All Businesses Need To Embrace Content Marketing
The traditional marketing world has become disconnected from today’s consumers. We often record our favorite television shows and skip commercials, flip right past the ads in print magazines, and have become quite good at disregarding online banner ads. Even those online ads that popup with videos, or have neat motion graphics get closed in short order.
For the past several years, smart marketers have understood that traditional marketing has been in decline for quite a long time now, and that there must be a better way. That better way is called content marketing.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating, publishing, distributing and promoting custom content for marketing purposes on a regular basis. The content you create under the guise of content marketing is carefully crafted to move your prospects – or website visitors – to complete a specific action. The end goal of your content marketing efforts is to deliver qualified leads to your organization and help move them through the sales funnel from prospect to customer.
The art of content marketing allows us to communicate effectively with our customers and prospects without selling, with the intention of bringing them closer to your company and making it an easy decision for them to contact you. This content can be engaging blog posts, informative infographics, interesting videos, well-written and informative articles, or even pictures. By creating and curating relevant, valuable content that informs our customers and prospects, we build trust and increase our authority within our market segment. This, in turn, leads prospects to reward us with their business. Rather than pushing out marketing sales pitches talking about how great our products and services are, we deliver quality information that makes our buyers more intelligent.
What Makes Content Marketing Different From Traditional Marketing?
The primary difference can be illustrated with three words we mentioned in the paragraph above – relevant, valuable, and informs. Without those three words, you have all of the traditional marketing material that we get all the time from companies telling us how awesome they are and trying to sell us stuff. That is precisely what makes content marketing so effective in today’s world where we are inundated with hundreds of marketing messages every day. Quality content marketing makes your customers and prospects WANT to stop and read what you have produced.
The greatest marketing companies in the world have embraced and are enjoying the rewards of content marketing. Great marketing minds like Seth Godin and hundreds of other industry leaders have concluded that content marketing is not just the future of marketing – it’s already here.