We live in a world where marketing is everywhere. It's inescapable, and all too often, it's annoying. For every expertly crafted marketing campaign that provides value and appeals to its core customers' needs and wants, there are irritating pop ads, unskippable video ads in front of YouTube videos, banner ads that fill up your entire screen (crowding out the recipe you were trying to read in the first place) and so much more.
As we all grow more and more tired of obnoxious and intrusive advertising, there is one form of marketing that manages to fly relatively under the radar. It's everywhere, and you're seeing it more and more, but you might not even recognize it as a marketing form. This is vital for a Toronto Internet marketing campaign.
Content marketing has been around forever, and it's only become more prolific in recent years. It overlaps with so many other marketing strategies, from SEO to influencer marketing, yet so many people continue to ask the same question: what is content marketing?
According to Hubspot, 77% of companies say they have a content marketing strategy and utilize content marketing services. Yet so many other businesses don't understand the value or purpose of content marketing or what it even looks like. More importantly, they don't understand how it can help promote their business and increase their bottom line.
Content marketing is necessary for growing your brand presence and providing value to your audience.
It also helps you establish priorities and structure within your marketing strategy.
Read on to learn more about what content marketing is and having a content marketing strategy can benefit your business.
Content marketing services: what’s involved?
When you hear the term content marketing, the first thing you think about is probably blogs and website copy, but content marketing is so much more than a format and has evolved to become a crucial part of marketing.
Content marketing is a long-term strategy that includes the process of creating and distributing content for your target market, including:
- Blogs
- Web copy
- Landing page copy
- Infographics
- Ebooks
- Case studies
- Whitepapers
- Email marketing
- Podcasts/Interviews
- Video production
- Photography
- And much more.
Why Content Marketing is Important
Content marketing aims to provide value, educate and ultimately turn your visitors into customers by guiding them down the marketing funnel.
Publishing consistent, high-quality and engaging content that resonates with your audience can impact decision-making more than any other method. Customers expect consistency in the brands they trust, and content can help your business build credibility and strengthen your reputation.
In a time when consumers are being sold to non-stop, content marketing seeks to take a step back from selling and instead provide value to the consumer. Content builds credibility and positions your brand as an expert in your field and keeps your company and services top of mind.
Beyond that, content is an essential part of any effective SEO strategy. What many don't realize is that written content and SEO go hand-in-hand. High-quality content is imperative for staying ahead of your competitors and improving your SEO rankings.
6 Top Benefits of Content Marketing Services for Businesses
Content marketing has a wealth of benefits for your business, but the most significant are:
1. Reach a Wider Audience
A strong content strategy can help your business reach a wider audience and also target specific customers across the web. Content marketing isn’t limited to your website; it can be used across social media, paid media, outreach, and more.
If your audience enjoys your content, they are more likely to share it with their own audience and recommend you to others, consequently growing your reach and increasing organic traffic to your website. Plus, once you publish a blog or a new piece of content on your website, it continues to build traction month over month at no additional cost to you.
2. Provide Value to Your Target Market
With content marketing, you can offer tremendous value to prospects and loyal customers who rely on your expertise. As every online space becomes saturated with marketing efforts, two things are happening; consumers are becoming increasingly savvy at recognizing something that's being sold to them... and, at the same time, becoming increasingly weary of it. In fact, 66% of consumers say they wish they could receive fewer marketing messages.
While introducing your products and services to your target market is the main goal of your marketing efforts, it's essential for brand's operating in today's over-saturated market to be aware of marketing fatigue. The last thing a brand wants is for potential customers to associate their brand with feelings of annoyance or irritation.
This is why content marketing is becoming even more vital. Take the focus away from selling or advertising and instead provide something to your potential customers that they'll love. From information, entertainment or insider tips, utilize content marketing services to discover what your target market wants to see and give it to them. You can create blogs, whitepapers, infographics, or videos and more. If your audience finds benefit in your content, they’re more likely to stay on your site longer and return to your site for more, strengthening your brand positioning.
3. Helps Your Business Stay Relevant
If your website lacks information, or your content is irrelevant to the search intent, it can affect your site’s performance, increasing your bounce rate and potentially decreasing your search engine rankings.
Updating and refreshing your website content regularly — such as republishing blogs or optimizing your service pages — helps keep your business relevant and improves the brand experience for your customers and prospects. This can help position your business as an industry leader, thus building authority and trust with your audience.
4. Higher Search Engine Rankings
Everything starts with a search. We've said before that content and SEO go hand-in-hand, and the truth of this cannot be overstated. Without high-quality, search-optimized content, your SEO strategy will be seriously lacking.
The majority of consumers research products and services online. Your business must appear on the search engine results page (SERP) if you want to be found and considered. Content marketing, when used in conjunction with an SEO strategy, can boost your rankings on search engines. Search engines like Google are constantly updating their algorithms to better provide high-quality, relevant results to search queries. Ensuring you're producing audience-focused, search-optimized content is one of the best ways to rank higher on the SERP. And with most users never clicking past the first page, ensuring your website appears as high as possible has never been more important.
5. Generate & Nurture Leads
Content marketing can help your business generate leads. You can encourage your audience to take a desired action — like contacting you, submitting a form, adding a product to their cart or signing up for a newsletter. By strategically placing a call-to-action directly in your content, you can guide your readers and increase conversion rate optimization.
With this in mind, creating content for specific stages of the marketing funnel can significantly help guide leads through the buyer’s journey, from the initial conversion to making a purchase. Whether it’s blogs to create awareness, ebooks to turn prospects into leads or case studies to convince them that they should choose your business, content can be tailored to guide your audience at specific stages of the funnel. Provide your audience with the information they need to make an educated purchasing decision.
Here’s an example of how a typical marketing funnel works:
Image via Moz
6. Cost-Effective Return on Investment
Content marketing provides a greater, more cost-effective return on investment than other digital or traditional marketing methods. Whether you decide to produce your content internally or hire a content marketing agency to manage your strategy, it’s still much more affordable than other forms of marketing.
With relevant and educational content, you can bring in more organic traffic and leads. Plus, studies have shown that content marketing can bring in three times as many leads as paid ads per dollar spent. While online advertising is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways for your business to appear in search engines, it can be costly, especially for smaller businesses with a limited budget.
It is worth noting, though, that similar to SEO, content marketing can take some time before you see results, especially on your website — that’s why posting frequently is so important.
Getting Started With Content Marketing Services
Your business must have a solid content strategy to achieve the best results. Now that you know the importance of content marketing, you may contemplate creating a content strategy yourself or utilizing the content marketing services and expertise of an agency like TechWyse.
At TechWyse, our team of content marketers and SEO experts create unique content marketing strategies to meet your marketing goals. Whether your audience is B2C or B2B, we tailor content marketing to meet your business objectives, audience, industry and budget.
Get ahead of your competition; get started today!
