How Content Marketing can help your BUSINESS?

Content Marketing

How content marketing can support your business?

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.