WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING AND IT’S IMPORTANCE

Microsoft founder, Bill Gates once quoted in an essay that, “content is king”. In the essay, which he wrote in 1996, he describes the future of Internet as a marketplace for content. Content marketing was being used long before the introduction of Digital Marketing. Marketers have been applying the power of content through mediums like newspapers, radio, television etc.

Content Marketing

No marketer in today’s business world will under-estimate the power of content marketing. The popularity of content marketing is increasing day by day. Content marketing is the process of creating high-quality, valuable content to attract, inform, and engage an audience, while also promoting the brand itself. With the help of content marketing, companies can provide truly relevant and useful content to their prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.

Content marketing is all about providing the right information to the prospective customers who are in need of information regarding buying of the product or services. It’s not about forcing a sales pitch on your customers but about using the pull marketing technique to attract them towards your brand. The idea central to content marketing is that a brand must give something valuable to get something valuable in return.

Without content, SEO’s wouldn’t have anything to optimize for search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.,  The metadata they add to posts is an attempt to help platforms like Google and Facebook, by making the complexities of the content much more simpler while they're indexing. Every link earned by every marketer points to a piece of content, and the keywords that people type into search engines are an attempt to find content. Every post, blog, email, tweet, landing page, and every product description are all examples of content.

Content Marketing can be done through many different ways, as per the creativity of the marketer and according to the nature of the product you are selling. Some examples of content marketing that can be infused to your marketing strategy can be,

1   1.WebPages. There is a huge difference between a normal webpage and a webpage that is content marketing. Digital marketers use different techniques which guides the users to the landing webpages. Content marketing can be efficiently used over here in providing the correct and useful information for the prospective customers when they arrive at the landing webpages.

2    2.      Blog Posts. There are marketers who consider blogging as the foundation of content marketing. Blogging is a marketing tactic that uses content to get your business more online visibility. A business blog is a marketing channel just like social media, direct mail, email marketing, etc. that helps you to support business growth. It does that by driving traffic to your website and providing opportunities for that traffic to convert to sales leads.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                3. Podcasts. Podcasts use an audio file to share information through computers or portable music devices like MP3 players. Integrating podcasts into your marketing plan will offer many benefits to your company including audience connection, simplicity, brand awareness, better relationships because the customers are directly listening to your company representative.

Customers want a company that knows the industry, so the podcasts help build up that trust.

 4.Videos. The effective way of using videos as part of a content strategy is keeping it as timeless as possible. Or else, you will have to risk wasting resources updating videos every year. High-quality video content can also be used to expose your brand to YouTube’s large and active audience. 

 5.Infographics. These are generally long, vertical graphics that include statistics, charts, graphs, and other information. Infographics can be effective in that if one is good it can be passed around social media and posted on websites for years. 

Even though the content is king, there are some other factors that marketers should keep in mind while using it in their business processes. The prime factors being ensuring the quality of the content that you provide for your users, ensuring that enough back-linking is done with various social media platforms so that your content gets enough audience, updating the info from time to time, adding a call to action (CTA) to your content etc.

Team Chee-Ron’s

Vyasan H.