The famous Seth Godin once said, "Content Marketing is all the Marketing that's left." YES! It is.
Instead of creating light and thin-veiled content with many repurposed ads, Marketers must create valuable content for their audience that resonates with their interests and needs.

CONTENT MARKETING, IN ESSENCE

In Today's world, Customers' expectations from brands have increased dramatically, and within the aggressively growing market, the competition has become insane.
So, customers’ behaviors have changed completely through the years because of the rapid and variable social media changes, which put massive pressure on the sellers to go through many trials and errors to STAND OUT!

Hence, customers now only expect high-quality, consistent, and valuable content that answers their questions, goes through every aspect of your product, demonstrates expertise, exposes how keen and detailed you are, tells them what differentiates you in the market, and gives them an insight into how working with you or using your product will be like.

Content Marketing is like having a first date. If you only talk about yourself, there won't be a second date. So, there’s no doubt that you have to work hard to build your credibility and gain their trust to finally reach that stage where they start to trust you as an expert.

WHY DOES CONTENT MARKETING MATTER TO YOUR BUSINESS?

Content is the reason why the research about your business began. Consequently, content marketing is a proven tactic to reach your audience effectively and efficiently.
Numbers in many studies and statistics prove it correct

• Businesses with blogs get more leads than other companies by 67%
• Content marketing generates three times more leads than outbound marketing with 62% less cost.
• 72% of B2B marketers say content marketing increases engagement and generates leads.
• About 47% of different customers view around 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative.
• Businesses that use content marketing get 30% higher growth rates than others that don't.

HOW CONTENT MARKETING WORKS?

Your business can use content marketing in many different stages, from attracting leads to demonstrating your product or service when someone is researching what to buy to close the sales process.
Therefore, delivering the right content at each sales cycle stage is essential, starting from Awareness through Consideration to Purchase.
Let’s break down this process to simplify how content marketing is approached in each stage.

1. Awareness Stage:
It’s the first stage of the sales process, where content should focus on the main top concerns and needs of your audience. This may include creating content about their pain points, challenges, and questions. It should be mainly educational in articles, blog posts, newsletters, videos, eBooks, and more.

 2. Consideration Stage:
It’s the middle stage of the sales process, where content should offer a mix of informative and selling ranges. The content must educate the potential customer about the product or the service features and functions using case studies, how-to articles, checklists, worksheets, and many more. And definitely, this content should support the business offers.
 
3. Closing Stage:
This is the last stage, where content marketing plays a vital role while a prospect is close to buying. The content marketing at that phase must focus primarily on sales by highlighting how you’re the best choice, not how great your products or services are. The best content forms to use at this phase are case studies, user-generated content, product video, research report, and many more.

6 STEPS TO START CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Nothing is worse than a poorly-timed sales pitch. It’s essential to be authentic, support your audience, and perfectly set your content marketing strategy. Here are six main steps to start creating your content marketing strategy.

1. Identify your audience with a clear idea about their priorities, challenges, and preferences. If there're many segments, start selecting one or 2 to work on and crafting a buyer persona for each.
2. Determine the proper content format that matches each sales cycle phase and showcases value.
3. Decide the assigned team members to write, edit, and proofread your copy. Also, determine whether it'd be an internal or external source
4. Determine your distribution channels, whether you'll post content on your site, people it to people, or print it for an event. Answer the "Where" question.
5. Choose a sustainable schedule to engage with the audience consistently by creating a realistic short-term content plan based on the budget and resources.
6. Follow best practices for writing content that fits your audience the best. The best piece of content is short, relevant, and actionable.

FINAL THOUGHTS ABOUT CONTENT MARKETING

Although driving sales is the primary goal of all marketing activities and efforts, content marketing focuses on creating valuable, related, and engaging content for customers.
Let your business's expertise and unique value shine through creating content that attracts, engages, and sells.

Have you ever lived one day without coming across an advertisement ? Most probably, the answer is: NO. Advertising has an enormous impact on consumers and their buying behavior. Therefore, marketers competitively advertise products in multiple ways, and each marketer is trying to hire the most professional agency like Tree Advertising to reach your target audience.

In the past, advertisements used to be hand-written, drawn, and designed on paper. They used to appear in newspapers and street signs. After that, radio, TV and digital advertising followed respectively. Over time, the importance of advertisements has been growing due to the offering of wide range of products, rising competitiveness, the change of people’s awareness, and the diversity of their preferences. Hence, greater efforts and more serious research on users are needed to understand consumer behavior and, consequently, affect buying behavior.

