Why is Content Marketing the future that awaits us
We have been hearing the term content marketing for over a century now, but do we know what it means?
Content
The hot, interesting, impactful information we have around us since forever. The collection of insightful experiences and relevant pieces of information being produced for the audience and distributed through different channels for active consumption.
Marketing
The awareness and enthusiasm transferred to the customers through stories and magic. The act of promoting or selling products/services of an enterprise with the help of curated content.
Content Marketing
Is like conversing with a specific audience by sharing online material(such as blogs, videos, podcasts, and social media posts). Fulfilling the needs and desires of the customers by delivering them relevant and valuable content.
“Content Marketing is the only marketing left” – Seth Godin
Have you ever wondered why content marketing is the cheapest, most effective strategy available nowadays, to get targeted users to visit your website?
In this tech-savvy, internet-friendly world, Content Marketing is the only way for businesses and small ventures to differentiate themselves from their competition and achieve success.
The following points relate to the fact that content marketing is progressing these days and more brands are starting to feel its importance.
- Content marketing allows businesses to communicate effectively with audience and build healthy relations with them
- It delivers the world what it seeks
- It’s the basic unit of most advertising campaigns
- It associates with people relatively and thus gains their trust
- Without Content Marketing, there is no future
- The valuable commodity most marketers today need
- The ultimate future of your brand
- And most importantly, content marketing proves to the customers that their needs are not only heard but also fulfilled.
CONTENT MARKETING - FROM A MODERN PERSPECTIVE
These days, people are so equipped with generating tons of content that they often forget that we are all emotional beings searching for depth, context, and connection in everything.
Hence, creating mediocre and dull content is proven to be a complete waste of time today.
Brands are so focused on their publicity, and sales that they neglect the fact that people want attention, they want to know that their needs are being respected and that their voices are heard.
People don’t care about how attractive and astounding your brand sounds. They care about how it can solve their problem or consistently meet their requirements.
Speaking of short-term goals, sure people like fun and entertaining stuff more than they like figurative and statistical data. But, when we think about long-term marketing, content should be memorable, easily digestible, and hold a high retentive power.
So from a modern perspective, content marketing isn’t just about telling some interesting success stories or promoting your brand.
It’s about understanding the audience, producing relevant content, delivering the masses what they need, and offering them the control and satisfaction they deserve.
Bridging the gap between the current and ancient reality of content marketing
The ancient reality
If we look at history, TV commercials, advertisements, printing presses were massively producing content and pushing it onto the customers to watch it forcefully.
Like we say, curiosity killed the cat, the same way advertising companies and marketers robbed the customers of their wealth by generating in them profound curiosity.
By making them desire something they don’t require and thus generate revenue out of people’s income.
This had become the usual mantra of businesses and enterprises at the early age of marketing.
Convincing the customers, persuading them into buying products was the classic marketing strategy used in the early century.
People had limited sources and limited channels from where they could get information.
For millions of years, we had different anonymous versions of content marketing that helped us to communicate effectively with the people and convey our ideas.
But with the advent of the internet, things completely turned upside down for marketers and advertisers.
They could now use multiple channels to build direct relationships with the audience by generating their own compelling content without taking any help from third parties.
The modern reality
Earlier marketers and advertisers were doing content marketing without actually understanding the basic concept of its working and relevance.
But when content marketing collided with digital marketing, every marketer, every customer experienced this huge wave of momentum.
Today, we have got hundreds of channels and billions of people on the internet are consuming information every day.
Today, content marketers showers upon their audience fragments of empathy, spend quality time producing content that fits their demands, and work hard to make sure people are satisfied and their expectations are fulfilled.
High-quality content is the driving factor that is helping businesses generate revenue and gain maximum opportunities to flourish in the market.
With the advent of digitalization, the majority of the internet-friendly population is seen active on most channels.
That’s the reason your content needs to surpass all the ancient and modern expectations of the customers
How storytelling is considered to be the primal boon for content marketing
Stories make us learn and remember things.
It makes us feel that we are a part of the community and not just mere beings.
Content with stories is easier to retain, consume and digest.
When people see a good story, they know it’s been written by someone who has a perfect understanding of what their customers can relate to.
Great stories come from people who not only know how to tell a story but also how to sell a story.
