What is Content Marketing? And why does it matter?
Content marketing is 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.
Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.
Content marketing is focused on forging meaningful connections. In 2018, they key to success is connecting with a person with a specific need at a specific point in their customer journey, and then meeting that need.
An average prospect reads 20 pieces of content before becoming a customer.
Content marketing works by building relationships with people over time.
CASE STUDY
Whole Foods Market has more than 2.6 million Instagram followers, but their posts rarely advertise deals or urge people to shop in their stores.
Instead, they share beautiful images of food, knowing that they’ll inspire people to cook – and purchase ingredients at their local Whole Foods.
What’s the value of content marketing?
Immediate Value
- Complete control of messaging and branding
- Credibility and relevance in online communities
- Re-use content over and over
- Highly tailored and targeted marketing
- Better Google score
Long-term Value
- Stronger, two-way conversations with customers
- Word-of-mouth referrals
- Search engine dominance
- Sales and marketing alignment
- Consistency and industry authority
- Trust and loyalty built with consumer base
ALL FACTORS LEAD TO INCREASED REVENUE OVER TIME!
Content Marketing FAQ
Q: How do we get 20 pieces of content in front of the customer?
A: The top three content marketing tactics are blogging (65%), social media (64%), and case studies (64%).
The top two tactics address different stages of the buyer journey; blogging is great for lead generation because users can discover content through search, and social media is best for building a relationship with leads and directing them back to your content over and over again.
Q: Where should I invest my marketing budget?
A: 69% of companies report their video marketing budget is increasing.
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.
Video is becoming increasingly popular in the content marketing world, and as a result, teams plan to increase their budgets to produce more video content in the coming year.
Q: What’s the best way to know if my marketing is working?
A: The top metrics for B2B content marketing success are:
1. Sales lead quality
2. Number of sales
3. Conversion rates
4. Sales lead quantity
5. Website traffic
6. SEO ranking
Q: How long until we see results? (after starting a campaign)
A: If you are consistently posting quality content, a great time to evaluate your efforts would be quarterly.
This gives your content enough time to gain momentum, so you have real analytics to evaluate. By your sixth month, you should have more than enough data to begin the process of allowing your data to determine your next steps.
Not seeing the results you want? Consider this:
- Is it good content?
- Is it consistent content? Frequent enough?
- Does it resonate with your audience?
- How well do you know your industry? How saturated is the industry?
Quality Content: Social media posts, blogs, videos, GIFS, animations, infographics, whitepapers, case studies, and more.
Ready to Start With REX?
Want to start talking about a strategic approach to growing your business online? Contact us for a free 30 minute consultation!
REX Marketing + Design Inc. is a multi-award-winning agency established in 2006 that focuses on strategic branding, marketing, and design. REX has a mission to contribute to the trust economy by catapulting values-based purpose-driven businesses to success. Discover more about REX Marketing + Design’s unique approach to building competition-proof brands.
Source: https://www.snapapp.com/blog/54-content-marketing-stats-guide-your-2018-strategy/