Did you know content marketing dates back to the stone age? or at least a couple of decades back, long before the internet was invented. So really what is content marketing? A case study by Neil Patel shows that this type of marketing strategy was used by toy companies when they created comic books with characters they sell as toys, and as you can guess, everyone with a comic book bought a toy of a character they liked in the book.
Amazing right?
It’s time to ditch good old digital marketing and start this awesome marketing strategy. It’s a no-brainer that everyone likes stories, people like content that engage with emotion, so why not leverage storytelling to enhance your marketing strategy and start seeing high conversion rates?
What is Content Marketing?
HubSpot defines content marketing as:
“Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content via channels such as social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, apps, press releases, print publications, and more. The goal is to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty.”
In a nutshell that’s all there is to content marketing, it’s about delivering content to your audience in a natural form. Unlike spamming your users with a bunch of Ads, you can use your blog to tell a story about your product or service you have an active audience in for that matter.
This marketing strategy does not only boost your conversions but also builds a strong relationship between you and your audience, it also gives you a chance to name every feature of your product even those features that don’t fit on an Ad or banner, making this marketing strategy a very efficient way to show your audience how they will use your product to solve their the problems
Benefits of Content Marketing
Marketing Creates a strong community around your brand
Once you start engaging with your audience through this type of marketing, you will start building real relationships with your customers, and when your audience develops a sense of connection with your brand it’s natural for him/her to spread the word about your product.
Take, for example, say you saw an Ad about a BMW, and the car looked good in the Ad you decided to go to their website, and you landed on their blog, you started reading about how fast their cars are, you start seeing content about all their features.
Not enough?
You heard to their YouTube channel and start seeing the cars doing stunts, and drivers having conversations with their cars using iDrive AI, you start asking questions and engaging, and finally you decide to buy the car and of course, you will share all the content you read to your friends trying to convince them that you have the best car in the world and for BMW you became a loyal customer and marketer.
Now imagine what if they didn’t have a blog or a YouTube channel what would have been the outcome, you wouldn’t have learned enough information about their car to convince you to buy it. Now go buy a BMW it’s a sick car guys.
Builds a strong brand perception
People engaging with your content, sharing it, and all that stuff, more people begin to trust your product and in turn, more followers and more followers mean more reviews and hopefully, enough of the reviews will be good ey, and make sure your product is really good. It’s natural for customers to trust products with more users, am sure you all check the number of downloads before downloading an App right! the more people downloading it, the more you trust that App.
Drives sales
My BMW example made this part way way clearer. Good content will make your audience want to buy whatever they read about. For example, say you have a Monitor company right, you’re the Marketing Director of Dell (congrats on your new job) and you want people to know about your new widescreen monitor. By default when marketing comes into your mind you think of buying Google ads, Facebook ads, more and more ads, yes ads help, but only to some extent and the return of ads is very low.
Now say you have a blog and you start talking about how a widescreen monitor is helpful, write a post telling your audience you’ve found a great way of increasing their day-to-day productivity as a developer.
Share how you can have multiple windows open on one monitor and how you don’t need two mid-sized monitors anymore, also share how the monitor has improved your gaming experience. Now that you have content marketed, people will start buying that monitor because well, they now need it, they now feel as if it’s necessary to boost their productivity with it, they now know what that monitor is capable of.
This post will drive more sales possibly more than all your ads are doing just because you showed your audience how the monitor solves their problem or how it improves their lives, also note that they wouldn’t have known that having multiple windows split up in one screen was possible and to them, having a widescreen monitor would be pointless.
More traffic to your website
Did you know you can generate income through your blog if you follow these steps? A blog can be one of your company’s multiple sources of income. More website traffic means people will start to discover more products you sell.
Still the marketing director of Dell (we haven’t fired you just yet)
Your dell.com is now receiving a lot of traffic and people are heading to the products page and start seeing all the other products you sell, people will start noticing your laptops and more accessories that work well with that monitor and more valuable blog posts about your products. ITS that SIMPLE!!!!!