Today the real problem lies in successfully surviving the competition within your industry.
You need to be better than your competitors, you need to know their weaknesses.
And the perfect way to do that is through storytelling.
To make a real online presence in the cutthroat marketplace, your brand needs to give customers something unique and fun.
So brands eventually decided to write stories that mattered.
They started publishing editorials and blog posts that made real sense and thus excelled in marketing with the help of storytelling.
Brands used stories with different plots as a medium to attract new customers and increase sales.
Stories helped businesses gain their target customers without actually barging in their windows.
Many established brands started using interesting stories as a tool for reaching the soft corners of their audience.
They wrote stories that solved their problems and gained their trust by making them feel connected.
They targeted customers with stories that focused on their passions, their favorite celebrities, athletes, and their favorite music, movies, and hobbies.
Gradually people started to develop the need for wanting more and more stories.
Hence storytelling opened a new door for content marketing.
Content Marketing- The most powerful insights
- Content marketing is evergreen and ever-evolving.
- Content marketing will keep on making progress in different areas for both niche and the majority of the audience.
- The concept and reach of content marketing aren’t limited. It’s an ocean of innumerable possibilities. It’s not something you can generate and instill into your marketing strategy overnight. You need to have complete knowledge about its functioning to achieve your business goals.
- To do the right kind of content marketing, you will need a lot more experience, and creating content with the right context is definitely a Hercules task. You need to create content that is concise, consistent, and makes a valuable impact on people’s lives. Content that fulfills the ever-rising demands of the customers.
- Content marketing today especially needs to focus on the buyer's journey to make more impact and gain new visitors.
- Content marketing is the only leading marketing present today if we speak in terms of new advertising. It will somehow always make its way into the future.
5 optimum content marketing strategies that will help you bring home the bacon
Between millions of blogs available on the internet today, it’s becoming more and more difficult to make your content appear indistinguishable. Hence with changing times, you will definitely need some new content marketing strategies to promote your content and make it visible to your target audience.
- Publish an insanely actionable piece of content with a lot of examples that indirectly attract the attention of the customers. The user experience should be the main focus of your content. When you make it easy for people to consume your content, it has a better chance of driving more traffic to your website.
2. Repurpose your content and do multi-channel content marketing. Taking one killer, long piece of content and molding it in a way that it gets maximum traction should be your main goal. You might as well take your best piece to date and break it into smaller pieces to later upload them on different social media channels. Publish your content in audio or video form to help grow traffic over time.
3. Retargeting is legit hence you can promote your content by doing weekly roundups. You can share it in your email newsletter, in boosted Facebook posts, and on different social media accounts such as Linkedin, Twitter, and Instagram. You can also do email marketing and remarketing to aware your customers of your posted content.
4. Optimize your content for SEO by using relevant keywords at least 4 to 5 times. Link your blog to other websites and don’t forget to add a learn more option for a better user experience. Optimize CTRs and take the help of push notifications to get more shares and profits.
5. Track your performance using metrics. Measure your KPIs, ROI, and traffic growth in google analytics.
At Staiir, our primal focus is always on creating unique content for different industries. We provide different services for brands and startups looking for ways to grow their social media and drive more traffic to their websites.
How content with context creates an unforeseen snowball effect on marketing
Although you might have a pre-planned version of content strategy in place for your marketing. And also an abundant collection of good vocabulary. Yet all that won’t still help you achieve the desired attention and visibility for your brand.
In order to generate a snowball effect, a lasting impression on the audience, you will need to focus on context over content.
Content is basically the stuff that you fill in your blogs to complete its overall structuring, whereas the context is the important part that attracts the target audience.
In the 1900s marketers worshipped content as their king. And so people were constantly pushing themselves into creating more and more quantitative content. They never realized that content was only a commodity to be shared and did not offer any value or relevancy to the customers.
Context on the other hand always beats content. When included strategically in the overall content, context offers it a sensible meaning.
The customers were now satisfied as their questions were being answered and their problems were getting solved. Context helped people to have their own unique perspectives and relate to the stories on a more personal level.
Finally, they started believing that something good has happened and they are being provided with qualitative information that truly benefits them.
When people started noticing this change, they finally recognized the importance of context and how it creates a massive slope for the snowball effect to take place(i.e for businesses and startups to gain new customers).