Although there are different ways for researching consumers, common factors should be considered. For example:

1. Demographic factors:
These include age and gender. By knowing consumers’ age and gender, you can use appropriate language and get closer to them. As a result, your target consumers will feel that they are personally addressed.  

A typical example: Birell Egypt
A non-alcoholic barely drink that targets men basically. In all its ads, we can notice that it addresses men and uses their jargon, especially on social media networks. This feature applies to both the content of Berill page and followers’ comments.

2. Customers’ interests:
Learning about your customers’ interests (e.g. sports, travel, fashion, photography, etc.) will make it easier for you to choose the best ad design. As a result, customers are expected to be attracted to your product.

Birell Egypt: Again!
The marketing campaign focused on football as the favorite sport of target consumers (men). So, they incorporated football themes in a way that suits the brand and its essential value.

Whether you manage an entrepreneurial or a non-profit business, marketing is the most essential part of your job and it is essential to have a professional marketing agency like Tree Advertising to reach your needed outcomes.
Marketing comes in various, and continually increasing, forms. It has even developed into an umbrella under which tons of separate marketing specializations and tools are subsumed. Examples of such tools include offline marketing (e.g. posters, signs and events), TV and radio advertisements and e-marketing. Each of these marketing tools has its own sub-divisions.
However, video ads are the most prevalent form of marketing, particularly used by major companies and organizations. At the beginning, they used to be shown exclusively on TV channels, but then they spread on video-sharing websites (e.g. YouTube) and social media networks.
A video ad is created by capturing a number of footages in specific internal or external locations, considering special details and specifications. In this article, we will focus on another form of visual advertising, i.e. Motion Graphics.
The question we will answer is: what makes a business owner or a marketing director to use a studio or a motion graphics designer to market his products and services? What are the advantages of Motion Graphics? Do they offer a useful marketing tool?

THE HISTORY OF ANIMATION.. BETWEEN WINSOR MCCAY & WALT DISNEY

Animations have come to life more than 100 years ago. In the past, videos were made manually before the use of computer programs. For the production of one video, thousands of pictures had to be drawn and then compiled to get the required number of frames: 24 frames per second (fps). Motion is caused by a slight rotation of frames, so that objects seem to be moving when shown on a movie projector.

At that time, the task of an animator was to make flat, 2-dimensional drawings of people and objects, without highlighting minute details.

Though Walt Disney gained widespread fame and was regarded by many people as a leader of animations, the sweeping change he brought about to the cinema industry was not absolutely revolutionary. Before Disney, Winsor McCay and John Randolph Bray achieved a remarkable progress in the world of motion picture films.

At the beginning, animations used to lack smooth movement. It was until 1910 that Winsor McCay, the American cartoonist, showed his first animated film “Little Nemo”, followed by “Gertie the Dinosaur”. Thanks to his highly accurate drawings and unprecedented smoothness, McCay had a notable impact on the animations industry.
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In 1914, a breakthrough in the animations industry was achieved. John Randolph Bray, the American cartoonist, devised cel animation which was then employed in the production of animated films for a long time. Unlike the traditional way of drawing hundreds of separate frames, this technique was based on creating a complicated set of background drawings and scenes on transparent celluloid sheets, and then laying cartoon characters over them to maintain a moving illusion.

Do you think that only consumers decide to prefer one brand over another or there are hidden factors taking part in making that decision?

Many people think that their buying decision of a product is only a matter of free choice without paying attention to the influence of advertising boards, TV and radio commercials, newspapers, social media ads, and most importantly the influence of the opinions and impressions of others about that product.

How do consumers become convinced of one product over another?

Companies start the process of advertising by identifying the unmet needs of consumers and potential customers and then encouraging them to buy those products by highlighting the aspects which satisfy those needs.

For example, you can notice that chocolate commercials stress how having ‘chocolate’ arouse a feeling of happiness. As a result, this product builds in the minds of consumers a specific image of how to satisfy this need.

Another example is how soft drink commercials stress the desire to end the feeling of thirst by having a soft drink instead of water. So the job of adverting is simply to influence consumers to frequently decide between buying one product over another through direct and indirect methods.

​Direct methods tend to point out the advantages of the product and focus on how it can satisfy a particular need or desire. Whereas the target of indirect methods is to influence the behavior of consumers (celebrities are an example of this).