Conquer Content Marketing and You Win!
The buzz for 2013 has focused on the need for content marketing to become a critical element in your online marketing efforts moving forward. This may well be a term you’ve heard yet not understand specifically what it means. Content marketing is the practice of creating, collecting, and publishing fresh content for your visitors. This manifests in a variety of forms, from relatively simple blog posts, to articles, reports, whitepapers, videos, audio podcasts, ebooks, and more. We live in a society that craves information, and the more of it you can provide visitors to your sites, the more authority you will earn in not just their eyes, but also the search engines as well. They can then reward you with higher rankings, more traffic, links, and sales.
Content marketing is getting more and more popular
According to BusinessBolts.com, this year some 74 percent of businesses intend to do an increased level of content marketing. Only 4 percent are not. There are many reasons for this, including cost-effectiveness, near-instant results and control over the medium. With content marketing you can shape your message, control the flow, and utilize a variety of mediums to get your content to your market. For instance, an article or blog post could be written, posted on your site, excerpted in social media, made into a video or audio and social bookmarked across the web. Repurposing your content for various platforms is the order of the day. Furthermore, this can easily happen quite often, and an entire content marketing campaign can be realized quite quickly.
A real-world illustration of how content marketing can rock your sales
The New York Times profiled a Northern Virginia company, River Pools and Spas, which was watching as their sales plummeted as a result of the housing recession of 2008. Incoming orders (average $50,000 per order) withered from around six a month to less than two! Their past advertising budget of $250,000 yearly on radio, TV and pay per click advertising had to go. Owner Marcus Sheridan launched an impressive content marketing campaign consisting primarily of blog posts and videos, and within a relatively short period of time, had not just regained what was lost but beat pre-recessions sales figures.
There’s little question that content marketing can provide results, and that it really should have a place in your online marketing strategy for 2013.