Content marketing is a strategic marketing 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.

What content marketing is?

With the evolution of online marketing with its new concepts as “Permission Marketing”; the traditional marketing approaches are on their way to be expired!

Traditional marketing is on a downward slope with a flat end. No one could think that he may drive along streets without banners, watch TV without commercial ads … etc. that’s why the curve will be flattered.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing 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.

If you have any engagement with marketing communications principles then you are more likely to find the primitive difference between marketing & sales. While the “Sales’’”  mission is ultimately selling the product to the customer, the “Marketing” raises product awareness & grabs customers to the research stage & then to consideration. It means that marketing paves & eases the way to sales!

But how do “Marketing” efforts do so? 

Old age, traditional marketing & advertising whether on social media or search engines such as google took the responsibility of raising awareness & brand recognition i.e. it handles the full process of purchasing cycle starting from the awareness passing by research & consideration stages till reaching the buying stage (the ultimate objective). 

Nowadays the first two stages of the process of raising awareness & research are mainly handled by content marketing & by somehow the consideration & buying as well …..

Your audience no longer needs fictional & stimulating advertising approaches, they need something more realistic & trustworthy. It’s better to give an account of your product or service from a real perspective, and try to show how it is beneficial without exaggeration as much as possible!

Finding that balance between convincing & exaggeration; needs a lot of experience & the know-how that “Select” can offer you ….

Done right, content marketing can ease the “Sales Team” burden. When your customer or even a prospect reads your content – whenever you publish it – it clearly makes the decision of proceeding or not. After that, the sales role will be just for more persuasion, further in-depth information, agreement settings, contracts, checking …etc.

 It all lies in what to write & where to publish 

Why content marketing?

Shifting to online marketing & somehow neglecting traditional marketing techniques is the main proponent of content marketing’s fast evolution.

We can say that content marketing remolds the face of marketing & sales strategies. 

Content Comes in All Shapes and Sizes

Content has no specific criteria, it is all about writing what fits your business, your audience & your industry.

However, there are the most common ones & that are required almost by all businesses such as: 

1-Social Media Post

It may be a text, image, or video format on social media platforms pages that cause a significant increase in followers. It is considered the most adopted type of content writing that almost fits all industries. It highly ranks in content marketing stats. 

2-Longform content

It is articles, whitepapers, ebooks, reports, and more. It is considered the second most required shape of content marketing. That type of content fits more on websites that’s why it is called “web content”. That type of content is the joker as can serve in many channels; it is published on the website, its excerpt is for social media for the same topic & as a link for more readings summarized in an infographic, transcripted into a video … etc.

3-Newsletters

This kind of content fits more dedicated organizations that have a clear content publishing schedule as well as regular updates, events, and information to connect with readers, however, almost all companies have one. With a subscription to your newsletter, your prospects have a better chance to be qualified customers. 

4- Infographics

It is about providing pieces of information in graphic format. 

Upon records, infographic usage grew from 9% to 52% & infographic demand has grown 800% in one year. Recently people get bothered more by reading articles but when it includes an infographic that collects an idea in just one image motivates them more to continue reading as well as grabbing the information much better. 

It is about providing information in an appealing format.

5- Reviews

It is a very impressive part of any website after testimonials. It lends credibility to your business. That’s why testimonials & advocacy are considered powerful converters.

• Also, there are some other content formats that are less required & sometimes more used by specific industries. It may include:

1- Case Studies

Customers’ success stories have a role in attracting more leads. It somehow acts as testimonials but in a longer format. That kind of content is more used by startups that would like to show their success stories!

2- Image galleries and slide shares

Get your brand message across with images. That shape may be blended into other types of content & more used for social media. 

3-Podcasts & Webinars

Informative audio/visual content that is accessible anytime online. That type is more related to industries that are involved in continual updates & users need a manual such as software & ERP industries.

4- Live video chats & events

Boost customer connection with live interactions.

5-Online games, polls, and quizzes

Interactive Content that gets great engagement

Content Distribution Channels

Distribution channels are where your content exists. These channels are not necessarily to be from your side thanks to social media. Any interaction on your content is perceived as another new one. I.e, when you publish content on one of your social media accounts & one of your customers, shares this content; when it is shared then it is supposed to be a new one. 

