What Are The True Benefits of Content Marketing?

...and how to get it right!

Before we look at the considerable benefits that can be gained from effective Content Marketing, let us first really understand what it means and appreciate why it is important.

Content marketing focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent online information in the form of: Articles, Case Studies, Infographics, Videos, Reviews and suchlike, in order to attract and retain a well-defined target market of Internet users. This attraction and retention ultimately leads to purchases, repeat purchases and other positive actions that you are striving to achieve, such as positive feedback and social media sharing.

Companies that thrive online are very adept at creating regular, interesting, compelling and provocative content that greatly enhances and drives their overall digital impact. This leads to more online clicks, actions, enquiries and sales. The fundamental requirement is to deliver high quality content via your website and through social media channels in a consistent manner to achieve the marketing goals of the business.

Companies that get it right reap the following benefits -

• Brand visibility and awareness increases

• Enhanced brand loyalty and trust is built through familiarity

• Increased online traffic and clicks improves Lead Generation

• Positions the business as an industry expert and builds trust

• Develops and maintains credibility and authority in your target sector

• Lasting relationships with customers produces repeat business

• Opens up new communication channels such as social media

• Gives the company a platform from which to reach out to potential new customers

Challenges for Small Businesses

Despite these considerable benefits, many small businesses find it difficult to implement a coherent content marketing strategy. They often regard their websites as a “set it and forget it” tool and think that it is enough to just have an online presence. They falsely believe that this will help them to succeed in the search rankings and win business.

However content marketing that really succeeds requires regular content (articles, videos, blogs etc) to be created and then uploaded online. Many small businesses simply baulk at the need to regularly focus on this series of tasks and even consider it as a non-essential “to do” that, by the end of the week, or month, they have simply not got round to completing.

Company directors and business managers that view content marketing as an essential task and give it a high priority in their agendas are reaping the rewards from consistent content marketing. And they are rated as leaders in their sectors and in their business demographic.

Requirements for a successful Content Marketing campaign:

• Determine your content marketing strategies and set goals

• Focus on your key target audience (KTA) and fully understand their challenges

• Ring-fence time and resources to produce the content required

• Develop a plan that sets out goals for the production of regular content

• Produce regular quality content with focus and clarity

• Fully understand what form of content to produce for different channels

• Understand where to post relevant content to reach target markets

• Measure the effectiveness of the content

• Calculate the Return on Investment resulting from your activity

• Reinvest in content marketing that is producing results

Engage With A Digital Partner

The best, easiest and most effective way for a business to achieve online success is to partner with a digital agency with a good reputation. Digital Agencies are fully trained experts in Content Marketing and they work extremely hard to ensure their clients’ marketing investments are producing results, month in month out. For any small business that wants to growth through online sales, partnering with the right digital agency is the route to online success.

Ask Big Red for examples of how Content Marketing has already expanded the digital impact of and driven new revenue for our valued clients.

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