Regarding the paradigmatic change that inbound marketing generated in the ways of advertising and marketing, using social networks and blogs to produce sales acquired a new meaning. The importance that these digital tools now have has focused the attention of companies on creating attractive content for the masses, whose format is appropriately adapted to these platforms according to their characteristics and functions.
Content marketing is complicit in this need and is consolidating itself as a specialty of digital marketing whose objective – to quote some words from Joe Pulizzi – is to create and distribute relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and gain the attention of a particular target audience. Content marketing shares this purpose with the inbound marketing methodology, which in the attraction stage, promotes the creation of content with a high educational component, which gives consumers the possibility of understanding and solving their problems.
We know that now as a project entrepreneur, you recognize the importance of having a corporate blog that provides valuable information to your buyers (76% of B2B marketers decided to produce more content in 2016) in this sense, we invite you to learn Other benefits of content marketing so that you can carry out this strategy in your company:
1. Increase the visibility of your brand
90 % of B2C Businesses (that is, those that direct their sales to the final consumer) use content marketing to build and promote their brand image. It doesn’t matter if your company sells advice, products or services, The idea of creating content that drives your company’s value proposition is vital to obtain greater visibility on the Internet. If your content connects emotionally and professionally with your potential clients using websites, social networks, email or any digital channel – to give an example – you will have more opportunities to make your brand visible. The use of various channels will allow you to attract the right audience from different sources and achieve greater web positioning.
Search engines are responsible for positioning content that achieves wide visibility both on blogs and on social networks. Search engine crawlers or web spiders, which are responsible for indexing and positioning web pages in search results, establish the quality of the content as an important variable within the classification process. In this sense, adapting the content you want to distribute to each of the social media to achieve positioning and visibility is a goal that content marketing can help you achieve.
2. Generate trust and empathy
When you educate over selling, people feel more listened to and less persecuted. Content helps get more leads than paid ads, which is why content marketing has had a strong role in sales processes. Nowadays, most users research the Internet before purchasing and place more value on companies that offer them useful content. Those companies that manage to truly connect with your interests earn your trust and empathy. To achieve this, content marketing is dedicated to understanding in depth how the mentality of the ideal buyers (buyer personas) works for your company, so plan exclusive content for them. Sometimes it’s not just about the content, but who the reader behind it will be. Another element that content marketing has in common with the inbound marketing methodology is that both establish the needs of buyers as a priority. Thus, generating trust becomes something more tangible since it becomes the center of attention of this discipline.
3. Build customer loyalty
The relationship you can maintain with your customers should not end after the purchasing process. On the contrary, this is when it should be emphasized the most. Not in vain, retaining a client costs less than finding one. To demonstrate this, Emmett Murphy & Mark Murphy developed a study that showed that a 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as reducing costs by 10%, in this sense building customer loyalty becomes an important task of content marketing since a successful way to do it is by providing valuable content.
In this way, creating content also for buyers who are at that stage is essential to achieve that loyalty. Content marketing, through blogs and social networks, facilitates this process since after knowing how your ideal audience thinks, it is much easier to continue giving them content of interest (and not just that which motivates them to make a purchase).
4. Increase your IOR
What is not measured can not be improved. In this sense, Measuring becomes an important task to know if your content marketing strategy is working. The IOR is an indicator that allows you to know the impact of your brand on the relationships with your customers and how profitable your strategy is. In this sense, creating valuable content for your communities will increase that impact. Having a good content plan will help you get more interaction (likes, comments, shares). Remember that there are different types of content and textual content is not the only one that matters. For this reason, content marketing recognizes that web articles and publications on social networks are more effective if they have visual support that allows users to relate more to the disseminated content. This can be images, infographics, videos, GIFs, among others. The way you promote your content will have a greater or lesser impact on your communities. It is recommended that you make the most of all the tools that social networks provide today to make visual content the most attractive of all. Increase your IOR by doing without a graphic designer who generates various types of content and gives it that characteristic touch of your brand.
5. It’s economical
To have a successful content marketing strategy, it is not necessary to allocate a large part of the budget to paid ads and outbound advertising channels. The content that you want to disseminate is created through platforms that only require a simple annual payment (hosting and domains) and others that are simply free, such as social networks. When you do content marketing, the information you publish lasts over time and will always be available on your blog for whatever stage of the buyer journey your buyer personas are in.
When you pay for an advertisement and acquire a certain amount of traffic to your web portals, these are momentary increases that, when the pattern is suspended, consequently, visits decrease. It can become a vicious cycle to pay for positioning when, in fact, creating content that positions itself is much simpler and cheaper, as long as content marketing strategies appropriate to the audience to be captivated are carried out. SEO is precisely about that, acquiring web positioning without using more than the aforementioned resources (valuable content in attractive formats and for educational purposes).
In this way, doing content marketing is extremely economical and above all, effective and not very difficult to carry out in your company. As we have observed throughout this article, it is all about studying in detail what types of people that content is aimed at.
Content has stood out as an important point in marketing strategies. With a special hierarchy, in social media such as blogs and social networks, to the point of becoming a solution for many companies. Content marketing uses all types of channels and formats to attract customers in a non-intrusive way and providing value. It should be noted that not just any content is valid, it must be adapted to the needs of the target audience and the characteristics of the channels to be used: means and end must complement each other strategically to achieve great results.
