While companies have relied on traditional marketing strategies for decades, some are still wondering, what is content marketing really? And why do I need it now?
Content marketing, when you peel away all the layers of techniques, trends, and possibilities, is a business opportunity.
Because it’s a tool they can use for growth. As businesses struggle to achieve growth in a challenging business environment, we’re seeing more interest and budget shifting to content marketing as the best choice for marketing budgets.
Quick Takeaways:
Content marketing is an opportunity to reach and convert new customers.
Content marketing drives measurable results and ROI over more traditional marketing tactics.
Content marketing allows you to build relationships that enhances brand trust.
Content marketing focuses an organization on telling brand stories that resonate with customers.
What Is Content Marketing Really?
Content marketing is the process of consistently publishing content that audiences want to consume. It involves brands acting more like publishers and creating content on a destination you own (your website) that attracts visitors.
Content marketing is not the same thing as content. It is customer-focused, answering important customer questions and meeting their needs and challenges.
Content marketing creates a financial asset. It allows businesses to reach, engage, and convert customers they would have never seen by using the keywords customers use and creating the content they consume on your own website to answer those questions.
Content marketing represents the gap between what we produce as brands and what our audience is looking for. It leads to quantifiable business value.
That makes it really different than advertising (more on that in a bit).
What makes content marketing denver different than other types of marketing is in the ROI and business value it delivers over time.
Content marketing allows any business to increase their presence in organic search because it focuses on sharing thought leadership. By using SEO and content insights as critical components, content marketing is increasingly more and more aligned with customer needs.
However, for content marketing to work, it must be well-executed. That includes developing a content strategy.
Successful content marketers align themselves to a content calendar – 12 months of content ideas based on data. Then that plan is executed and optimized on a regular basis
For many companies, content is randomly published based on requests from executives. These random acts of content do not support strategic goals and often produce little in the form of business results.
The Business Advantage of Good Content Marketing
Unlike other approaches, there is something special that makes content marketing stand out as the best of modern marketing methods: It’s sustainable.
When done well – with a strategy behind it and relevancy within each piece – it offers the benefit of exponential growth, building brand awareness and trust, winning over prospects and convincing leads, and endearing your customers, helping to build a loyal base of brand advocates.
Once you get your content marketing strategy going, it’s that positive snowball effect in action. Your brand presence gets bigger and more impactful. It becomes easier to achieve your marketing goals with future content because you already have a foundation in place – a vast content library of written, visual, and experiential content, all designed to resonate with your target buyers.
This is in contrast to traditional marketing. Advertising, even with today’s sophisticated digital ads, can create overexposure. Audiences become saturated with brand promotion that offers no genuine value to the people you’re trying to build customer relationships with.
Content Resonates, Advertising Saturates
A critical factor in your content marketing is relevance. What are your customer’s challenges, pain points, and needs? That’s what you should be writing about, not producing a commercial for your brand. Well-written, insightful content draws your audience in and sets you up as a thought leader.
On the contrary, advertising, even digital ads, leads to overexposure and saturation. You haven’t attempted to build a relationship with your audience. Instead, you’ve only captured a story about your brand as the star with no room for the real hero, your customer.
To sum it up, as I said a few years ago, the right content is “a vehicle that can deliver us from the throes of the ‘death by SPAM’ illness that still persists in many marketing organizations.”
The Impact of Content Marketing on Business
So, you may still be wondering, why content marketing? Isn’t it just throwing up a blog every now and then? How do you know content marketing has real ROI (return on investment)?
It’s normal to have apprehension about investing in something that seems hypothetical in nature. But the stats don’t lie. Consider these impressive numbers:
Web traffic growth: Companies that blog have, on average, 434 percent more indexed pages than those that do not. More content equates to more traffic, and content marketers have seen 7.8 times higher year-over-year growth in unique site traffic. (Source: Aberdeen)
Leaner budget but bigger results: Content marketing garners three times more leads than paid search advertising. Additionally, it costs 62 percent less to execute content marketing versus any other type of campaign. (Source: Demand Metric)
Higher conversion rates: Brands that use content marketing can expect 6 times higher conversion rates. (Source: Aberdeen)
More chances for your brand to get in front of the right eyes: 47 percent of internet users read blogs daily. (Source: Statista)
Buyers crave content in the decision-making process: 80 percent of business owners and executives prefer to learn about brands through articles rather than ads. 41 percent of B2B buyers consume three to five pieces of content before talking to sales. (Source: Demand Gen Report)
Thought leadership: Developing a credible library of content that signals your authority and expertise draws in decision-makers. In fact, 60 percent of buyers said thought leadership convinced them to purchase a product or service they had never considered previously. (Source: Edelman-LinkedIn)
The numbers don’t lie. This is but a short collection of what you can expect when you put momentum behind your content marketing. You can realize these benefits and more. However, you have to start with a strategy, discerning what content marketing means to your business and how you’ll go about being intentional with what you produce and disperse.
There are plenty of excellent content marketing examples from brands big and small across all industries. I’ve got one great example to share with you now, which is even more meaningful given the current environment.
Cleveland Clinic, one of the most respected healthcare brands, established a campaign around its value of putting “Patients First.” The objective was to have all its 40,000 employees, which they call “caregivers,” to engage with this value and live it every day.
To do this, they created a video, “Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care.” The powerful video was first used internally but was then posted publicly on social media and its blog, Health Essentials. The blog saw substantial growth, with 6 million visitors each month!
