People ignore all sorts of traditional marketing techniques these days. Interest in television advertising and print ads are on the decline. The moment people realized that traditional marketing has started to lose its awesomeness and Internet is where you can find your audience, they have turned to digital marketing.

“Good communication means good business”

If you are planning to market your business online, you cannot do it without content marketing since that’s the way you get to communicate with your clients and convey the idea about your business to them. It is popularly said that “Content is King” and good content, can undoubtedly boost your business.

Content marketing: the definition

The standard definition of content marketing goes like this:

Content marketing is the creation and sharing of valuable content in order to gain customers and to turn the existing customers to repeated buyers. The content will always be related to what exactly you are planning to sell.

What makes Content Marketing unique?

One might think all the buzz about content marketing is nothing but a fad. But, the fact is that content has always been the soul of marketing. Just give it a thought. Unless you know something is valuable, you are not going to buy it. How do you know something is valuable? Through informational content! But the importance of content has come to the forefront only in the past few years.

Despite content being the soul of marketing, there is a one major difference between traditional marketing and content marketing. All other forms of marketing techniques advocate the hard sell. i.e. They try to sell you the product while, content marketing tries to empower the customer by making him more knowledgeable about products and their benefits.

The now intelligent customer stays loyal to his source of knowledge more often than not.

Why do you need content marketing?

Because content is all you get to hear right from the moment you take your first step towards digital marketing. Rest of the marketing techniques just follow it.

• An advertisement alone doesn’t compel customers to buy a product, valuable information regarding the product does
• A Social media network is a great medium to make your business reach majority audience, but only with great content
• It’s always the content based on which Google ranks your website so that people get to access your business
• A great content leaves a great impact on people, letting them to know , like and trust your products

Different forms of content marketing

You create good content, but how do you make sure that it reaches out to the potential customers? That’s why there are different forms of content marketing, which include:

Blogs

When you hear the word content, the first thing that comes to your mind is obviously a blog. Blog contents contain relevant information about a particular business or product. Blog posts instil a sense of trust in the customers by giving them all necessary information about your product and helping you strengthen your brand.

Newsletters

You send newsletters to potential customers, each of the publication speaking about a particular topic of interest each day. It is considered as a great marketing strategy to attract customers and encourage them to visit your business websites.

E-mails

E-mail marketing tops the list of the most successful techniques used in content marketing. In e-mail marketing, you collect e-mail Ids of potential customers and mail them some informative content or offers. It is a means of indirect marketing where you don’t try to sell the product to the customers but you give them information that may be of great help to them, thus making them eager to learn further about you and your business.

Social media

Social media networks are very much popular amongst Internet users and that is where you have majority of your potential customers. Through social media, you can post, tweet, share and dialogue anything and therefore, it is a great medium to share your content, links to your blogs and website posts etc.

White papers

White papers are documents that contain long content, meant to promote a particular product. They introduce a problem and with the help of case studies, research findings and content of the sort to argue that your product or business is superior to other businesses in solving the issue.  It is somewhat like boasting about your product, but if you are sure about your business, what’s wrong in showing it off?

Videos

Video marketing is gaining popularity these days. Videos are effective marketing tools since they help you convey to the customers an insight about your business, how they can help you solve an issue etc. through effective content. Be it interviews, testimonials or guides, you get to show off all information about your business through videos. But make sure that the videos are short enough since people have a very short attention span and they tend to get easily bored.

E-books

E-books are of great advantage for your customers who are keen to learn more about your business and products. You can convert your best content into digital format and sell them or give away to your customers so that they can attain deep knowledge about your business.

Images

Images speak better than words at times. Therefore, a powerful image with great design can be the best marketing strategy to help you spread the word and gain more customers

Infographics

Inforgraphics is the trend these days. It is a design led graphic that speaks to customers with powerful images and relevant words that can explain even complex things in a simple manner.

How can content marketing help your business?

Content serves two different entities – customers and search engines. It builds customers’ trust and helps you rank better in search engine result pages (SERP). Adopting content marketing can benefit your business in the following ways:

• Generate in-bound traffic to your website
• Increase engagement with potential audience
• Generate more leads
• Increase sales
• Helps in brand-building
• Cheaper than traditional marketing

Here are some interesting stats about content marketing:

1. Content marketing is employed by 93% of B2B marketers (Content Marketing Institute)
2. About 60% people are inspired to look for a product after reading about it online!(com)
3. Out of all the marketers who blog, a massive 82% report positive ROI for their inbound marketing (hubspot)