How Content Marketing Works
Content marketing offers the audience valuable materials to improve insight and solve problems. By learning how content marketing works, you can grow your business.
Businesses use content marketing materials to attract, engage, and keep customers. Here, you will learn the foundation to make content marketing work for you.
What is Content Marketing?
It is creating and distributing marketing content to attract and engage with ideal customers.
The top assets in content marketing are articles, videos, podcasts, webinars, eBooks, and social media posts. These marketing materials help create brand awareness. And it presents a compelling attraction for products and services.
Content lets you communicate with your ideal customer. Communicating in a simple and understandable way helps trigger a buying action.
The Difference Between Content Marketing and Traditional Marketing
Both are marketing concepts operating on different channels and ideals.
Content marketing operates by permission to share information. The idea is to heed the prospect’s call for information (in search results).
Here, your target customer comes to you for information. They do this by searching on Google for specific content to solve a problem. And you serve it to them by the content type you created.
Your ability to stand out matters!
Your content has to provide value in a creative, simple, and informative way. Doing this determines if the audience would choose you or your competitor.
Traditional marketing operates by interruption! The idea is to locate potential audiences and position a marketing piece before them.
You see this in TV commercials, billboards, and newspapers. Some newspapers have more adverts than the news, which is very annoying!
Content Marketing vs. Traditional:
Content marketing focuses on the customer. Thus, it delivers high ROI.
Traditional marketing is a game of chances. And it’s very expensive, often beyond a small business’s budget!
Is Content Marketing the Same as Digital Marketing?
Good question!
You don’t need to confuse the two terms. Think of digital marketing as the house and content marketing as a room in the house.
Digital marketing uses the power of the internet to reach a wider audience. The goal is to create awareness for the business or product and to increase sales!
Content marketing is a specific strategy to achieve your digital marketing goal.
For instance:
A strategy to tap into millennia’s love for music would be to create a blog that promotes music. You share songs and lyrics to attract and engage the youthful audience.
There are several content marketing ideas to achieve your digital marketing goal. Before now, content marketing provided information and trust building. Today, it is a veritable sales engine if you know how to engineer it.
For example:
Businesses use digital marketing tactics, such as PPC, to drive sales. And content marketing helps to attract traffic to achieve the goal.
Both marketing ideas work together to grow the business. So, rather than exploring the differences, let’s think about leverage for success.
How Content Marketing Works in Real Life
You have heard the saying, “The customer is king,” right? Nowhere is it more relevant than content marketing.
Here’s how:
You need an intermediary to market your product and brand in traditional marketing. Digital marketing allows you to do it yourself.
Creating an effective content marketing strategy requires understanding the buyer’s journey. And knowing the sales cycle is crucial, too!
There are processes to engineer your content marketing for super performance.
Here are a few you could work with:
- Set a Goal. You need a goal to decide what you want from the plan.
- Create KPI. You must set key performance indicators to measure goals and know when you achieve them.
- Determine Your Audience. So you won’t come across as an annoying marketer, you have to know who would engage with your content.
- Understand Your Current Position. What are your current content marketing efforts? Are they helping to meet your goal?
- Determine the Best Content Channel. With your goal and audience profile, determine which channel is best for your content. Effective content marketing shoots the right message to the right audience. And it uses the right channel of communication at the right time.
- Choose Content Type. Several contents are out there. Create the best one to optimize your time, money, and resources.
- Provide for Implementation. A plan without implementation is a waste of valuable time. Allot resources to execute your content marketing plan. Done well, you should expect a high ROI!
- Create a Content Calendar. This resource stirs your content marketing projects to fruition. It contains content type, channel, and follow-up details.
You need skills and an understanding of content marketing processes to succeed. But you can leverage the skill set of the pros at the same.
Are You Struggling to Make Content Marketing Work?
There is more to content marketing than we can discuss in a short post. If the content marketing efforts for your business are not fruitful, you need help!
SwingPointMedia is a marketing company focused on using content marketing, such as written articles, videos and podcasts, to attract their customers’ ideal audiences. This approach has proven to attract higher-quality customers while simultaneously reducing the sales cycle by as much as 70%.
SwingPointMedia serves local businesses in Southern California and can be reached by calling 760-422-5176.
Schedule Free Consultation today!
