Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your business, but it’s often not utilised as frequently as other methods. Businesses (particularly those that are smaller or newer) tend to prefer social media marketing as it’s accessible and cheap so a good choice for those with a smaller budget. While of course social media marketing can be brilliant, the best way to promote your business is by taking a multi faceted approach- and content marketing should definitely be in there somewhere. Want to find out more? Read on.
What is content marketing and why use it?
Content marketing is where you create interesting, engaging and relevant content connected to your brand which can be be used on things such as blogs or in Youtube videos. It’s not directly promotional, but will interest the audience prompting them to investigate further. That way the audience doesn’t feel like your product or business is being forced down their throat, you simply generate interest and they can make their own decision from there. This is incredibly powerful- people of course want to feel like they’re in control of the things they buy and this way you’re simply influencing them rather than directly saying ‘come and buy our stuff!’ which can be incredibly off putting. One of the main reasons to utilise content marketing is that it’s highly effective. Whether you’re a custom t shirt business, sell cloud storage or are a legal company, content marketing can be customised to fit what you do. Content marketing helps to raise awareness of your business leading a customer to go on and make the decision to shop with you.
How To Do It
Content marketing is generally focused on providing a source of useful information to the reader or audience, with your site linked as a resource. If you sell clothes for example, a piece written about seasonal fashion trends will engage a person with an interest in this area- who can then go on to click your link to research and find out more if your business is relevant to them. In terms of blogs, this link back also creates a backlink which will improve your company’s domain authority and also improve ranking within search engines too. That way, when people are searching directly for businesses like yours, yours is more likely to be at the top. Since almost all clicks relating to searches go to those on the first page- this is something not to overlook. You will either need to build a network of reliable bloggers and video creators, and them assemble a team who can create excellent content. As this can be a big job, it’s often best to outsource to a company who already has bloggers and writers in place.
Downsides
One of the biggest downsides to content marketing is the time and the cost. It takes time to produce good quality content- and that’s what this is all about. It then takes time to work with a blogger, negotiate a fee and have the content published. Again, outsourcing can streamline the process for you.
