The best way to increase sales and boost your business is to make your company the go-to experts in your area. By having a solid marketing strategy that includes content marketing, you are increasing your value to customers, establishing yourself as a leader in the industry, and creating a more loyal customer base. Content marketing focuses on ways to engage you audience, and uses content to drive profitable behaviors in customers.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing can be defined as “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.”
The key words here are valuable, relevant, and consistent. Unique content will drive up your rankings and put you in the position of offering them a direct benefit of even just visiting your website. Once you have potential clients on your site, you can get to converting them! Getting people to your site is over half the battle.
Strong content is not just blog posts, but also the copy on your website, your ads, and your social media. As opposed to spam, when you are providing free relevant and valuable information, customers are more likely to trust you, and continue to remain loyal to you. Great quality content is a key part of any marketing strategy, including social media, SEO rankings, inbound marketing, email campaigns, and more.
There are four steps to an effective content marketing strategy, though every company is different and you will want to adapt to what works best for your business and your goals. The first step is figuring out what you want to accomplish and the risks associated, secondly you create a business plan for your goals and the value you want to provide, which includes what message you want to send and keeping your branding consistent. Next you need to figure out your target audience and their wants and needs, and what content and engagement specific to them would look like. Fourth, you develop a channel plan; what channels are you using for this content marketing? These are the platforms you’ll use to put out your content and tell your story, and should also include your criteria and objectives of each platform.
Your content marketing strategy will grow and change as your business does. A fantastic way to move your business forward, attract new customers, and increase sales is to offer valuable, relevant and consistent new content in a smart, engaging way that matches your goals and your branding.