If you haven’t added content marketing to your business strategy yet, you need to. Content marketing is about attracting new customers on the web by creating blogs, videos and social media posts that people want to share. Businesses spend thousands of dollars each month on content marketing, and for good reason. It’s one of the best ways to reach new customers and then convert their interest into sales.
Types of Content Marketing
When you create a great piece of content, people share it with their friends. This spreads the word about your business. The goal of content marketing is to get something to go “viral.” That’s when swarms of new customers are possible. Of course, the hardest part of content marketing is creating the content. Here are the most common types of content marketing pieces.
Blog Posts: These are short content pieces displayed on business websites or as guest posts on other websites. For best results, blog posts need to be highly skimmable with headers and images to break up the content.
eBooks: These are longer form content pieces that present unique information to people that they can’t get anywhere else.
Infographics: These are blog posts presented in image form. It is a good way to present statistics and do comparisons. People love infographics because they are visually appealing.
Videos/Podcasts: These are content pieces for people who don’t like to read. Viral videos are the most effective form of content marketing, but one of the hardest to pull off.
Why Content Marketing Is Important to Your Business
Content marketing is important because it helps raise awareness about your business and the products and services you sell. Traditional advertising does the same thing, but content marketing is less expensive, and you can more precisely target customers. That’s why it’s important to implement content marketing into your business strategy from the beginning.
When people have a problem, they typically perform research to find a solution. If you’ve already offered a solution through your content marketing efforts, your sales will be higher. Really great content marketing pieces give people more information to help with their buying decisions. Raising awareness is important, but presenting more information is critical to your success.
How to Get Started with Content Marketing
One of the simplest ways to get started with content marketing is to create a business blog. It’s the perfect place to post information about new products and services. Then, when you have a following of loyal customers, you can branch out your content marketing strategy to guest posts. Finally, when you have a solid framework of informative posts about your products and services, you can focus on creating fun content that is relevant to your industry to point more people to your website.
Content marketing is important in getting more customers, but people aren’t going to share your posts if they aren’t useful or funny. SEO and PR firms can help you with this process and make your content marketing efforts more successful. You need a content marketing strategy to take your business to the next level.
