Content Marketing In Depth Study

What is content and content marketing ?

Let us start with content. Content is information. It is available in the form of audio, video or text. The litmus test for quality of content is freshness of information, ease of readability. Topic relevancy, and usefulness to the user will add up to the test. Content marketing is broadcasting information on products or services to create trustworthiness. It will improve brand image but not sell the product or service. This information makes visitors to know more about the product or service. It will then convert visitors into loyal customers in due course.

The answer for all these questions explain Content marketing?

  • Why is content Marketing or what is the purpose of content marketing?
  • What are the content marketing strategies?
  • What tools are required to develop content marketing?
  • How to evaluate content marketing results?
  • What are the benefits of content marketing?

What is the main purpose?

Content marketing focus on groups of audience searching for specific piece of information. It has three ingredients.

  • useful information or content
  • creation of content
  • publication of content.

From the feed back of new and existing users, content is created or updated continuously. It is a huge business on the internet for online branding. The main purpose of this business is

  • To generate leads to the business
  • to increase online sales or generate customer base
  • engage visitors with content and convert them to customers

Online marketing work in two ways

  1. Creating demand for a new product or service
  2. Understanding the existing customer needs and offering necessary content to meet their demand. Content marketing addresses the second point.

Advantages and disadvantages of Content marketing

Advantages

Companies want to develop trustworthiness and loyalty among its customers. They constantly try to improve their products and services to meet the needs of their existing and expected customers. They collect information in the form of feed backs about their products and services. All this feed back and improvement ideas come from content marketing. Content marketing is well crafted useful information to the customers. With new content published in various media, the companies drastically reduce other marketing expenditure.

Disadvantages

  • Slow process: It will not yield results instantly. The companies opting content marketing as promotional tool should develop content. The content can be in the form of audio, video or text. They have to take care to meet search engine optimization requirements to rank for SERP results. The next task is to make content reach existing and expected audience. The audience will then read, hear or view the content and develop interest in the company and its trustworthiness.
  • Delayed results: The above process takes lot of time and thus the results will be delayed.
  • Not a one man show: To develop content for fairly large company is not a one man show. Writing blog posts or creating audio or visuals to company is hard and time consuming. Huge data is required to create great content, Required content is about the audience, their taste, age, locality to understand them better. The developers must have Knowledge of company’s products and services and know the audience pulse.
Creating fresh content:

It is an uphill task to create fresh content because of the following changes in the industry.

  • audience requirements
  • Google Algorithms
  • content marketing look for fresh content frequently. Creating content thus is a continuous process in content marketing.

Content Marketing Strategies

The strategy is defining a marketing plan, implement the same and analysing the results. The company has to address the strategy for two types of audience

  • existing customers looking for improvement of the product or service
  • new customers want to tie up with you. Recycle the same with added improvements.

Master plan for marketing content

  • Define goal or objective or mission: Clearly identify your target audience for your products or services.
  • Decide the type of content (audio, video or text) you want to develop and publish content to your audience.
  • Be clear about the benefits you audience get from your product or services. These details are normally shown in about us page’
  • Set up key performance indicators: This is most important strategy. This should measure the success rate of your efforts in terms of sales, traffic, conversion, revenue
  • Collect demographic data of your audience: This is also an important strategy. This data will help to shoot the content to the selected audience.
  • Prepare a checklist of methods of content creation, distribution or publication. Manage these tasks through content management tools like WP Engine or HubSpot.

Prove a difference to your customers

Your content should outbeat your competitors in quality of information. Mke the viewers or readers read your content and turn to your product or service. That is how content marketing strategy should be planned and executed.

Content marketing case studies

Case study is a research strategy and in-depth investigations. They analyse gathered data from a variety of sources and record for future reference. Following case studies give insights of content marketing .

Lenovo
  • Lenovo, a leader in laptop innovations deliver their information through video marketing. The content is broadcasted through videos, a powerful and impressive visual treats. These visuals give insights to everything about Lenovo laptops. The series are tips and tricks, Lenovo modern IT, ESD ( understanding electronic discharge), ask support and Lenovo Thinkpad series.

Lenovo video series increased the brand image and site traffic by 10 to 15% . These videos had 35 million social views and 1.5 likes. More about these series at lenovo’s support

Self Growth

Self growth portal has 537,605 self improvement resource articles. They have 34000 experts contributing articles. THeir topics are success skills, relation ships, mental health, finances, health, spirituality, life style and community. They have 2 million visitors in a month round the world. Their e-zines have 500,000 weekly subscribers. They have readers in more than 100 countries. Majority of them are from United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, and New Zealand

Hubspot
hubspot
source : https://www.hubspot.com/

HubSpot develops and sells software products. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah established the company in 2006. These products are designed to offer tools to promote content marketing, anlyle web and optimize search engines. They promote these products through excellent blog articles. Those blog posts are engaging and informative, with deep subject explanation that visitors are looking for. They constantly upgrade their tools to meet current and feed back demands through ebooks, They share their content through a sharing hub called , Inbound.org. Their viewers tho this hub is around 500000 per month. In addition they create videos on the subject and promote them to social media like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Infographics for content marketing

Infographics is the buzzword of the present day to create content to attract visitors. One infographic image tells the story of 1000 words of content. The below infographic image reveals the benefits of content marketing. Imagine how many words of blog article to write to explain the same

content marketing through infographics
What these experts say about marketing content
Ann Handley

Get Control of Your Content Marketing Ideas So You Can Take Action … Make each paragraph & sentence earn its keep, says @annhandley.

Writing is NOT the foundation of good writing. It’s thinking and researching, says @annhandley
.

Ann Handley is the first content officer in the world. Ann have 250000 followers on twitter. She is a columnist for Entrepreneur and a LinkedIn Influencer. She contributed to the following books on content marketing defining Content Rules.

Allison Wert

all good marketing techniques involves content marketing techniques says Allison Wert, content marketing manager, Frontline Education.

Innovative marketing expert Allison Wert proved results of content marketing success through her CMA project. She is an expert in building trust among her audience.

Kamkash podcast interview

Content strategy should answer this question. Can I generate two leads per day? If the answer is ‘yes’, the strategy is on right track. what content should I be generating. The next question is, should I create an ebook, white papers, blog posts to generate leads? answers to these questions answer the right content strategy. This is the opinion of a Social Media Marketing Expert Siddharth Rajsekar in an interview conducted by Nishant

What is the difference between content marketing and digital marketing?

Digital marketing is different from marketing through content. If advertisement through digital media like TVs, sponsored ads is used to marketing brand, products is digital marketing. Remarketing is included in the digital marketing methods.

Apart from content and digital media many other methods reflect the objectives of promoting brand and attracting customers.

  • search engine marketing
  • social media marketing
  • e mail marketing
  • influencer marketing
  • podcast marketing
  • webinars and many more to come.

As all roads lead to Rome, all these techniques is to promote products, services and improve brand image. Attract audience and convert visitors into trusted customers.

More content marketing news and trends

Artificial intelligence will be the upcoming trend to drive the markets.

Google in its digital marketing projects spent 8 million dollars in 2017 towards creating new stories using artificial intelligence (AI). While Google news staff create stories, AI will be used to broadcast. Without using AI completing this project for local stories is impossible.

Content creation and publication through voice is the upcoming trend in marketing content. It is called interactive content – The internet of things (IoT) offer content to visitors through voice-controlled technology. Voice based software is already on its way through SIRI and alexa.

References: case studies content marketing institute