billions of online ads that are all trying to do one thing – grab their attention.
The way people are researching and buying things these days is completely different from the way it was done even just 10 short years ago. It’s not to say that online ads aren’t effective, it’s just that most companies don’t utilize PPC properly – but more on that later.
Rather than trying to go the hard sale route and tantalize potential prospects with little tidbits of information that inevitably lead to some kind of landing page, content marketing is all about consistently delivering free, valuable, and relevant content to your target audience.
At its core, it is storytelling.
Why Does Content Marketing Work?
Consumers these days aren’t frequently browsing the internet with their credit card in hand, instead, they want to be wined and dined with genuinely helpful information that they can enjoy without having to give you their payment information.
The whole purpose of content marketing is to build trust with your reader base, which then develops into brand loyalty, and, most importantly, happy paying customers. Even though it may sound counterproductive from a cash flow standpoint, the more free information you give you, the more customers you’ll get.
Imagine you’re confronted by two salesmen. One is talking all about the benefits and costs of their product while holding a contract, and the other is offering you a free book that’s packed with information. Which one are you likely to go with? Probably the free book guy.