For a more precise talk; let’s classify the channels under the following categories:

1- Owned:

It is the content that is managed by your own company team. The content is published on your owned media like website, blog, mobile site & social media channels.

2- Earned:

It is the readers’ interaction with your owned content via shares, mentions, reposts & reviews. It helps in increasing the probability of visiting your page or site. This can be used as an insights source, if the users interact with the content then it is performing well!

3- Paid:

It is advertising your content using PPC, display ads, retargeting, influencers, social media ads, and paid content promotion. It is something like stimulation for the content to spread more. This opens the road more for “owned” media” & offers a better chance for “shared” one due to high exposure.

• It is more productive to use a blend of all channels with the ultimate goal of establishing an all-inclusive marketing strategy that leverages the probability of generating leads & qualified prospects. 

Content marketing checkboxes:

Here are some criteria to depend on to evaluate your content.

• Informational/Educational: try to make sure that your content contains a piece of information or something valuable about you that needs to be delivered to customers.
• Emotionally satisfying: check whether your content is emotionally balanced with your industry.  Avoid the extremes of sympathy.
• Entertaining: even if your industry is by no means an entertaining one, you need to emphasize the idea in such a way that grabs attention, take care of bothering your readers! 

A content marketing guide:

Now having a content strategy or not,  there are published content & here is the guide to ensure an upward curve for the future.

Step1: define & understand your audience:

Before exerting more effort on writing new content & wondering whether it sounds good & fits your goals, ask yourself a question: who are my buyers?!

It is better to first set your audience & then start to build your content strategy of what & where to write that really targets them. 

For each content try to set a goal i.e to make targeted content.

Step 2: understand your industry 

By understanding your industry, the buyer decision-making process will be clear enough so you can tell where to strike & when. You can create a strategy that targets your customers. A buyer in the early stage needs content that raises awareness while someone in the decision-making stage needs a stimulus & emphasizing the benefits of your product or service.

Step 3: optimize the content:

Schedule a check for your old content as we don’t mean that you have to get rid of all your old published content but consider the following:

• Reinvest: it means that you can reinvest your published content in other different ways & channels. For instance, if you wrote an article & published it on your website then you can write an excerpt for that content & publish it on social media or create an infographic for that, try to convert it into other visual media such as videos …etc
• Update: it’s very effective to refresh your content each now & then, this is very appreciated by your customers, increasing the credibility as well as leveraging your value with google rankings!
• Retire: we know that it is hard to remove content that you kept on for at least a night from your website but sometimes it is for the business’s sake. We mean that you need to be wiser while managing your content strategy & don’t over-optimize. There are contents that are no longer adding to your equity, for instance, if due to the outbreak of coronavirus, you decided to publish content about its impact on business, then after a while when there is no corona anymore, that content may serve in the opposite direction to your benefit!

Step 4: Publish & monitor:

Your content needs monitoring even after it is already published via any media, actually for many reasons that may include:

• Figure out any errors or mistakes
• Refresh the content each now & then 
• Drive insights from interactions on the content
• Find out how your content affects your deals & more.

 

ROI of a successful content marketing 

When any business invests in an asset, it tries to calculate how much it shares in revenues. That is what we call a return on investment. 

Perceived as an asset, the content has a great impact on revenue rise or drop, however, it is not that much easy to well-defined by how much it contributes to the revenue increase.

Content marketing creates credibility. 96% of the most successful content marketers agree that their audience views their organization as a trusted resource & creates three times more leads than paid search advertising. 

in addition to all of that, you need to stay tuned with the latest social media platforms trends as tiktok & its marketing strategies 

What does “Select” offer your business?

Get Optimized Content Strategy & High Traffic Across All Your Digital Marketing Channels that is complied with SEO standards Through:

• Generating Content Ideas
• Content Copywriting For Website Articles
• Blog Posts Copywriting
• Corporate Publications (Catalogs-Company Profile)

Conclusion:

With all these efforts that content marketing really deserves; done wrong, you may be putting all of this at stake. That’s why “Select” offers you to get all your content marketing management handled by experts.

A precious piece of content could be your gate to Alibaba’s “lead” cave!