Online marketing is all about content. Content is your online currency; any business that wants to drive tangible results from its online marketing efforts must commit to becoming a content developing organization.
What is content marketing, exactly? It is the creation of valuable and relevant information that helps prospects and customers make informed decisions.
By sharing your expertise, and therefore being perceived as a subject matter expert, you elevate yourself from competitors. The more engaged you are during the buying process, the greater the chance of success; thereby increasing close rates.
Content can be developed and distributed in many formats: blog posts, social media updates, email newsletters, company videos, infographics, etc.
3 Reasons Why You Must Commit to Content Marketing
1. Search Engines Results
The job of search engines is to provide searchers with the most relevant possible results to their queries (based on their search keywords). The quality and timeliness of your content has a significant impact on how credible you are with search engines – which dramatically impacts where you get ranked when people are searching for businesses like yours.
Your goal must be to rank as high on page one as possible in order to drive quality, inbound leads. This will only happen if you are regularly producing and posting valuable content.
2. Make Yourself Valuable
Many businesses shy away from content marketing because they lack ideas for content topics. The best source for these ideas is your target market. Prospects and customers want advice; they have questions they want answered; they have common areas of concern.
One way to gather this insight is by analyzing the questions people are asking through search engines. Online marketing analysts are becoming increasingly important to maximizing your web presence, and one of their key roles is to determine the focus for your content.
By creating content that addresses these questions, concerns, and the need for advice, you are making yourself more valuable to your prospects and customers. And that’s a good thing.
3. Multi-Channel Communications
If you are not using online means such as email (find out 5 reasons why smart marketers choose to use email), social networking, and your website to communicate, then you are missing out on opportunities to connect with your target audience. In order to take advantage of these powerful communications channels, you need something compelling to say: valuable, relevant content.
The Bottom Line
A content marketing strategy must be incorporated into any online marketing plan. If you commit to content marketing over the long-term, your online marketing efforts will be instrumental in your revenue growth.
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