Understanding and Rocking Content Marketing

98% of all materials and product research begins on the web. For anyone selling products and services, this is an extremely important statistic. Your customers are researching you and your competition before you ever know they exist. If ignored, this can be detrimental to your bottom line. If utilized, you can grow your business at exponential rates. 

Today, your audience wants to first be educated and informed—not sold! When they understand your message, they’ll trust you, rely on you, and they’ll act. Strategic communication is critical to this process. When speaking to different audiences (investors and customers), it’s important to craft different messages. This is the essence of content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content Marketing is a marketing process to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating content in order to change or enhance a consumer behavior.” In fact, 95% of B2B marketers are using content marketing to their advantage. 

What Does An Optimized Content Marketing Strategy Look Like?

There are a few different types of media used in content marketing: 

An optimized content marketing strategy utilizes all of these media types in harmony with one another. This includes press releases, blogs, keyword articles, feature articles, case studies, SEO, social media, PPC, banner ads, and trade publication ads. 

What Kind Of Content Should You Use? 

This first criteria of good content is that it be fresh. Posting new, non-duplicate content regularly is key. On-site, including keyword optimized content on every page with an emphasis given to the main objective of the page will also improve the page rank. Off-site, fresh content should be posted on Facebook, Google+, and other social networks to help increase overall website authority. 

The second criteria is “quality over quantity”. While you want to have a regular source and schedule of posting content, you don’t want to just post content without a purpose. Content must be keyword enriched, have a focus, and help make you a global source for industry-related news and information. When speaking to investors and shareholders, you want to speak to the successes, community involvement, and other stories that support your corporate story.

Final Results

All of this effort will have the final result of increased website traffic, lowered bounce rate due to increased quality of on-site content, increased keyword rankings, increased high-quality leads, and increased online authority. Give your audience what they want and they will do the same for your. It’s basic reciprocity!