Types of Content Marketing
Blog Content Marketing
A blog is really important in your content marketing strategy, make sure your company has an active blog talking about your company’s products and services or anything related. A blog will be part of your customer relationship-building process. Most of you know Paul Graham right or Y-Combinator at least, his company for funding startups, Y-Combinator got really popular mostly because of his essays. There are so good that people around the world love his essays. You can visit his website here.
Podcast Content Marketing
A podcast is another great way of content marketing. Your audience will have questions to ask you, some are not answerable by text you’ll have to explain with a natural voice and sometimes slang for them to understand and that will help your potential customers clear their heads around a feature that they had raised questions about.
Make sure your company has a podcast team, in fact, hire a whole team of marketing,…content marketing and reduce your Ad costs. People don’t even like ads, more than a 20% of the chance they’re clicked by mistake and as for me, 100%, unless the ad is about something I am actively looking for.
Video Content Marketing
They are many video-sharing platforms in this digital world. YouTube and Tiktok, let’s have a moment of silence on these two and then start adding twitch, Instagram, and Facebook to the list. People love visual content. I bet you never spent a day without going to YouTube or any other platform for that matter.
Also before buying something you’d probably heard to YouTube and see the product in action. Like if the BMW website say their cars have awesome exhaust sounds. The text wouldn’t satisfy me and I’d heard to YouTube and visit their channel, put my headphones on, put max volume sit back, and hear their cars blow my ears.
Social Media Content marketing
Do you guys know Andrew Gazdecki? He is really popular on Twitter among the startup community and if you run a startup or follow the startups tag on Twitter, you probably know this guy. People got to know about his company microacquire not because of Ads or anything, it’s because Gazdecki doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut on startups tweets.
What does he do?
He helps startup founders with tips on how to run a successful startup and after that, he gives startup founders some sort of fused motivation and propaganda to boost the startup founder’s esteem in the end (that’s where he kills it) he then states that he helps startups get acquired, microacquire’d and that is how people know about his company and they love his content. He talks about startups so much that you’d barely find a tweet of his without the word “startup” in it.
How to create a content marketing strategy
To run a successful marketing strategy it is important that your marketing channel has a lot of visitors and for those who have websites, I recommend you read this article on how to increase your website traffic.
Identify your target audience
Knowing what to write about or make videos about is key to having a successful content marketing strategy. You are still that Dell marketing director, of course, you will have to write content that targets people that will use that dell ultra-wide monitor.
So my guess is that your targets are content creators, those people making videos, obviously, they will need a spaced out and a clear timeline, and software engineers, we love those monitors just because they are the biggest in the store and probably the most expensive nothing else…..
We obviously multi-task a lot and we need that stack overflow tab always open, and one for YouTube and finally your text editor. So writing content surrounding this target audience will be key to driving more sales. Targeting normal desktop users will be a bad idea as they probably won’t give a shit about a big ultra-wide monitor.(this is an affiliate link, by the way, it’s a random monitor I found on Amazon going for less than $300)
Decide on the content marketing type
Here’s a trick to this stage. You don’t decide here there is nothing to decide, just use all the content marketing types I taught you. You can need all of those. This is largely because people have different tastes on what content they like. I like YouTube videos more than blog posts. So probably if you’re marketing something you’re gonna catch someone like me on your YouTube channel. Do it all!!!!
Create and distribute the content
Its time !!!. Go ahead and start creating content about your products and enjoy the high conversion rates and I guarantee that. You will love this strategy, its simple just three steps not a long list of bla bla bla. Do just this and you are good to go!
Conclusion
Take a look at Andrew Gazdecki or Paul Graham, these individuals have run a successful content marketing strategy and I advise you to follow the same strategy and if possible even upgrade. Content marketing is a great way to drive more sales and also a bonus of massive website traffic and all that is because of…. People love to engage with emotion and not only that, I wouldn’t turn down a good story. “How my BMW saved my life” how many people looking for cars would click on that? I’ll leave you to find out.
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