A Guide To Content Marketing

It seems that marketing has gone the way of content. Studies show that marketers spend 25% of their budget on content marketing. In fact, it shows itself to be both the game changer today and the future top of mind marketing strategy. In one survey, 80% of participants believed that customized content should be a key component of marketing. When it comes to content,  websites that are content-led are considered to be the preferred way to engage customers, according to 37% of survey participants.

Of companies that use content marketing, around 67% of them outsource their content marketing to others. About 80% of people indicate that they discover the particulars about a company through content marketing.




Why You Need Content Marketing?

Anyone seeking a reason to consider content marketing can find a whole catalog of answers:

• Keeps readers attention
• Improves brand loyality
• Generates leads
• Increases direct sales

For example the cost is about 62% less than traditional marketing. It also generates three times more leads, per dollar invested, than traditional marketing. There’s no company out there that couldn’t benefit from increased brand loyalty. For that huge population of marketers, content marketing can deliver this. Content marketing helps capture readers’ attention. As a lead generater and direct sales aid, content marketing trumps the traditional style of marketing.

In a world where it’s possible to skip past advertisements on cable television, streaming sites and more; it’s important for companies to look for ways to capture market attention. When the content component is added as a marketing tool, 60% of people who come across it are inspired to find out more about a company on their own. To go along with this, 70% of people indicated that they would prefer to learn about a company by reading an article about it than from adverts.

Other benefits of content marketing have to do with the way people perceive themselves in relation to the content marketer. For example, they feel more positive toward a company, they feel closer to a company and an overwhelming majority enjoy reading relevant content about a company.

Identifying who the competition is and what they are doing, knowing the characteristics of the buyers one is targeting and building great/relevant content will help any company to better market their products and services.

Content Markting ProcessThe Content Marketing Process

Once you have developed your content marketing plan, identified your audience and created your channel plan, it’s time to operationalize all of this.While there are no templates and shortcuts in content marketing world, there are frameworks you can use to create our new process and be successful with it.

There’s no shortcut in terms of deploying content marketing. – Pam Didner

Kapost and Marketo’s guide, “How To Build and Operate a Content Marketing Machine” explains the whole content marketing process in 7 steps:

Plan: Create a strategic structure for your content marketing
Team: Assemble the group to manage your content marketing operation
Ideas: Generate a steady flow of ideas for your content
Production and Distribution: Assemble your content and distribute it across the web
Audience Development: Generate traffic to your content
Conversion & Nurture: Convert visitor to leads, nurture them to opportunities
Measure & Optimize: Analyze and improve performance
To learn more about what content marketing is, how it can benefit your organization and how to get started using this technique to promote your company.