An Inbound Marketing Approach
Content Marketing is, without a doubt, an Inbound methodology.
We can say that inbound marketing is any strategy that aims to capture people’s interest in a non-invasive way.
Companies launch “bait” – in the form of relevant and relevant content for the consumer – so that it is people who seek the company and not the other way around. Very different from more traditional marketing (Outbound Marketing), where the same message is delivered to a large audience in an interruptive way, whether or not it is relevant to those people. It’s one-size-fits-all marketing.
Whatever marketing tactics you’re using, content marketing should be part of the process, not something apart. Quality content is part of every form of marketing:
» Social Media Marketing: content marketing strategy comes before social media strategy.
» SEO: Search engines reward companies that consistently publish quality content.
» PR: Successful PR strategies address issues that matter to readers, not your business.
» PPC: for PPC to work, you need great content behind it.
» Inbound Marketing: content is the key to driving inbound traffic and leads.
It’s thus no surprise that content marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach new customers. It will drive traffic to your website, helps establish you as an expert in your industry and provides audiences with helpful, actionable content they need to solve their problems. So it’s these and other these and other exciting benefits of content marketing you can see below.
1. Builds Authority and Credibility
Your company content should highlight your “expertise” in the field and provide valuable answers to your audience’s questions. Your customers will be more inclined to trust you if they see you as an industry expert.
Improving the quality of your content is critical to the success of your content marketing campaigns.
The quality of your content is directly related to the profile of your audience. By understanding your audience’s needs, you’ll be able to offer more relevant content.
Showcase your capabilities through content that proves your strengths as a business and what you can do for your customers.
2. Brand Affinity
By producing high-quality content, you’ll be able to increase people’s interactions with your brand, thus enabling closer proximity and even increasing loyalty with your audience.
If you regularly provide actionable content, your audience will seek you out when they need more than they can do on their own.
When you create value without getting anything in return, your audience is more likely to trust your advice and recommendations.
Your brand reputation improves when your content displays in the right place, at the right time and to the right audience. The more quality content customers see, the more likely they are to have a positive association with your company.
3. Generates atraction on social networks
Social media and content are not the same things, but they are, for sure, good companions. The benefits of content marketing show up in social media and vice versa.
Potential customers who find your website’s content helpful and relevant become your advocates on social media. Those who discover you on social media may very well access your website, blog and email list.
Distributing your content across various social media platforms will increase your exposure. By doing so, more users will see and read your material, plus they will have the opportunity to share your content with their friends and followers, increasing your circle of followers considerably. Over time, you will gain more and more social media followers and, as a result, more social media traffic.
Sounds easy: Publish content on your website, use social media to promote it, grow your audience and do it all over again.
Either way, it takes resilience. It takes time and implies continuous effort until you get a meaningful boost in website traffic as a content marketing strategy’s outcome. Don’t give up! It will pay off.
Consistently writing and publishing the best possible content for months or even years without any significant movement can be extremely disheartening. Resist because the time will come – and you’ll soon start experiencing the kind of traffic and growth you want – it just takes time and perseverance. Once you get past this inflexion point, the growth rhythm accelerates rapidly.
4. Increased Conversions
One of the most important benefits of content marketing is inbound lead generation. Adding more quality content to your website helps create a bigger digital footprint. That will lead to a higher likelihood of your business in search results.
Whenever you create well-optimised content that answers a question or solves a problem, you are more likely to rank higher in search engines. That helps increase organic traffic, creating more opportunities for visitors to become leads and ultimately convert (regardless of whether your conversion goal is traffic, leads, sales or other).
In other words, the information you provide will enable consumers to make a more informed buying decision, and by seeing you as an expert, they’ll have more confidence that it’s the best option. After all, it was you who helped them get there.
Also, don’t forget that your content should always include a CTA (Call-to-Action) and guide the reader on what to do next.
Finally, remember to use common sense and not turn your content into an advertisement.
5. Lower Marketing Costs
Content marketing only costs time. It’s incredibly cost-effective and even better – it offers varied returns. The first few months (or even 2 years) of a content marketing strategy may not yield many results, but in the coming months, you will start to see growth. A few months later, you’ll see more, and suddenly, you have significant exponential growth.
Content marketing is cheap, safe, available to anyone in any industry and beneficial in many different areas. The sooner you start investing here, the sooner you’ll start seeing results, and the better results you’ll get. Whether you’re aiming to increase traffic and conversion rates or you’re just trying to build a better relationship with your customers, there’s no reason for content marketing not to be included in your marketing strategy.
Content marketing can reduce your marketing costs. It can decrease your advertising spending. And your ROI grows over time.
But understanding the benefits of content marketing isn’t enough to get you there. The competition is fierce, and it’s not enough to make it equal to winning this game.
If you need help from those who know, saving you time to focus on the core of your business, contact Link37. We know how to leverage your business.-9
6. Higher Visibility in Search Engines (SEO)
Every new post you add to your blog is another page that Google will index. More pages don’t always correlate with more search traffic, but having more quality pages indexed can give you more opportunities to appear in searches. If you target “long tail” keywords and topics that your customers search frequently, you should have no problem showing up in these searches with your archive of posts/information.
Creating quality content also helps in building your online authority.
7. Larger Remarketing Audiences
We’ve left to last an unexpected benefit of content marketing and one that can help you grow your business.
In a perfect world, people browsing the web find your content organically thanks to your meticulous SEO efforts, carefully read every word you write on your blog, and then buy things on your site.
Unfortunately, that’s not quite how content marketing works.
One of the most rewarding benefits of content marketing is that it allows you to create highly fine-tuned remarketing audiences based on your website traffic, a very effective technique for increasing conversion rates. How?
One of the best things about remarketing is that we can create custom audience segments based on virtually any criteria that are important to you. When it comes to content, meaningful behaviours can be extraordinarily valuable, especially if you have to segment your database by goal or conversion funnel stage.
For example, we use content remarketing to create personalised lists of all segments that will feed into ongoing or future campaigns. We use lists of people who read the blog regularly but haven’t yet downloaded one of our guides. We have lists where people have downloaded various guides on specific topics and also visited have also visited selected pages on the site, like the Products or Pricing pages. We have lists of people who have reached a particular stage in our conversion path but, for some reason, have not converted.
In other words, data analysis on (analytics) content is a treasure trove of valuable user data that you can use in other marketing campaigns.
Content marketing is cheap, safe, available to anyone in any industry and beneficial in many different areas. The sooner you start investing here, the sooner you start seeing results. It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in increasing traffic, conversion rates, or just improving your customer relationships, there’s no question that content marketing should be included in your marketing strategy.
Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately to drive profitable customer action.
LAST UPDATE ON APRIL 2024
